At SMX Advanced this week, Matt Cutts has revealed that Google has changed two major factors with how they deal with links.
Firstly, Google now passes value through some JavaScript links. If the link is actually contained within the HTML (rather than being in an external JavaScript file), then Google will pass link value through it. This has some big repercussions for sites that are selling links as advertising, and using JavaScript to prevent the link passing value. In the past, this was a fairly legitimate way of selling links without breaking Google’s guidelines, but now these links will pass value. This means some webmasters may now be breaking the guidelines without even realising it. Matt Cutts did mention, luckily, that it would be unlikely that webmasters would be penalised for this practice, certainly not in the near future.
The second huge piece of news that Matt Cutts revealed is how Google now deals with link sculpting. In the past it was an excellent method of ensuring that the most prominent pages were given the greater share of link value. Links to pages that didn’t need to rank well in the natural listings, often terms and conditions and privacy policy pages, could be nofollowed to allow the remaining links on the page to pass more value. Now, however, it seems as if Google are saying that the remaining links won’t pass more value, they’ll pass the same amount of value as they did before and the remaining link equity will simply “evaporate”. This has led to many sad faces around the SEO community, with Rand Fishkin calling Google’s move “bizarrely counter-intuitive”.
An interesting statistic that Rand mentions in his latest post on SEOmoz is that (of the links that Linkscape has found) around 2.7% of the 474 billion links on the Internet are nofollowed, and 73% of these links are internal. A change in how Google deals with over 9.3 billion links is almost certainly going to affect Google’s index in a big way, for better or for worse.
More detail on both of these major changes can be found on Danny Sullivan’s post on Search Engine Land and Lisa Barone’s post on Outspoken Media.
Photo credit: Ed Yourdon
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June 3rd, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Just as page-rank sculpting was beginning to get truly main stream, Google changes their policy towards it. Yep, that sounds about right
It’ll be interesting to see if/when this gets implemented.
June 4th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
” In the past it was an excellent method of ensuring that the most prominent pages were given the greater share of link value.”
Sorry, that dog won’t hunt. No one has ever been able to show that PageRank sculpting works. In fact, no one has ever been able to show that they could actually sculpt PageRank.
Since no one outside of Google has the ability to track and measure PageRank, there is no way anyone can knowledgeably adjust the flow of PageRank through their site.
It should also be noted that Googlers including Matt Cutts have been advising people not to waste their time on PageRank sculpting almost from the time it was first suggested.