Today's article from Search Engine Land: Google Loses "Backwards Compatibility" on Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting is a must read, but it's frustratingly hard to understand Google's position shift on the topics. In this post I'll talk briefly about the "change" and how it may affect webmasters and SEO best practices, as well as examining some of the bizarreness that surrounds this issue.
First off, an excerpt from SELand:
So today at SMX Advanced, sculpting was being discussed, and then Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that it no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages. Again — and being really simplistic here — if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.
Further, it was explained that YouTube wasn’t doing sculpting way back in 2007 as a way to boost certain video content. Instead, it was that YouTube randomly shows some video content and didn’t want these random selections to perhaps gain more authority than they should. And even with the change announced today, that still works. In the past, the unblocked videos got more authority money and the blocked ones got none. Now, the unblocked videos still get authority money — just not as much — and the blocked ones still get none.
Let's do a quick visual explanation of what's supposedly happened:
I have to say, I'm a little skeptical that this is an accurate and fully honest description of what Google's changed. It's certainly possible, and historically, their representatives at conferences haven't been known to issue directly dishonest statements, but at the same time, this is a massive shift in how PageRank is calculated and seems unlikely to me to have a positive impact on search quality.
I suspect the change is because many people have been abusing nofollow internally to attempt to game Google as well as abusing it in the sense that they've actually hurt their site's relevance and quality in the results (this latter seems more likely to me). I've mentioned in the past that you need to be very careful with PageRank sculpting as a practice, but let me illustrate again with a quick flowchart.
Basically, PR sculpting is useful on large domains, with thousands of pages and issues getting those deep pages enough link juice (PageRank) to stay in Google's main web index and appear for long tail search queries. Historically, in our consulting business, we've experienced terrific results sculpting the flow of PR to deep pages and growing the indexation rates of those sites. If Google has made this shift, we should expect those positive results to reverse themselves, but to date there's been no outcry of lost rankings and traffic to deep pages from the sites we've worked with. Of course, finding correlation in the web environment is nearly impossible due to the lack of a static landscape, but still....
The funny thing about all this to my mind is that if Google really has changed to treat nofollows as link "sinks" that consume PageRank but don't flow it, they're really only screwing over the sites that are only semi-familiar or semi-serious about SEO. Savvy SEOs are just going to go back to the old method of PageRank sculpting that existed long before nofollow - creating links that robots can't see or follow (in Flash, in external Javascript calls that are blocked, in plug-in content, etc.) to get around the issue. It's sad, too, because it rewards those paranoid SEOs who didn't listen/believe Google's acceptance of PR sculpting with nofollow and kept doing it the old fashioned way, and casts doubts on whether we can trust future messaging around SEO best practices, too.
I've got to say this is one of the more bizarrely counter-intuitive moves I've seen from Google, but I still think we don't have the whole story. Let's see what the follow-up questions and answers bring before we make any drastic decisions.
p.s. Via Linkscape, we can see that ~2.7% of the 474,779,069,489 (474 Billion) links in our index are nofollowed, and of these, 73% are internal links. We're talking about a massive change to the web's link graph, affecting more than 9.3 Billion links - for more stats on this front, see my old post, Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW.
I can only think that Google have been misinterpreted.
If I have a blog post with 300 comments, and have the links nofollowed (my blog is dofollow but example), then there would effectively be juice lost due to the comment links.
Links are valuable, because they add to the relevance of a comment made, because a reader can follow them to find out more about the person.
However they also form part of disclosure.
If this is only for internal links, there are major problems because often a link will be nofollowed because it points to a tracking link that is also blocked by robots.txt
Any sensible knowledgeable webmaster is going to nofollow those links, because they serve no purpose for Google in their current state, and who wants to turn them into hanging pages.
That may also be a workaround, if Google handles links blocked with Robots.txt differently
Totally agree with your comment,
If i own a blog or forum than people who are participating, will post their links and resources.
just take an example of SEOMoz, we all are participating and posting here with resources, there are thousands of profile having outgoing links to blog or website. Now according to Google, if they will not consider PR sculpting than other important links will lose the benefits of using nofolow links for unnecessary pages.
according to me, we are having two options:
1) either we stop crawler for indexing unnecessary links.
