PageRank Scultping Doesn’t Work and NoFollow is Worthless

A few weeks ago at SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts made a comment during a Q&A session that seemed to shock the SEO industry.  The comment Matt made was that link juice that is assigned to a nofollow’ed link by Google evaporates instead of being reassigned to links that don’t contain the nofollow attribute.  Well after many speculating blog posts were made by SEO’s trying to understand the comment, Matt decided to post a clarifying post on his blog about page rank sculpting.

In Matt’s post he explains that all links on the page used to be assigned and given link juice in various levels based on the location of the link and the context in which it was used.  Then he goes on to explain that Google, and other major search engines, introduced the nofollow attribute to allow webmasters to label a link that they did not fully trust.  These nofollowed links were not to be assigned or given any link juice because of the tag.  Any link juice that was to be given to them was to be reassigned to other links on the page.

Now Matt explains that around a year ago Google changed the algorithm to assign link juice to these nofollowed links but not give them the credit for it due to the tag.  The link juice that is assigned to these links now goes into the large black hole that is the internet, never to be seen or heard from again.

What Matt has basically told us is that as website owners add more links to their pages, the amount of link juice that each link will get will be reduced incrementally. This reduction in link juice will happen regardless if the status of the link is nofollowed or not.

This can cause serious issues for websites that contain blogs as most blogs allow for comments to be left by their readers.  Most blog systems allow those users who leave comments to also link their name on the comment back to their website.  This can drastically increase the amount of links on a single page that the original blog poster didn’t originally intend to be there.

The topic of this problem did get brought up by both Matt and the users who left comments on his post.  In his mini F.A.Q. on the post Matt posted the following questions and answers:

Q: If I run a blog and add the nofollow attribute to links left by my commenters, doesn’t that mean less PageRank flows within my site?
A: If you think about it, that’s the way that PageRank worked even before the nofollow attribute.

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Right there Matt does answer the question that allowing comments with these links does in fact lower the amount of PageRank, or link juice, that will be transferred to your other pages.  Matt also states that he does not recommend that users turn off the commenting systems on their blog.  I am very inclined to agree with Matt to not turn off the commenting system but that doesn’t solve the problem of those links lowering your link juice.

The other question that comes to mind is why have the nofollow tag at all now?  Really if you think about it, the tag was originally designed to label a site as not trustworthy in the webmaster’s eyes.  The nofollow tag can still be used for this purpose if the webmaster doesn’t mind loosing a portion of his link juice to someone he doesn’t trust.  A better idea would simply be not to link to anyone who you don’t trust.  After all if you don’t trust the other end of the link.. why are you linking to them?

With what we now know from Matt’s post I really can’t see any reason to use the nofollow attribute on a link anymore.  As it sits you know that the link is going to cost you in link juice either way.  It also seems that you trust the site enough to allow the link to remain on your site.  So why not just give them the link juice?  Other then the idea of not wanting to help someone else out, there is no reason not to give them the credit for the link.

The only exception I can see to that is when internet users are allowed to add links to a site without the webmasters personally checking each link.  A perfect example of this would be blog comments or a website guestbook.  In these cases I can understand not wanting to vouch for the site on the other end of the link, however I think a better solution would be to not allow the link in the first place.

As for my solution for the newly found problem..  I created a Wordpress plugin that removes all the links from the comment authors and only enables them for users who comment more then a specified number of times.  It also provides us the ability to remove the nofollow attribute from those links when they do appear so we can reward users who leave multiple comments on our blog.  If your interested in getting a copy of this plugin, please visit the comment link manager plugin page.

So what are your thoughts on this new issue?  Should everyone just do away with the nofollow attribute all together?  Should webmasters stop allowing users to post links on thier sites?  or should we do as others have suggested and participate in some sort of cloaking, iframe, javascript solution?  Share your comments below!

Post Tagged With: Google,Plugins,SEO,Webmasters,Wordpress