google rel=nofollow

[zebedy]

What's changed with nofollow?
Wednesday September 9, 2009


Back in 2005, Google announced that when a link has a nofollow attribute on it (rel="nofollow") "those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

Then in June of 2009, Google implied that the use of nofollow on links was not being as severely penalized as before. According to SearchEngineWatch.com: "Basically, using nofollow will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page through the nofollowed link. But that PageRank is no longer "saved" to be used by other links on the page. It just "evaporates," according to Cutts."
Ultimately, it means that while links marked with rel="nofollow" won't get a PageRank bonus from Google, they might still follow the links and the negative impact of the nofollow is lessened.

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[lots0]

The new way pagerank is calculated differs in the following way.

Pre July 09 - if you had a page that was PageRank 4 and the page had 10 outbound links on it and you no-followed 5 of the links, but left 5 links for google to follow... google would divide 100% of the pages PageRank (PR4) between the 5 links without the no-follow and give 100% of the PR to the pages without the no-follow. Of course google would not give any pagerank to the links with no-follow.

After July 09, the algo has been tweaked so that in the same scenario as above, the five links without the no-follow will now only get 50% of the total PageRank of the page (PR2) that will be divided between the five out bound links, instead of the 100% of the Pagerank (PR4) as before.

The pagerank that is not passed does not actually disappear or evaporate, the PR is still carried by the original page/site, however you are not going to increase the Pagerank that is passed by the links by having all but a couple of links on a page no-followed.

Google did this in an effort to stop what some SEO's call "PageRank Sculpting". "PageRank Sculpting" = effort to artificially increase the pagerank that is passed by a link.

FYI - googlebot still follows the no-follow and indexes the no follow pages, it just does not transfer any pagerank to them.

NOTE: We have recently noticed that Google seems to be reducing the 'Trust Rank' of sites that extensively use no-follow is an effort to "pageRank Sculpt".

If you have been using the no-follow to sculpt pagerank... we suggest you reevaluate your strategy.