2) or we have to avoid unnecessary outgoing links.
Still there is a big confusion, I hope Google will publish in depth announcement about this matter.
I think it's highly unlikely that we have the full story here... I'd like to see Nick or Ben's input, but I think this changes the pagerank algorithm in some pretty fundamental ways because pages are not passing on all of the pagerank they acquire. It seems to me it might even break whether it converges...?
I really hope that we see some sort of clarification: the points that Andy and others make above highlight why this seems very strange indeed.
And I also agree with Rand about the worst thing relating to this decision (if it's true):
Just watch the mentions of FUD go through the roof, and for once I can't be bothered to disagree with them
just when I figure out how to actually do PageRank sculpting right. figures.
I would love to see a follow post in a couple of months as to how this affected SeoMOZ, directly comparing the stats from your "Sculpting with Nofollow works pretty darn well" post.....
Have you guys seen a difference already?
Definitely interested to see a study of the results as well. I have skepticism like Rand that the statement may just be a smoke screen.
For all the ifs and maybes and general WTF above, perhaps we need to look at the bigger picture.
While I agree with what you guys are saying, I think this is part of a bigger shift towards rewarding good old fashioned content whilst closing as many loopholes as possible.
Think how much easier life would be for Google if all they had to focus their efforts on were measuring the quality and popularity of a site's content instead of constantly responding to ways their algorithm was being gamed?
Don't get me wrong, I love SEO for its unpredictable nature and we all need to get results from SEO today etc. And I'm not suggesting any of you are misbehaving in terms of gaming the system, but think about the amount of time and effort that goes into exploiting the loopholes and then imagine what you could do with that time and money if you invested it in content and user experience?
So, I am going to evaporate the pagerank of this page right now by adding some links in this comment:
https://www.cnn.com
https://www.amazon.com
Honestly, this is ridiculous... so, it means that, for example, the links should not be allowed on blog comments even if they have a nofollow parameter because those links posted by readers will affect my other links on my page
Strange move.
I think the "evaporation" rule will apply to internal, not external links. That would certainly make more sense (eg the example of a blog post with 300 nofollowed external links). But of course I have no way of confirming this!
As mentioned by a number of people already, this move by Google will effect many webmasters (if what we are saying here is confirmed in it's entirety).
But I think this will merely be a pain in the butt for everyone more than a major shake up of the industry. Because link Rand said, most savvy SEO people will just revert back to previous scultping methods and any legacy nofollow links will be left as is (I mean why bother removing them?).
But I ask this....What was so bad that Google was forced to make this move?? What were webmasters doing wrong that caused Google to do this?
Thanks Rand,
Once again a great article. I agree, I definately feel this is a backward step, hard to understand really.
I think it makes a lot of sense actually. Why should nofollowing one link increase the value of another? This simply makes the nofollow attribute for internal links do only what it was intended to do - devalue a single link.
Except that under these assumptions, adding a new nofollowed link devalues all other links on the page which seems wrong too?
Except that _if_ the proper use of nofollow is for indicating paid links, etc., then additonal nofollow links are probably a good indicator of reduced value of local content (current page, links out). In that scenario it seems right.
Wouldn't it be nice to be google and be able to see how these things affect SERPS in realtime.
I think that is a false assumption. It is possible that Google's new algorithm no longer uses Number or Order of INTERNAL links on a page as a factor in determining the volume of PageRank that can be passed through that internal link.
This more fundamental shift in how Internal Link PageRank flows would make it so that each internal link behaves independent of one another. This appears quite sensible to me - does one link become less important because another is present, especially when we know the links are not editorially given since they are internal?
I do not, obviously, know the method that Google is using to accomplish this - perhaps they have just decided to ignore internal nofollows (lets be honest, nofollow was meant to hide untrusted links, which should almost never mean internal links you created).
Nevertheless, if this is what it is at face value, everyone is rightfully confused. I think it is better to assume that we just dont know everything yet.
