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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.

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.

In the past, I've said there's no direct correlation between editorial rankings and paid advertisements. Well, it seems I was wrong. Paid search really can affect organic search. My team recently noticed this in one of our client's Google Webmaster Tools accounts. They saw instances of backlink anchor text that we knew we weren't optimizing against (not requesting links with these keywords) and they seemed very promotional in nature. When we reviewed these links, we saw that they were coming from paid search efforts. They were the titles of the ads on both Overture/Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords. Yet, Google Webmaster Tools was (and still is) showing these as anchor text of backlinks to the Web site.