This week we've got a special treat! Live from the halls of SES San Jose, our own Jen Lopez sits down with the one-and-only Matt Cutts to discuss NoFollow.
As we all know, there was some controversy about Google's shifting views on nofollow earlier this year. So now that some time has passed and Big G has refined their position, what would Matt recommend to sites that have lots of nofollow tags already in place? Watch this exclusive interview to find out.
From Jen:
This has been a great week at SES San Jose 2009. There were lots of great sessions, informative tweets, fun swag and I've personally met many of our Pro members! My favorite session of the week was "Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic" where Matt Cutts, Greg Boser, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Tiffany Lane and Vanessa Fox (unofficially :)) reviewed several websites in front of hundreds of people. The use of the rel=nofollow for PR sculpting came up in the review (imagine that). Matt Cutts recommended to a site owner that he remove all the nofollows from his site, even to non-necessary pages.
This is a subject that comes up time and time again on the SEOmoz site whether it's in the Q & A section, or in the blog and comments. So I wanted to find out directly from Matt, what he would recommend to our users moving forward. This afternoon I sat with Matt and got his take on the conference in general as well as the use of rel=nofollow and PR sculpting. (Oh yea! And if you haven't seen the tweets and read the posts yet, Matt got a new haircut. :)
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Matt Cutts on NoFollow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
I just wanted to add that given recent experience with a few sites, I might be wary of removing nofollows entirely from a site. There have now been three sites we've seen (through consulting, friends and Q+A) where removal of the nofollows led to a dramatic loss of traffic. In each case, it appeared that this was because Google was indexing fewer of the deep, long-tail targeted pages (all of these sites were relatively large). And, in each case, putting the nofollows back on seemed to fix the problem.
Now, obviously, these could all be weird cases of coincidence, but it seems pretty unlikely. The one I was able to observe most closely certainly showed fewer numbers of pages indexed in Google right after and that number went back up after the nofollows were replaced.
My personal advice right now is - if you're just starting a new site or re-designing, choose your links intelligently so you don't need to use nofollow. However, if you're thinking about pulling all those nofollows off what you've already got, that could be a bit dangerous and you should monitor it carefully.
BTW - No argument with what Matt said in the video, but I think his phrasing is very carefully chosen. In the instances he mentioned, pulling off the nofollow probably makes lots of sense, it just may not be completely universally applicable.
Thanks for grabbing that interview Jen!
I agree Rand, I have done the same thing on my small and large test sites and seen the same thing (although at about 4 weeks it started to grow again). I think Matt is correct in theory; you should nofollow links that go off your site if you don't vouch for them, but there seems to be some sidebar benefits to having no-follows on a site for links that go to internal pages that maybe Google can't even explain. Or maybe the drop in rankings and index were due to the large change in the internal link graph of the site.
Rand, thanks for sharing some real world testing here. I've got nofollows implemented on a rather large client site, and have been very leery about touching them. This at least puts my mind to rest on the issue for the time being...! :)
I deal almost exclusively with small business e-commerce sites. I use nofollow pretty much only on those pages where I just don't want search bots going, add to cart buttons, cart page, sign up pages,e-mail contact lists, etc. :-)
I'd definately not want to block the faq or contact us page or other similar pages.
The smarter the site architecture the more success you'll have with your customers and then typically the SE bots will follow.
Interesting video, some good points to consider.
I do the same thing.
Just in case you weren't aware, nofollow does not always mean nocrawl. Nofollow will not necessarily prevent the bots from going to those pages, it just prevents link juice and PageRank from flowing through to the linked page. (source - you can find more by searching "crawl nofollow")
To make sure those pages are not indexed, you can add this to their head section:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Exactly! Thanks for this clarification. Also, there are plenty of times when you'd want to use noindex,follow.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
For example we often recommend using this for paginated pages. This will keep pages 2, 3, 4, etc. out of the index but will still allow the bots to follow/crawl the links within the page.
"<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> For example we often recommend using this for paginated pages. This will keep pages 2, 3, 4, etc. out of the index but will still allow the bots to follow/crawl the links within the page."
On paginated pages, are you using the example <meta> tag on page 2, 3, 4, etc. leaving page 1 alone?
Yes, exactly!