That means dofollow links should not be presented with nofollow links for the reason that Google will consider both in its evaluation.In this scenario, its wise for the webmasters to go back and use the Flash or Image Links, so that google bot doesn't recognize the devalued links. Hence the valuable dofollow links can enjoy their share of PR.If google will really follow what Matt Cutts has stated then, nofollow tag will eventually be scarcely used for PR sculpting.
Agreed. I think this is a logical move for Google as too many people are starting to remove valuable content or skew the page hierarchy just for the sake of rankings. Nofollow is meant to be used to link to pages you cannot trust or whose trust you cannot verify. Can you say that you do not trust your privacy policy and it's all just a load of rubbish? If Google knows that the site has a privacy policy, terms and conditions and a login page it gives it valuable information about the type of website. This is funny as I've just recently advised one company to drop their nofollow links on all pages of this type and then I read this today...
My vote would be the same. I think that Google is probably doing some analysis of nofollow that points to the same domain name. Maybe offsite nofollowing links will still be good, just not necessarily PageRank sculpting anymore.
For an organization with so many brilliant people, Google still manages to do some dumb things now and then. I guess doing dumb things will look good on their resumes if they every want to work for Microsoft.
Think about it logically guys, if I have a soccer team with 11 players on the field and decide to take two of the weakest players off the team without replacing them does this make the 9 players on the field stronger?
This change also stops people from ‘gaming’ the search engines. The nofollow attribute allows webmasters to push link juice to the links they feel are more important! See the issue with that sentence? Google obviously thinks allowing the webmaster to control what links are more important as a problem with the algorithm.
Ok, if we want to start using examples here, think of it this way:
If I have a soccer team with 11 players on the team and decide to take two of the weakest players off the team without replacing them there is a good reason for it - they are weak and they are hindering my team's gameplay, which is why I'm taking them out. Does this mean that the remaining 9 players can play better with each other as a team once the two weakest players who have been hindering the game are out? Yes.
They may play better as a team I take that on board, but the players definitly don't become stronger individually!
The nofollow rule gave webmasters too much of a say in what google should and shouldn't rank!
What I don't understand is that if you have 5 links, with four nofollowed links. According to the new system, the remaining link will not have extra link juice passing through it as a result of the sculpting.
Does that mean that the pagerank just remains static on the page where the links are and does not 'flow further' or does it mean that the pagerank that would have passed through the nofollowed links is now lost?
Now that is a good question. I would assume it would remain static on the page. But, who knows for sure?
If it remains static on the page, then it lessons the problem, because sometimes nofollowing is used to rank pages higher for secondary and long tail terms. I know this is not a very effective tactic, but im the kinda guy who believes SEO is becoming so competitive that every little crumb of an advantage helps.
It would also be cool to know whether a page loses 'trust' if it has a lot of nofollowed links pointing towards it. I think this is an important factor since nofollow essentially means that you don't trust the link but you're linking to it for convenience's sake. If nofollow affects trust negatively, im sure many seo's will think twice about using it a lot on their own pages.
In matt cutts' words, the pagerank "evaporates"... which makes me think you're better off getting rid of the nofollow and keeping that pagerank on your site.
What I want to know which is of far more importance is, how did Rand get this post out 15 minutes before the original source was published at search engine land? :)
Come on now...
Everybody knows that Rand is well known for his ability to see into the future ;)
Some questions to ponder:
So, is nofollow going back to its original objective of preventing link and comment spam, rather than to sculpt PageRank?
What about using nofollow as a condom around a paid link? Is that still valid?
Is this change in usage a result of Google's advances in crawling sneaky Javascript usage?
It is a mystery!
I think nofollow will still mean no follow, it simply will not allow the other follow links to pass on extra link juice. So nofollowing links on your page will have no effect on the amount of pagerank other links pass.
Actually, based on the interpretation above. if you had a blog post with 100 links nofollowed in the comments section alone and 20 standard internal 'followed' website links then the page would only pass PR/120 to each of the 20 internal links, which is a lot worse than PR/20 which was the old understanding of how it worked.
