Preventing Links Counting

As I mentioned yesterday (Is Link Building Being Ignored) I believe that target="_blank" may stop Google from counting the link as a back link sometimes. This is a problem for link exchanges where nearly every link uses this.

First, what does this code mean? It opens the link in a new window so as not to lose the visitor to the other site. So I suppose it's saying “Give them the information on the page, but it’s not important to me and I want my visitor back.”

If it's not important to the web designer – and remember the search engines typically open windows in the CURRENT window for search results – why should the search engine find the link important?

If you don’t really want to point traffic to the other site, then why should the link really be important? If it's not important, then why should it count? If it doesn't count, Google shouldn't show it and search engines should ignore it.

So it would make sense that target=”_blank” caused search engines to ignore a link. But not fully. It's still a valid link and they do follow the link – I've had too many sites discovered quickly by search engines when the only link has used target=”_blank” that it doesn't stop them following the link. But I do believe it stops them from counting the link.

So how can we find out if this is true? Well, I'm starting an experiment to find that out.