I'm wary of removing all of our nofollows at the moment. I plucked a few from our homepage and within 3 days i noticed ranking changes in google AND bing.
I put the nofollows back and the rankings returned.
The alternate crawl path and interface cannot come soon enough for us.
I've had experience of this too. People being blasé about nofollow links is something that bugs me quite a bit. People should be wary about it because whilst it may be suitable for some site, it's also unsuitable for others.
After watching the video, I want a Matt Cutts bobble head doll. Then I could ask him questions and have him node his head at me.
That's hilarious!
LOL! (literally)
chenry: "I don't know, Matt, should I get rid of this nofollow to my ToS page?"
Bobble-head Matt: *wobble-wobble-wobble*
I foresee a whole range of Matt merchandise of the question-answering variety. The magic 8-ball would be especially popular.
id buy one of those or better they should be swag they give away at conferences
I believe you mean the "Matt-gic 8 Ball" wonk-whahhhhh
I'm a little worried about the advice to remove nofollows if they've been used as part of a structural plan on an existing site, especially one that is doing well. As Rand says, evidence apparently abounds that messing with nofollows like this may be detrimental, so if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just keep a close eye on it and don't add to it. Additionally, there is of course no way I'd do it on a new site or freshly implement it, mostly given the evaporatory qualities Andy talks about :)
It would be wonderful to know what Matt thinks* about disguising links in other ways, however, such as by using iframes or javascript--and what happened to the idea that Google was going to get into indexing javascript content?
*says
I thought, that Matt confirmed somewhere, that Javascript links are now crawled...
They are. It was Maile Ohye who confirmed it.
https://searchengineland.com/google-io-new-advances-in-the-searchability-of-javascript-and-flash-but-is-it-enough-19881
Depends on how you build the JS links ;)
I think that's good advice in general - if you've got a complex site that's performing well, you don't make a massive change just because someone gave you a bit of new advice (no matter who that someone is).
I still haven't seen compelling evidence suggesting internal link nofollows are altogether bad. If I understand nofollow correctly, it's not really "evaporation" so much as "altered dispersal".
Example: Page A has 10 internal links, 5 are nofollowed. Each of the 5 followed links gets 1/10th of the link juice. The 5 nofollowed links get no juice.
Is it consensus opinion that the other 5/10ths "evaporates" or does it just not move off of that page? I guess the answer is probably some combination of evaporation and juice staying on the page. Would love to see the data on this.
If 4/10ths stay on the page and 1/10 "evaporates" nofollow is still a very good option for things like calls to action and other links to pages that have little or no search value. The page would retain most of the juice, "evaporate" a little, and NOT waste juice on links to pages that don't need it. In this scenario, I'm happy to evaporate a bit and save more for the page than would have otherwise been lost on low-value pages.
The counter point, of course, is that the site as a whole loses some juice. But I would still argue that stronger high-value pages could outweigh the site's juice loss if the math is right.
Again, I would love to know what everyone thinks about this, and it would be great if we had a more detailed answer from Mr. Cutts.
EDIT: And yes, I agree with Jane that it would be nice to know what G thinks about the other ways of disguising links. It makes a lot of sense to have some standardized way to link to low-value pages w/o disbursing the valueof a high-value page.
Boy... he sure has that response down pat.
I wanted to weigh in here as well. There were certainly a TON of questions I could have asked him, but there are two things to remember. One, I had to respect his time as this was impromptu and he had others that had been scheduled previously. I was quite happy to get this quick interview. Second, it was just me and a flip camera after a very long few days of keeping up with client work, attending sessions, writing posts, etc.
I'm not trying to make excuses for myself, as I thought the interview was fun and relaxed and exactly what I was going for. As I mentioned above there are many questions I could have asked him, and I could have dug a bit deeper but my goal was to get him comfortable with answering questions with me.
I do have to say though that hearing my voice without seeing my face on camera is a bit odd, plus I think I need to work on that cackle of mine. :)
I think you did great: it's more that Matt knows he's talking to an SEOmoz audience who are likely relatively advanced. I think that telling us what we've been told / guessed / proven ourselves is a little bit like walking into Math 451 and going over how integers work. He knows, and could succinctly recite, a bit more than this, I think, but I also recognise that he can give SEOs the tiniest piece of information and we'll run amok with it to our own advantage. This is essentially playing it safe.