That's based on the interpretation made on SELand and by Rand here...
The whole idea behind no follow is broken anyways. It was for untrusted links before and now it is supposed to be there to appease the Google god that you are not taking advertising revenue away from them.
Rand - great summation...
It would seem that this recent retraction of the use of "nofollow" as an internal sculpting mechanism is related to the announcement of the Canonical Link Element in February.
By announcing the wide spread support of the CLE and denouncing nofollow as a sculpting mechanism - I think Google is then expecting that more sophisticated sites should be able to sculpt through CLE and optimal site structure as opposed to spammers nofollowing 70% of their homepage...
It would make sense that they are trying to get the main use of "nofollow" back to for that which it was created - nofollowing advitorial or paid links to external sites. Using it as a sculpting tool was an after thought.
Not sure if I'm completely connecting the dots yet - but these 2 big announcements relative to site structure seem to be to closely related (and very timely) to NOT be playing off each other.
Dixon
I wrote earlier on a comment about the canonical tag too, haha.
I really wouldn't be surprised if Page Rank juice got transfered from using no follow to canonical.
I think we really need to find more uses, and find better ways to use the canonical tags.
As I've said elsewhere, this is highly detrimental to blogs with lots of commenters as it easily doubles the amount of links on a page while the PageRank (which usually wouldn't go towards commenters) just 'sink' or 'evaporate' instead of going elsewhere.
Does this mean bloggers now have to set up JavaScript links for commenters links? yeah, thanks G
Google actually reads JavaScript links now.
I mean JavaScript links that either:
Use the external JS file (as G can't read that ;))
Go through a redirect thingy which is robots.txt blocked
Should of clarified that in my earlier post
If the link is blocked with robots.txt, that is a leak as well, if it doesn't have nofollow
that is true but the PageRank will just 'evaporate' now with a nofollow.
It's almost lose lose lol
What would be if page A is linking to page B which is labeled with the "noindex" meta robots tag, and on page B we have at least one dofollow link, back to page A.
then it's just a reciprocal link however page B won't appear in the index... how's this involved with the PageRank issue?
Well the PR should flow through page B back to page A. Or? :)
It is an evolving phase for the Blog Comments!
1. Lets see how blogs tackle their commentators' information after this change!
2. Its definitely a challenge for the existing blogs publishing nofollow attribute in the existing comments.
woah. This could be big, and I agree with you being skeptical. As AndyBeard illustrates above, if this were true you'd get loads of pagerank getting 'lost' in the ether.
if it WERE true, the conclusion would be that it's better to remove internal links to "privacy policy" etc, because they're actually stealing link juice that could be going to your important links, without that juice actually going anywhere?! Or maybe the answer is to sculpt by other methods like putting 'blocked' links into an iframe and disallowing the iframe source via robots.txt as explained in the PageRank Optimisation Guide...
Let's hope Matt Cutts passes by here to clear this up a little...
Or maybe the answer is to sculpt by other methods like putting 'blocked' links into an iframe and disallowing the iframe source via robots.txt as explained in the PageRank Optimisation Guide...Yeah, but what about those of us who only use XHTML Strict? ;)
That is a very good question Darren. Even worse: What will the ones do, who are using XHTML-RDFa?
Yep, "lost in the ether" is a good way to put it. In fact, in the second mention of this bomshell, during the "You & A with Matt Cutts" session, he used the word, "evaporate" to explain what happens to the leftover juice.
What if i have alot of duplicate content and I nofollow and noindex them? wouldnt it help?
You can nofollow, noindex the page but if the link is a follow link then you are just causing a break. It's like driving down the street towards a dead end --- instead of running into a wall at the dead end, the nofollow attribute is like putting up blocking (detour) cones, telling you not to go this way, thus not causing you to run into a brick wall (or a break)! Keeping the flow. In the view of search engine bots, this brick wall or break may cause the bot to exit the site cause it has no where to go at this point.
So I would suggest to follow the internal links on the page so the bot has follow through options but use noindex (by itself) if you'd rather keep the page out of the search index.
