Fallout from Matt Cutts noFollow Revelation
During SMX Advanced 2009, Matt revealed that Google had changed the way PageRank was distributed when links on a page contained the noFollow attribute. No longer was there a benefit to PageRank sculpting and even more of a revelation, this change was made a year ago.
Here is the important part of what Matt said:
“So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.”
Since then many in the SEO community have written about the fallout from this revelation. Patrick from blogstorm had a great article about the effects this change could have on blog commenting. Basically if every noFollow link reduces the amount of PR the page can pass, then all a competitor would need to do is add a bunch of noFollowed links to a blog’s comments and all the followed links would lose value.
To deal with this some have suggested using plain html text instead of links. For example instead of link like, our SEO Company, just use the text our SEO Company www.smseo.net and let users copy and paste it. Not very user friendly but addresses the concerns about noFollowed links hurting your followed links.
In response to all of this, Dave Naylor’s Search Marketing blog has come up with an ingenious way of dealing with noFollow links along with comment spam. If you are a regular commenter your links will be followed, if you are not you will just get plain text.
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