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Home About Contact RSS Feed   « Google releases Ad Manager A little more about Placement Targeting in AdSense » Should you sculpt PageRank using nofollow? I’ve seen a few posts (Dave Naylor, Joost de Valk) discussing this over the last few days and thought I’d share my view of it. Both posts bring up the same analogy, attributed to Matt Cutts: Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect. My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely. Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level. While I agree in theory, I think that’s a bit oversimplified.  What if you could re-allocate your $100 more effectively in just a few minutes, then go try to raise it to $300? Sculpting PageRank is one of those things that can earn a nice benefit in a short period of time, but you can keep tweaking forever for progressively lesser and lesser gains.  See the chart on the left. For example, you probably have links on your site for “log-in”, “privacy policy” and other such pages.  Go in and nofollow those.  How long did that take?  Two minutes?  That alone probably brought as much benefit as it will to go through every page and carefully sculpt things out. Knock out a few of those links, then spend your time trying to work on getting $300.

Oct 7, 2007 at 5:38pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan    Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google More and more, I’ve been seeing people wondering if they’ve lost traffic on Google because they were detected to be selling paid links. However, Google’s generally never penalized sites for link selling. If spotted, in most cases all Google would do is prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing PageRank. Now that’s changing. If you sell links, Google might indeed penalize your site plus drop the PageRank score that shows for it.

This week at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Cutts joined the discussion around nofollow during the duplicate content session. According to Outspoken Media's Lisa Barone: A debate broke out mid-session when Matt Cutts got involved about whether or not nofollow is still effective. Of course, as soon as it got hot, all search representatives got very tight lipped about who said what and what they really meant. As far as I could, Matt Cutts did NOT say that they ignore nofollow, but he DID hint that it is less effective today than it used to be. Later, Cutts addressed the issue again in his You&A keynote. When asked about PageRank sculpting, Cutts said that it will still work, but not as well. Basically, using nofollow will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page through the nofollowed link. But that PageRank is no longer "saved" to be used by other links on the page. It just "evaporates," according to Cutts. Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has some visual aids to help describe the process. This change mainly affects those SEOs that have tried to optimize their pages using the nofollow tag for PageRank sculpting. It's safe to say that most site owners have no idea what PageRank sculpting is, which is probable a good thing, since it can quite easily be done wrong and cause more problems than it solves.

For some websites using nofollow and pagerank sculpting is a complete waste of time, energy and resources. For other websites there may be some moderate level of benefit, and for some websites ignoring pagerank sculpting may be costing you traffic and sales.

Enter Siloing and PageRank Sculpting This is simply the activity of controlling what pages of your site share their link love. You do this by adding a "nofollow" attribute to any link that you don't want the search engines to give credit to. Take the example Matt Cutts gives. Maybe you have a friend who is a total underground, blackhat, do-no-good, evil-empire, anarchist spammer. You know he's bad to the bone. But you have a soft place in your heart for him and you want others to check out his site. All you have to do is add a nofollow attribute to the link. It would look like this: <a href="http://www.total-underground-blackhat-do-no-good-evil-empire-anarchist-spammer.com/" rel="nofollow">a blackhat spammer</a>. In this article, Joost de Valk, a Dutch SEO and Web developer, quotes Matt Cutts as saying, "There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollowed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery." Joost's article explains PageRank sculpting in more detail if you find this topic fascinating. His article also talks about "siloing." He points to an article on BruceClay.com that discussed this concept in a great amount of detail. Siloing is the idea of only linking out to other pages on your site and other outside resources that relate to that specific category or topic. So, if you had a cherry ice cream cone page, you would only link to resources discussing cherry ice cream cones. Information about chocolate ice cream cones and ice cream sundaes would either not be linked to or would be linked to using the nofollow tag like I showed you above. Controlling Link Flow Using Robots.txt Finally, there's more than one way to block link love. You can also add this information to your robots.txt file. This handy file goes in the root folder of your Web server and tells the search engines how to not spider and index all sorts of things.

What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page, you'll see that the "Sign in" link is nofollow'ed. That's a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn't going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn't benefit users or convert any new visitors? Likewise, the "My itineraries" link on expedia.com is nofollow'ed as well. That's another page that wouldn't really convert well or have any use except for signed in users, so the nofollow on Expedia's home page means that Google won't crawl those specific links. Most webmasters don't need to worry about sculpting the flow of PageRank on their site, but if you want to try advanced things with nofollow to send less PageRank to copyright pages, terms of service, privacy pages, etc., that's your call.

And while the business networking aspect is great, I’m writing to tell you it can be useful for your SEO efforts too, specifically link building. You may not know this, but LinkedIn does not employ the nofollow attribute on its links, like most other social networking sites. So that means we can use LinkedIn responsibly to build some nice one-way links to our sites and blogs. Even better your employees can use this to build some SEO-friendly links to your company site.

So the days of parsing links onto high PageRank Flickr pages are over. Or are they? No. Let’s examine why in list form. Let’s examine how you can use the remaining scraps of link juice from Flickr in your SEO campaigns. 1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits. 2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank. 3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow. Many Flickr personal profile and group pages gain toolbar PR just by having the link spread around in-house, so it’s not that hard to make those pages accumulate PR. Google seems to be very generous in that regard. There’s a lot of PR to be passed around through Flickr apparently. So, the glory days of Flickr SEO may be over (unless Yahoo does the improbable and flips the switch back), but Rome didn’t burn to rubble in a day, so we might as well make the most of Flickr before it completely collapses.

Google has also added functionality to the Webmaster Tools API to enable site owners to provide input on control settings (such as preferred domain and crawl rate) that could previously only be done via the application. As they note in the blog post: “This is especially useful if you have a large number of sites. With the Webmaster Tools API, you can perform hundreds of operations in the time that it would take to add and verify a single site through the web interface.”

So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links?Many webmasters have written about their success in growing their audience. We've compiled several ideas and resources that can improve the web for all users.Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in generalStart a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you're passionate about your site's topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.If you're interested in blogging, see our Help Center for specific tips for bloggers.