By the last day of an SEO conference, 70% of the participants don't even have the mental capacity to show up for a free breakfast. You did fine for a first-timer. Plus, interviewing an industry superstar is intimidating, even if they're nice.
I, too, think this was a great first-time interview, Jen. And I thought it was very wise of you to not dig too deep since this was an unscheduled interview with a key industry player you had never interviewed before. Better to build rapport and trust with a source first, so that you can ask the hard questions later ... and have a good chance of actually receiving straight answers. Apparently you took great notes in J-School ; - )
Christy
PS -What kid of camera did you use? And did you use any editing software, if you don't mind me asking?
Thanks guys! Much appreciated. :) It was fun too!
@denverish I was using a Flip Mino, it's a tiny little thing that did exceptionally well for the low lighting and surrounding noise!
im surprised yall got as much time as you did with how popular he is
I agree that you did GREAT for snagging and interviewing the czar, especially as Dr. Pete said, at the end of the conference.
Job well done Jen!
Wise to let him get comfortable before asking some pertinent questions.
Just as long as you're working up to bringing in the hypnotist and algorithm documentation requests demands ;)
You can do it!
Umm ... where was the WhiteBoard? And why was this put up on Thursday? And I'm supposed to trust you? :-)
He posts it early to keep us Europeans, Australasians and Asians happy, because if it goes midnight and we don't have a video, we send nasty emails to site support.
Roger Ebert would be proud of you.
I can answer that: From a marketing standpoint, "Whiteboardless Day-before-Friday" just sounds dumb ;)
SEOmoz should make a mini-whiteboard lapel pin that they can put on interviewees and write their name on. That way, they'd always have a whiteboard. Actually, now that I say it, I love the idea of a whiteboard name-tag. Somebody go make one so I can take credit for it.
The schwag ideas from this comment thread are way more useful and actionable than the information dispersed in the interview.
Holy Effing Crap! That's Brilliant!!!
I'll get the scientists working on the tube technology immediately!
I think there is a far bigger issue than whether to no-follow your privacy policy footer link. Sure, I get Matt's response that you may not need to sculpt on your own site.
Here's what gets me.
It was an SES show (NY 2008, if memory serves. Maybe it was SJ the year before, but no matter) where the issue first surfaced big. Someone can correct me on the date so we're complete, but I want to talk about the concept.
When I first heard this, I made some pen-and-ink notes and decided to mull it over for a while. Then the various toolbars and plugins began highlighting no-follow links.
So I surfed a long while with no-follow links highlighted, and Holy Cow, the adoption looked like a hockey stick. I began recommending it to clients -- even to one client in the YP space who had thousands of links to little merchants.
In our lemming-like rush to stay even with each other, we drank the Kool-Aid, even many who just accepted a glass and sipped at first. Google can and does use FUD as a tactic to move the search marketing industry. And those of us who decide to lead a battle against not complying with the site controlling 3/4 of the traffic are welcome to do so. I'll be over there, stripping out my no follows.
So if we all hop when Google or any engine hollers "Jump", what about canonicalization? Doesn't this smack just a wee bit of the same thing? I remember watching Matt at PubCon this year when he made the announcement, and everyone furiously wrote down what he was saying.
And sure it's important to tell an engine which page is the definitive version, but we already have similar functionality in Google webmaster tools. Why can't that functionality be expanded to something like, "always consider trailing slash" canonical or "always consider http instead of https" canonical? Then the meta tag itself could be used for individual exceptions?
Why do we keep having to junk up pages with what is probably an 80/20 or better situation? Can't we just declare some rules in a sitemap and call it a day?
Most importantly, as we each search for an edge to outrank or outearn the competition, maybe jumping at every suggestion isn't necessarily smart. I don't think anyone was penalized for NOT having nofollow tags! ;-)
The "Mad Paid Links Rant" was at SES2007 and continued at PubCon that fall.
nofollow is still just a bandaid for a much serious problem regarding Google and their use of links for ranking. A very small fraction of webmasters have even heard of nofollow yet Matt Cutts is still discussing it. Educating the masses on the proper use of nofollow will have a much bigger impact and will bring Google closer to their ultimate goal of perfect search results.