It depends how you do the noindexing (in the meta tag on the page, or the robots.txt file in the root of the site) and it depends on how you do the nofollow (in the link pointing to the page, or in the meta data on the page itself). The four available scenarios have vastly different outcome in terms of URL showing in SERPs, flow of PR into the page, following of links out of the page, and flow of PR out of the page. It is not a 'simple' topic.
What if the noindexing and nofollowing are in the meta tags of the page?
Page accumulates PR from incoming links. Page is spidered by bots. Page does not appear in SERPs. Page does not pass PR on to other pages.
g1smd I am not sure if I understood what you mean.
If page A is linking to page B which is attributed with a "noindex" meta robots tag, and on page B there is at least one link with destination page C. Are you saying here that PR will not reach page C?
The saddest part of all this is....
RIP OFF REPORT GAINED ANOTHER JUMP IN THE SERP'S AGAINST ONE OF MY CLIENTS! >_<
GRRRR
I am so mad they break all these rules and now instead of 2 results on page 1 of Google I am looking at 3... -_-' So instead of using no follows, let's just let everything be followed including paid advertising.
/vent
This seems like a misunderstanding to me. I'm monitoring @mattcutts Twitter for a response.
In related news, here's another example of why Twitter is so useful. The folks who say "Why do I care if someone's eating a sandwich. Twitter is dumb" continue to look sillier and sillier by the day.
I'm sure he'll have a great 140 character explanation. I've got his RSS feed - who is going to know first? Me because he has to have the post up before he can tweet it.
Actually, I would expect a quick Tweet before a blog post goes up. That guy tweets constantly!
If PR sculpting did work (which I feel it did if Google is changing how it works), I think this is once again a step Google is taking to focus on brands.
Large commercial brands that do and/or should spend a lot on AdWords are in many cases not as SEO-savvy as smaller competitors. So this type of change would mean larger brands would have a better fighting chance on competing on search terms that they may not be buying. Once they start seeing conversions on those terms they may consider bidding, and that increases Google's revenue.
Also on the last point Rand makes about going back to the old ways of PR scuplting, I think my big takeaway is that site architecture will be even more important than in the past (already quite important). Thinking about how many links are on the page and making sure that there are as few extraneous external links on the page as possible will be more critical.
Were the SERPs getting so infested with spammy results from internal pagerank sculpting via nofollow that Google had to come up with this "solution"? So the "solution" using the $10/$5 example is remove the nofollow and spend the whole $10 and introduce 5 "worth less" pages into the SERP, great "solution" Google.
I know everyone is talking nofollow, but I wonder if this only affects the nofollow attribute or does it affect the passing of link juice from any internal sources. If the latter, this will make the rel="canonical" attribute useless in terms of passing value from the duplicate page to the established preferred version.
Or is link juice still being passed, but only its normal amount is passed, no more doubling up on link juice. I really need more info about this change, I'd be happy if Google made a public statement about what's going on.
PR sculting was a great way to push content pages for big sites with a lot of content pages laking juice to keep them all in the index. It worked for me and I will keep an eye on my rankings to see if something changed.
It's interesting that Matt's always said not to waste your time sculpting pagerank and instead improve your navigation by linking less to those pages you'd normally nofollow.
Most of us probably shouldn't have even bothered with it, as Rand mentioned, huge sites are the only ones that would see any benefit to doing it...especially if you're linking to a login page 100,000 times in your footer.
Interesting article indeed. Look at this part:
The funny thing about all this to my mind is that if Google really has changed to treat nofollows as link "sinks" that consume PageRank but don't flow it, they're really only screwing over the sites that are only semi-familiar or semi-serious about SEO
Oh! Poor fellows!
Anyway, let's wait and see till the whole story is clear, and Rand already metioned that it is said to affect the 'large-sized' websites with deep internal pages.
Has anybody compiled a list of Cutt's quotes?
great blog, is the NOFOLLOW so important today?
Like many sites, we had been using No Follow in our footer to help hide certain pages with non-important content (at least in our eyes for ranking).
