Earlier this week, Matt Cutts announced that the search algorithms have been changed and that the use of Rel=nofollow will have a negative impact on your websites that ever before.
The announcement comes as a shire shock to make SEO-savvy webmasters; mainly because the change places every webmaster in an awkward situation. Simply because; we shouldn’t use NoFollow but we can’t not use it either…
NoFollow was introduced in 2005 and was accepted by many major Search Engines including Google. This was a welcomed addition to Search Engine Optimization by many because it gave webmasters an opportunity to have more control in their linking structures.
However, this is no longer to be. Google recently annouced that PageRank sculpting needs to be approached in an entirely different way.
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.
The use of the NoFollow tag will definitely have a negative impact on your website as seen through this image below:
Image from SEOmoz
As of now, many ideas have been put forward on how to tackle this problem. We can’t really remove NoFollow because we don’t want to send out link-juice to specific internal pages or outbound links, but then again; adding the relation tag will also decrease the amount of link-juice given to the remaining links on your page.
“SEO Experts” have denounced the use of iFrames, Siloing and even perhaps use of Javascript (however, this has also been rejected by the Google team as a form of valid PR sculpting.) There isn’t a definite answer to this dilemma and everything put forward; are nothing but possible ideas. All we can do is read everything we can, and decide for ourselves what the best possible solution is for us.
I’m still learning about the situation myself, so expect a few more articles on this issue in the coming weeks. If I find anything worhtwhile sharing; it’ll definitely be posted here at Blogussion. Till then I strongly encourage you to read SEOmoz’s article on PageRank Sculpting.
I also urge you to watch the video below, made by the SEOmoz team to address this issue in a video-format. It covers a lot of the basics and eventually steps into more deeper waters. They even throw up a few possible alternative solutions;
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – How Do We Plug the Nofollow Leak? from Scott Willoughby.
What’s your input?
If your a SEO-savvy webmasters; what are your thoughts about Google’s changes? Do you have any recommendations to work yourself around it? There’s a lot I need to learn myself on the topic, so don’t take anything this post for granted; Perhaps you might have a different perspective to this change in Google’s algo?
PS: At least my earlier debate on NoFollow V DoFollow will finally have its final say! 
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I really do not see how it is going to impact a lot on a webmaster; essentially he/she maintains the PR and prevents the precious link juice to follow to so called “unimportant” pages. Maybe, a wee bit change is you interlink (that is link your pages within the blog or website). But then again, why will you want to make your internal links no-follow? Maybe, I’ll go over the video once again and catch somethings I could not the first time around.
Richael | Domain Marvelous´s last blog ..Some tips on choosing killer domain names!
If you had something like a comment policy, or the wordpress administration login link, or a link from a form to a processing page, you probably don’t want your PR juice being distributed over these. That is why you would include NoFollow. Now Google is indexing everything, even unimportant pages.
The video was a great resource for learning more about this problem. I couldn’t really understand it just from the images so the visual helped. Is there a reason for Google getting rid of nofollow? It doesn’t seem to benefit anyone from what I can see.
It’s probably just another thing Google is doing to make us hate them. :/ But I really don’t know, maybe Janith has some better insight here.
Alex´s last blog ..Design Trends in the Thesis Community
Hi there,
It does seem like the new Google algorithm will have a negative impact on most websites and blogs. But it could also be a good thing in the long run. I guess we all will have to wait and see what exactly comes out of it.
Thanks for the great article.
Mani Raj
Havoc Marketing
Havoc Marketing´s last blog ..Learn Pay Per Click Advertising From Google Itself
Thanks for the video. Good is taking great care of these linking. I cant guess what will happen.:P
Harish | Blogging Kid´s last blog ..A Recap of Some My Best Posts On This Blog
@Janith: A post after a long time
Well, I think nofollow is not out, its just that people won’t put much effort in PR scuplting.
Does this also affect the outbound nofollow links? (so I’m actually decreasing your link by adding this comment)
Well….we are DoFollow in the comments, so I don’t think so. But PR isn’t really a big factor nowadays, so it won’t really be too much of a burden on us if we drop a couple points in the next update.
Alex´s last blog ..Design Trends in the Thesis Community
This is a very interesting and important topic and I would love to watch the video.
Not sure why but I can never seem to play video from Vimeo, they just drag too much. I have no problem with Youtube, so I am not sure what it is. I have tried to watch dozens of videos on Vimeo but no luck.
Is this particular video on Youtube?
James Mann´s last blog ..10 Common Mistakes People Do Running A Home-Based Business
That’s weird you can’t see the video…I searched for something about the algorithm on YouTube, maybe you will find something useful?
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=google+algorithm&aq=0&oq=google+alg
Alex´s last blog ..Design Trends in the Thesis Community
I had neglected doing any kind of PR sculpting, so this news comes to some relief to me. I watched the SEOMOZ video and come to the conclusion there is much we should do, except remove pages that are of no value to a visitor.
This indeed is a huge change. So far (yeah, I know it’s a recent change) I haven’t noticed any changes, my PRs stayed the same. But with the next PR update, everything will go upside down and I’m simply terrified of the amount of work that I’ve done that will go to waste with this …
Tipsy´s last blog ..Pazurki od Eweliny
Yes, the next PR update is something to be more worried about. I fear this will hurt us more than help us.
If it was really new, there would be a lot to be concerned of, but based on what Matt Cutts said too, this is in effect since last year already, so it’s quite old news.
If you have been doing well then, and still are doing now, you shouldn’t care about that.
Nicolas Prudhon´s last blog ..Did The “NoFollow” Attribute Really Change?
great info man I was unaware of it
Interesting stuff. However I have read some articles claiming that these changes are already in effect, and have been for some time. I will try and find one of the articles.
Martin´s last blog ..Cool New Zombie T-Shirt at Threadless
I am very confuse. This should be major breakthrough new, but it look like only few people know about this.
Freeway´s last blog ..210 Freeway Accident
Our own blog PR will be higher as we pass less PR juice to others, right?
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
Wow, well, i guess it was gonna happen someday, but I wish it weren’t true. I think its important to have the link value for DO follow, and if you want no follow, it should remain that way, and not give off the juice. oh well….Google always changes things.
Karen