Google and No-follow Links
Important news from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Web Spam, who said at a question and answer session at SMX Advanced conference yesterday that PageRank sculpting was no longer an effective technique. For those that are unfamiliar with the term, PageRank sculpting is the process of using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on your least important page links, such as the terms and conditions, privacy policy and registration pages. These pages have a purpose when the visitor is at the site but they unlikely to be the reason a visitor come to the site.
Using the nofollow attribute on the links to these pages, the intention was to effectively remove these links from the link-graph. In the previous months, this technique was valid and even commented upon by Matt Cutts saying that it was okay to do this.
Now the rules of the game have changed.The total number of links will be counted but no-follow links will not pass PageRank. If you have 10 links on a page, and the PR for that page is 1 then , each page will get 1/10 th of the page rank. Even if two of these link happen to be no-followed. Prior to the anouncement, each of the followed links would have received 1/8 th of the PR.
How does this affect the SEO process? Probably not that much. In previous talks Matt Cutts said described PageRank sculpting as being a secondary effect. i.e. you would have to have some PageRank in the first place before you can sculpt it. For most people this is not going to change the rankings of their site too much. However, the announcement has annoyed many SEO because they have been advising their clients to add no-follow links to their websites.
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Tags: Google, Matt Cutts, nofollow, PageRank sculpting, PR, SMX
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The problem with PageRank sculpting is that the SEO community has no way to track and measure PageRank, so it has never been possible to actually “sculpt” PageRank flow.
People who have attempted to make this work have been blindly shooting in the dark, and Googlers (including Matt Cutts) have been advising the SEO community pretty much for the past two years to NOT attempt to do this.
It has proven to be a colossal waste of SEO effort as to date no one has yet shown they can make it work.
Its frustrating to hear that Page rank is going to get evaporated in spite of all those no follow links.
I guess the best thing to do would be to use all the available PageRank on every link now by taking out the no-follow links on those unimportant pages if they are not dangling node but leave them in for duplicate content links.
[...] Following on from the revelations that nofollow will no longer work for sculpting PageRank, there is a post on Matt Cutts’ blog explaining the issue. It is not [...]