I agree. I'm new to the SEO scene and this whole NoFollow thing is a bit confusing to me. If there was more education going on for this particular subject, maybe I'd understand it more. (Well, maybe a bit more education explained in non-SEO terms, that is.)
The nofollow attribute was originally implemented to discourage spam on blogs and forums, so I agree that only a small fraction of webmasters have even heard of the attribute - only a small fraction of webmasters would need to, especially since most blog and forum solutions implement them by default on comments.
Instructions on how to use nofollows for their original intent is very straightforward; if you can't vouch for it, don't link to it. It doesn't get more simple than that. Of course "educating" the masses about this simple concept isn't why Matt Cutts Google is still discussing it. The masses that have heard of it aren't interested in what it's original intent was. This growing demographic has other things in mind, namely, gaming the system with an attribute that has so much potential.
There are too many lines you need to read between if you want to gain from paying attention to the "personal blog" of a well known employee of a 100-200 Billion dollar company, IMO.
Google's biggest mistake here was changing their original stance on the nofollow. The public will be a lot less likely to trust and follow Google Guidelines if they change so dramatically. It'll be a while before they gain that trust back.
All that being said, it cannot be easy keeping search results relevant and fair while at the same time circumventing the non stop barrage of spam and malicious intent.
While many folks laugh or balk at Matt Cutt's Google's repeating message of 'publish useful content and worry less about trying to gain an edge with tactics like nofollows' I tend to agree. Keep a site's architecture tight and don't worry about tricks like nofollows. Because as we can see, one minute they work, one minute they work differently.
I agree with MikeWMPS, don't pay too much attention to what Matt Cutts says. Just pay a lot attention to Rand's views, they will be backed up with testing.
There were a couple of if's and when's that need to be examined:
"If it's within your own site ..."
After that comes the second sort of the if statement
"The best time to use nofollow is when you have links to external sites" (now the limiting comments:) "that you can't really vouch for...."
"If you're doing paid links..." (We knew that, Matt! :) )
Lastly we need to look at is the links on the home page. That's the second time he mentions that! So those links seem to have a large inpact on the flow. Of course we knew that, but I never heard Matt confirm it so often in such a short period of time.
Anyway, PR sculpting seems to be starting on the home page.Which fortunately is consistent with my own observations :)Placing or removing links on the home page seems to have a fundamental effect on the amount of visitors to the site, and seems to have a HUGE impact on the long tail...So I am anxious to see this discussion develop here...
I agree those if's and when's were important to understand which scenario Matt was recommending to take no follows off.
There are far better ways to doing things than Matt suggests.
More important isn't nofollow on its own, but how Google handles PageRank that "evaporates" from nofollow, or historically dangling pages.
Again: "I will say something, they won't know anything new after it." inclusive a 24/7 smile.
Too bad he just reiterated what we all have heard before from the Google camp.
Nice to see him sporting a new hairdo though.
Thanks for the vid all the same.
uggh seriously? Add the nofollow Matt says, take away the the nofollow Matt says, truly crazy making if your webmaster. Thankfully I never bought into the PR chunneling thing to much so no big deal to me.
Very interesting, but please remember as noted above test, test and for the love of testing, test some more.
It's pretty amazing that we're still talking about dofollow and nofollow tags. Personally, I think Matt and the rest of the Google team know more about the issue. Meaning that the Google algorithm is likely to know how to treat a page, and also the links within that page, without the physical command.
Matt does raise some great points regarding which pages to remove the nofollow link. For me, I like to keep it simple. If you want Google to find it (which they will regardless), then put a dofollow tag on the page. Keep it hidden? ..nofollow.
Of course he recommends that you remove the nofollow on internal links, it defeats the original intention of nofollow from when the concept was first conceived.
Matt's position as middle man between the Goog and the SEO mob has baffled me for some time now.
I get the general opinion that the majority of SEOers don't take the word of Matt as gospel - and nor should they.
What can we take from Matts weekly additions?
P.s. Is Matts blog becoming more of a book review site recently?
Discuss!
I've noticed Matt's book review-filled blog too... maybe he's got a book coming out soon and is paving the way to get to the top of Google for all book-related keywords as soon as it's on sale!!
i was thinking the same thing we only really see one Google engineer (correct me if im wrong) i want to know where the other Google peeps are. I kind of feel like what Matt Cutts is doing to SEO is the same thing that Stephen Hawking did with physics. Stephen Hawking was the first celebrity physicist (well i guess Albert Einstein was kinda too) and now Matt Cutts is the first celebrity Google engineer
You mean Hawking was purposefully not telling us all he knew?