About eight weeks ago we went with a silo approach to our site to try to better channel our pagerank where we wanted it. And use No Follow in more places to better control the flow. We didn't get the benefit in places we expected to get it. Even lost ground with some terms that surprised us. Was already contemplating going back to our old link strategy.
It's certainly possible that google has been slowly moving in this direction for a while and we just didn't know it.
Has setting your layout to silo helped in increasing your PR?
So far i've been using pagerank sculpting to "drive" pagerank to my own posts using no follow on most of my external links.With this new changes at pagerank how should i handle my website?Should i remove most of my nofollow tags ar just leave iy as it us?
Some of the nig websites use this attribute like wikipedia for exampel that no follows all external links.Will they get slapped after this change
It will be interesting to see and i am looking forward to any answers to my "problem"
thanks
I know this is basic stuff but you must remember that all links on the page are not equal. If you start with 10 and you have 2 nofollow links this does not nessiarily mean you are left with 8... These 2 nofollows might be generic footer which offer limited value. Google is smarter than this and I always tell people to think about heat map tracking, then imaging that being link juice. Heated link juice... nice - Rand, I see a new product :)
I am going to have to side with the nay sayers on whether we have a full story here. The reason why is the the fundamental way the Page Rank is passed around the net. I was under the assumption that Page Rank was a zero sum proposition. Meaning that their is a finite amount of page rank at any given time that is passed around the web. The change in how page rank flows would simply make page rank dissapear at an exponentially fast decay. Think about what would happen in 2.7% (taken from the article) of pages were only passing 80% of their page rank. That means a fair bit of PR just dissapeared into cosmic dust. Where did it go? Is it hanging out taking a lunch break at Subway or something?
Either way, great article.
About two weeks ago I implemented for the very first time the "nofollow" attribute on my web site (to some internal links), which I am not sure that I want to take them off at the moment for the reasons you all might understand.
My question is: If it is true that PageRank Sculpting was or is now a myth, what is with Bots Herding?
An example:
If page A has a followed link to page B, and the page B has a meta robots tag with a “noindex” directive, and page B has a link back to page A.
What should to happen in that case? Where does the PR go to?
So I'm wondering if webmasters will look at alternative ways to handle links. For example, reduce overall links on a page to increase PR flow to the important ones. Another theoretical idea would be to use some hackish way of creating links that aren't straightforward anchor tags... Obviously not ideal but I'd think that if the above is accurate, reducing the actual number of links on a page will be important to make sure maximum PR is passed to the most valuable/intended pages.
Anyone else have input on this idea?
I like to use nofollow as another resource to reinforce content structure and let search engines understand better what is all about in a site.
PR sculpting and Siloing walk so close that results difficult to distinguish where the intention is more close to PR gaming or AI for SEO. Any thoughts?
(I'm starting to think it is a crazy idea as noone say a word about in all the sites I asked)
Hey Rand,
In the should i link sculpt diagram the first question is "Do you have 1000s of pages NOT in Google's Index?" Don't you mean the opposite? (in other words shouldn't you remove the NOT). Only do linksculpting once you have all your indexing issues figured out, right?
I agree with waiting to see for sure before doing anything. I need a bit more proof and substantiality before making acting on a amove like this.
On a side note, what's the deal with RankTracker? It's been three days and it's still not working. Great timing considering it's the end of the month and I've got reports due. EEK ;)
Rand,
Great article. I most especially appreciate the "quick flowchart". Quick? Dude that's why you're the RandFish!
Anyhow, I had been avoiding the nofollow aspect of sculpting til now, too many other things to focus on, or at least so I thought. Your chart confirmed that for 99% of my clients I've been focusing on the right things.
I do now, however, have a couple clients with 20k plus pages and though I've seen okay results so far, was wondering if the main issue was page sculpting or inbound links. Now, with the Google change AND your flow chart, I am convinced it's time to focus on those links.
Thanks for being able to clarify this otherwise up til now confusing issue.
I agree, this is a bizarre move by Google. I'm still not entirely sure about their reasoning.
