The SEO industry has been awash with lively discussion since SMX Advanced in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. At the event, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) let slip with a few comments that suggested that PageRank sculpting no longer worked. The exact nature of his comments have subsequently been torn apart by shrewd SEOs, and so early this week, Matt decided to clear up the situation with this blog post.
PageRank sculpting is the practice of manipulating the flow of PageRank throughout a website using the NoFollow tag, so that the most important pages get the most PageRank. The benefits of this technique have long been debated, with some webmasters apparently seeing significant improvements in terms of visibility and traffic following the implementation of PageRank sculpting, while others seeing no change at all.
Matt Cutts yesterday dispelled the myths by clarifying exactly what happens to PageRank that meets a NoFollowed link – rather than being channeled elsewhere within the website, it simply evaporates. To add insult to injury, this “evaporation” has been happening for over a year, leaving many SEOs with egg on their face; plenty still thought this was a valid and useful amendment to website architecture.
Matt Cutts has been issuing veiled references to the fact that NoFollowing probably isn’t the best use of a webmaster’s time for a while. Here he responds to Randip Dhesi – one of iCrossing’s Natural Search Analysts – who asks “what are your views on PageRank sculpting”.
Matt responds by saying that you’re better off ensuring your website has top quality content and great links. Nofollows should be used to keep search engines away from certain types of page – a login page being a good example. He also suggests that PageRank sculpting should be as something you do without the NoFollow tag – i.e. by reviewing your internal linking structure, and making sure you’re linking to the correct page from the right place.
Potentially this could really change the SEO landscape – lots of people are talking about what this means in terms of linking to other websites. For example, the Wikipedia NoFollows links to external sources. While this is the correct use of the NoFollow tag in this case, it now means that the Wikipedia is losing significant amounts of PageRank. It’s unlikely that the Wikipedia will stop linking out, but some webmasters will be much more precious when it comes to their PageRank.
This has an even bigger impact when you consider blog commenting. Commenters are traditionally allowed to leave a link to their own website when adding value to someone elses blog post. If you’re the owner of a blog, it now means you’ll be losing PageRank everytime somebody leaves a comment. Precious bloggers may prevent visitors from leaving links, which in turn may reduce the number of people prepared to comment. It’s a vicious circle that could erode the virtues of the blogosphere.
For more information on this, it’s worth following the comments over at Matt Cutts’ blog, and opinions on this over at SEOMoz.
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June 19th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Hi Jonathan – It is amazing how one comment, at one conference can cause such a stir. I was interested in how you came to the conclusion that Web sites such as Wikipedia or common blogs would be losing PageRank by using nofollow? I haven’t come across that in anything I have read so far. I took Cutts’ statements to mean PageRank would evaporate within your own Web site if you used nofollow on internal links.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Hi Brandon, I took this statement from Matt’s blog post (linked to from above) to mean that NoFollowed links result in evaporated PageRank:
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.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I think another thing to bare in mind is that before you may have used a nofollow to ensure Google followed an optimised internal link rather than a ‘read more’ or image link, this may now be a waste of PageRank.
As a result it makes it more important to ensure the optimsed text link appears before any image or unoptimised links in the HTML that point to the same page.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I agree that this could have a negative effect on the blogosphere. Regarding site design, I think we will more sites siloing their PageRank, as many have said – expect an increase in iframe usage.
If was to to do that, I’d wait for Google Wave and use a wave instead of a regular comment system – it might help keep the the incentives for people to engage and comment as there would be links to the user profile, just not HTML (as far as I’m aware).
June 19th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
@Randip – Yeah, imagine iframe usage for blog comments could get big.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Wasn’t nofollow developed to help prevent comment spam? Don’t think it worked very well. You could always turn off nofollow on blog comments. I turned it off on my personal blog and it encouraged people to make comments. Everyone wins.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
You know, I reread the statement on there and it certainly sounds like what you’ve stated above. Read over the comments, and seems Cutts won’t directly answer the question of why would you lose PR for nofollowing external links in blog comments. For example, the first comment directly asks that.
I know the latest Wordpress release allows for follow/nofollow options for blog comments, but I don’t believe the others do.
What’s even better is that Cutt’s blog uses the Thesis theme, a theme designed with SEO in mind, and has nofollow in his own blog comments.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Assuming that page rank results in high placing in the SERPs, then when Google quietly introduced this change to the way they deal with nofollow, the big sites that link out often with nofollow links should, theoretically, show a noticeable drop in rankings (and therefore traffic).
But if you look at Google trends for websites, and look at Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, two sites that link out all the time with only nofollow links, their traffic figures from Google haven’t really changed. This probably explains why nobody in the SEO community noticed anything.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
It is interesting to read the opinions of SEOMoz in the post mentioned above when Rand quoted a colleague in a post just after the announcements, where he was basically writing these announcements off as a scare tactic to stop people abusing page rank sculpting.
…effectively his unnamed colleague was saying “I bet it still works”.
What is your opinion on this Jonathan?
June 19th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
@Rob @Dave @Brandon All of your comments fit really well together to suggest a well executed bout of misdirection on the behalf of Google. TBH, I really don’t think Google would do that, but it definitely feels like something doesn’t quite add up here