Such a smiley dude, but he sure doesn t give a lot of beef on the bone to bite off.
I don't think anyone was penalized for NOT having nofollow tags!
It is confusing. When in doubt, look at G's practices, I guess. Note, the extensive links to resources regarding site speed and performance are void of any no-follow tags https://code.google.com/speed/tools.html . Curiously, though, they are also void of any accessibility tags. Is this because link descriptions that accompany the resources are explanatory enough?
It would be really interested to know what Matt Cutts says about nofollow link.
Also, really appreciated the comments that Rand left, I will keep them in my mind.
Not to be a Debbie Downer - but I thought that the interview questions could have been presented in a better way, and perhaps additional (related) questions could have been asked of Matt.
I also wonder about Matt and Google's take on "disguising" links with iframes or javascript..
And chenry, a Matt Cutts bobblehead that nodded constantly would be a great addition to the desk of each and every SEO. Cutts certainly has "presence" on camera.
I am very surprised that SEOMoz did not take the opportunity to ask Matt about anomolies in some high-volume SERPs regarding the Vince update.
Prime opportunity (and an ever so timely one) missed!
I am increasingly using no-follow for the sites I manage. In our case, we want to streamline and make sure robots follow and index all the important pages fast.
Our technology allows for faceted search and this adds millions of pages (because of seattle home with all price range combination, bed combination, bath combination blah...) and 90% of these pages provide little or no value for search engines to crawl.
Just remember - Google is just a marketing channel for your site. Believe it or not, there are websites that get 60-70% of their traffic directly and have very little dependency on Google.
Thanks,
Rajat
It's an interesting point, which makes me think:
I really doubt, if nofollow also means ignore. Or don't go there.After all, nofollowed links do appear in the external links overview in webmaster tools. And nobody asked the question what exactly happens. It's only confirmed, that nofollow means no PR. Also a page that is nofollowed everywhere can still accumulate pagerank through an external link. And still nofollow is different from a robots.txt exclusion.In your case maybe a meta noindex is more efficient.
Also Google doesn't care about size. Your site is peanuts in the big picture. Cutts said, that they can crawl *all* new content in 6 hours...
I could be wrong about this, and please if I am some one explain it to me so I can put this issue to rest in my head.
But how exactly is the use of nofollow not working for page sculpting. It seems to in theory still work for the most part, just not as effective as before.
Less Link juice is passed sure.
Not every nofollow link is not followed sure.
But doesn't it still currently under the new explanation still work for page sculpting?
I could be way off, and if I am, I'm sure someone will step in and correct me (thumbing me down in the process)but here's my take away on the latest in the no-follow debacle.
The best way to page sculpt is to be extremely picky about your navigation you set up. Reason being is that you want to retain every last drop of PR by having it all passed along within your site.
The second best way is to use no-follow's on the links that are on the page you are sculpting that give no value by having PR flow.
Your first "best way" is on the mark (source).
Your second "best way" doesn't do anything to sculpt page rank. The old idea was that you could feed more juice to some of the links on the page by nofollowing other links on the page. Google has said that this is not the case though. The link juice going to nofollowed links just "evaporates". This illustration describes the old and the new way very well (source).
Recently, I was creating backlinks for my pet related blog Pet Care Sunday. Most of the links approved by the webmaster is no-follow. As per Matt Cutts - those links have not any direct value like the do-follow link but they might have some positive impact on the ranking, right?
Or should I remove all the no-follow link?
[link removed by editor]
Nice post. I had added a whole bunch of nofollows on our site last month and have gone and removed them all now.
Good to hear it straight from the horse's mouth (so to speak).
BTW, intresting how Matt's mouth sort of tightened up when Jane started asking about the nofollow. Clearly shows stress! :)
(Yes, I am big fan of Lie To Me)
What a intresting post, vedio and comments. Everything is really informative. I agrees thay follow would would also downgrade the rank so you have to select no follow link very wisely.
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I think he is proposing a 50-50 revenue share!
So PM me and I'll give you my bankaccount number.