It's not really that bizarre. Google makes money from Paid Search not Organic Search. It's in their best interests to change the algo frequently to ensure that people still need to keep buying ads to fill the gaps in their organic listings.
Similarly it's not in their best interest to deliver perfect organic search results for the same reason.
Keeps us all in jobs too :)
Andrew
Yeah, what Andrew said!
I would be careful now with changing all your architecture on the spot just because of a blogpost that *might* be misinterpreted.
Personally, I think that Google isn't doing us a favour by changing the behaviour both as workload and the quality of the search results are concerned ...
I think we have to wait and c before we take any action
This is a very strange change of direction, bizarre really.
As you say if it is the case it would be easy just to switch back to blocking them completely, however I'm going to wait for a bit more info before taking any further action.
thanks for this very important information.
So let's say you've got a page of product listings. Each product has an image and a title, (image first, followed by description) both of which link to the product's 'more info' page. Normally, you'd nofollow the image link so that the only followable link pointing to it is the one with the text.
What are you meant to do after this change? It seems like if you removed the nofollow, Google's policy of only counting the first link to a destination would mean the image is the link, rather than the text, which is hardly ideal. But if you leave nofollow there, half of your link juice is wasted outright!
Eee, Google, you don't half make SEO tricky.
I was under the impression that using an image link as your first link would work as a fix to make your next links anchor text pass the keyword reputation.
I don't know if you should be using No Follows on product pages.
Remember they have the canonical tag, if you have multiple products and such, just canonical tag everything, to the initial page of a product.
A potential thing to look at is the fact all the search engines ( Google, Yahoo, Msn) have came together to use the canonical tag, and no one is using it too heavily.
Maybe there will be a shift of Page Rank power from No follow to Canonical tag.
For instance this page has 10 internal pages linked it, let's give this page more "juice."
So you have 10,000 pages, 1,000 of them are original pages or original products, and they then give those 1,000 pages more "juice?"
something to think about....
So, this essentially means that blog posts with a lot of comments are just pi**ing link juice up the wall? Couldn't have Google just come out and said what it was really meant for some years ago?
It might just be, that this nofollow thing behaves differently for external links.
That would make sense anyway...
That sounds much logical. If nofollow continue to work only for external links it would be useful only for non editorial content, like blog comments and other visitor generated content. In fact that was initial intention of nofolow.
Also Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. you'd see a drop in rankings if you post/share anything on those because they nofollow everything.
Moral of the story is, if it's internal Canonical, if it's external, do what you gotta do...
As I said in 2007 :)
https://pocketseo.com/google/77
"I think that Matt Cutts’ answer to Rand Fishkin’s question was not thought out completely, and that it is only a matter of time before Google retracts this feature of rel=”nofollow”."
good post Rand.. from what i've seen (and commented on your previous whiteboard fridays).. Google: "...build sites for the user" How does nofollow assist the user?
oh.. and we now have 78 valid experiments .. ready to change your mind yet?
I think you should definitely write a blog post about it :-)
I figure after 100 tests it's a fact... lol..
i'd be happy to help you perform the test yourself.. i have 82 running 74 completed..
it takes 6-8 weeks to filter full cycle
i've offered the same thing to @Dannysullivan.. because his article proves my theory.. yes the one you referenced.
you two are the ones that have the two most prominent articles on the subject.. so in order to change the way the world thinks you have to change the influencers ..
plus seomoz is spitting out "don't use keywords" in the Q and A.. and since i kinda tell clients best place to go online for reliable info is SEOMoz..
it's all about you fixing the problem.. which fixes my problem..
Client: "You told us to sign up for SEOMoz but they told us the same thing our last SEO company did, we don't need keywords tag"
Me: "ok, are you okay with me proving it on your website?"
Client: "ok."
Now you see my dilemma...
=)
Between this and the javascript changes, it seems like Google is upsetting a good number of folks at SMX.
--John Connor (kind of)
Worst case- PageRank sculpting was a waste of time and had no benefit. I can't see it hurting your site blocking links to unimportant pages, that just makes no sense
I really, really hope this isn't the case.
