As a followup to a past post on Blogussion about the Google Algorithm change, “Jeet” from GetLinksPro has explained the impact of the change in his own words.

I have always advised bloggers to switch to dofollow comments and moderate the comments with a tight fist. This not only rewards the contributors it also brings a lot of traffic from smaller dofollow search engines and links from dofollow lists and directories.

I personally prefer and recommend using the dofollow plugins that can impose a limit of minimum 3-5 comments before a dofollow link is given.

But I sincerely believe that now is the time for people who are still nofollowing their comment links to switch to dofollow; rather it was an year ago when Google changed their treatment of nofollow links – but we didn’t come to know about it until recently.

An Explanation in my Own Words

I will try to explain the changes in interpretation of nofollow links in my words, though you can use the original reference (Matt Cutt’s post and some excellent comments there).

Earlier, if a page had 5 links and page had a PR5, 20% of the PR juice flowed to these links. It was slightly below 20% because a decay factor was introduced to ensure that all pages don’t end up getting a PR10; but we won’t go into those details.

If you had a contact and a privacy page out of these 5, it was very easy to manipulate the PR flow by nofollowing the links to contact and privacy page. Thus, the PR“>PR juice was distributed among three pages only and these pages got 33% PR juice each.

PageRank sculpting or nofollow was a great method to increase the PR for internal pages by nofollowing links to external pages or to contact / privacy type of pages.

What That All Means

With the new changes, however, the effort of nofollowing is wasted completely and you won’t get the 33% PR juice on remaining three links even if you dofollow the 2 pages. It can still be argued that only 10% juice is leaked for each of these nofollow links (as compared to 20% earlier) and that leaves us with 80/3% ~ 26% PR juice remaining for the remaining 3 links. But that’s not for sure and I wouldn’t be surprised if the remaining links are still getting only 20% juice (with a decay).

So now that we have established that nofollowing links is not going to affect the internal linking much it’s much better to dofollow external links in comments, at least someone is benefiting from these links and that someone is a regular contributor to your blog.

So, rather than throwing away 20% of PR juice, it could be given away to someone who visits your blog regularly and makes it a point to write an informative comment.

How Did I Put That?

I tried to explain this new change in the flow of PageRank to a page using a different kind of example here. Let me know how I did, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Related posts:

1. Debate: DoFollow vs. NoFollow Links

2. We Take Another Step To Becoming More Than Just A Blog: The Launch of our DoFollow Blog Directory

3. Google Eliminates the use of NoFollow by Changing Search Algorithms