I agree that it's too early to act on this news - those who have relied heavily on PR sculpting via nofollows should have noticed some significant reversal of their work.
What is going to be the impact on websites that have both nofollow and dofollow attributes?.....
does this mean that the blogs with a nodofollow are going to be affected than the ones with the dofollow attribute.... All this seems greek and latin to me though!!
There isn't a dofollow attribute
I've not found anything that indicates "dofollow" as an attribute, however... I have used "rel="dofollow" to un-do a global no-follow link created via a joomla plugin. It replaces the "nofollow" attribute from the link and passes juice... any thoughts as to why?
presume 'dofollow' is just being used to break the rel attribute with a redundant value so it won't be read by the search engines. Is that what you mean?!
I'm not sure what you mean. Adding the "dofollow" allows the link to pass, but perhaps only because it muscles out the "nofollow" and not because it is an actual attribute. Is that what we are concluding?
The only time I've seen "dofollow" is when spammers try to leave comment spam and bypass a site's nofollow.
They write the link code with dofollow or follow (non-existent -- you could write 'ham sandwich' with the same effect). Their fake rel attribute comes before the real rel attribute (nofollow). The standards say that an HTML element can only have one rel attribute so nofollow detectors discard the 2nd rel attribute (nofollow).
I asked Google about this to see whether Google discards the 2nd, invalid rel attribute (the nofollow) and didn't get a really believable response. It seems like people in the thread didn't understand the question.
You're correct. But Do Follow is becoming a common way to explain that a link is not a No Follow link. With Wordpress, there's a plugin called "Do Follow" which allows you to change the names of the visitors into links that follow, as opposed to the default action where the names are No Follow links.
It seems that blogs will start not to accept links in the comments. If you want to point to some URL you can paste it, but it will be in a plain text format, not as a link.
It's logical to me. If you have 100 links in comments on a given bog article, all those links will eat your PageRank.
*** blogs with a nodofollow link ***
A what?
'blogs with an "ordinary" link', would suffice :-)
I've experienced mass loss of rankings from my long tail keywords which are targetted via landing pages. This would explain the situation well I think part from the drop happened 29/05/09 Friday morning.
This basically means link building will be make even harder for me.
We've also been seeing inner / longer tail pages lose rankings recently, and this could have something to do with it. Seems to have been a general devaluation of internal pages ranking purely off the basis of internal link juice from the homepage. But again, I would have expected a lot more people to report things like this...
I'd say that's exactly is what happening on my site. All the pages that are ranking well because of page rank flow from the homepage ( which I tend to link build for ). I wish google would stop moving the goal posts I'd just made my directors happy!
Great article.
The illustrations really helps to explain the how the link juice works, which i always have the problem explaining in words how this help
-- edited by Jen - removed link
Thanks for giving me the oppertunity to add some comments here. I really love to see some good information here and this is great article I ever found-
Thanks
-- edited by Jen - removed link
This gave me a headache.
I have several websites and I have nofollow sculpted each, I have not seen any difference in my deep pages or my page rank. Either way I don’t go by page rank any way. I have webpage's with low page rank that are beating sites with twice the PR in the search engines Google especially. I don’t’ see why Google would do this in the first place. Unless they think they are somehow leveling the playing field. If this is the case Google is way misguided.
- Casey Removed Link
This is an interesting post. I've read so many different views regarding the nofollow that it can be quite a confusing element of an seo strategy.
I'll be interested what Google have to say in the near future to add to their recent comments regarding this.
Thanks for sharing.
Karl
PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait...wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... CY: wait... I: wait... YCat: wait... I: wait... Top: wait... I: wait... L: wait... C: wait...
Bonjour de Montréal,
Great Article Rand. Thanks!
Véronique
I was never convinced that PageRank sculpting worked. I have commented in a number of places that NoFollowing aninternal link makes a website look at best inept (don't trust you own internal links?) and at worst like it is trying to manipulate PageRank (do I hear penalty-bait?) PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait...wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...
I don't understand the benefits of this change on their part. I hope it's a lie.