Search Engine Journal

Comments

65 responses so far ↓

• Andy on Feb 11, 2008 at 1:44 pm

  I have a tiny little blog and recently my page rank went from 4 to 0. My reaction - “Oh well. That figures, I wasn’t using the no follow attribute.” I wasn’t real worried about it. Should I have been?

  I still have a fair amount of traffic that continues to grow. My RSS subs continue to grow. My Technorati authority continues to grow. I am seeing my Alexa go down due to a spike from a stumble that went large. But over all, I am continuing to trend up.

  Google is actually a small percentage of my traffic. I turned off my page rank on my tool bar some time ago. Is that ignorant? Am I missing something that I should be concerned about?

  Great post, it is refreshing to see someone with some credit come forth and express this.

• Dave on Feb 11, 2008 at 2:05 pm

  That seems sort of like saying that using a good META description is a red flag. Especially since a lot of CMS platforms automatically nofollow some links.

• Dan Perry on Feb 11, 2008 at 2:08 pm

  Jut an opinion, but I think it’s like everything else; OK in moderation. When I go to a new site, and see that every link is nofollowed except one or two, that’s a huge red flag to me.

  Considering Google, via MCutts, is telling us to use it makes me believe it is OK, but don’t go overboard. The difficulty is finding that line, without crossing it.

• WEBOSIS on Feb 11, 2008 at 2:32 pm

  I have the same thoughts regarding the use of nofollow, but I have seen positive results from using it to “sculpt” internal PR, so I’ll continue to implement it… with caution.

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 11, 2008 at 2:39 pm

  Great comments so far!

  @Andy — Great job in marketing your site outside of Google! Too often people place a dependency on one source and when it goes, so too does their site (or business!).

  @Dave — While a lot of CMS’ may add in that attribute, it’s still your site to control. I’ve only offered one theory here. It just happens to be my take on the matter.

  @ Dan — I agree wholeheartedly in that when a site has zero nofollows in use, and suddenly introduces one. That too absolutely raises suspicion. While Matt and Google may recommend it’s use, that doesn’t make it a strong tool for SEO’s to rely on. Again, I may be a conspiracy theorist — but there are thousands of people who are afraid to turn PageRank on with their toolbar…. But I’m sure if you asked Matt, he’d recommend it’s use just the same.

  —

  Keep the comments coming!

• Miguel Dorneles on Feb 11, 2008 at 2:46 pm

  Thanks for bringing that up, Eric. That’s something I’ve also been suspicious about.

  I agree with you when you say that nofollows raise curiosity and my opinion is that it should be used only for links posted by users in a blog (comments) or a forum or other types of UGC which the website’s owner have little control over. I mean, look at Wikipedia. They use the nofollow attribute for outbound links in order to prevent SPAM.

  I don’t think we should it for every single link in our own copy because, as you said, it makes no sense at all. Besides, it doesn’t seem fair considering that this is a reciprocal Web within which everybody links to everybody. I see nofollow only as a protection from unwanted outbound linking.

  Well, that’s of course just my own view over the subject.

• Dan on Feb 11, 2008 at 2:46 pm

  Hi
  I am a bit confused here..are we talking about nofollow used on internal links or on external links?
  Because you said something about controlling the “link juice” and this can refer to the use of nofollow on internal links too, right?
  Or the whole article is just about linking out with the nofollow attribute?
  maybe is just me but I am not sure about if I understood this right and I don’t see why using nofollow for internal links would be a “red flag”.

• Hagrin on Feb 11, 2008 at 3:22 pm

  I definitely think that you can put the conspiracy theory to bed.

  As mentioned above, plenty of open source CMS platforms nofollow tags straight out of the box so right away the population using the nofollow tag isn’t just the SEO community. Plenty of sites that rank very highly nofollow almost every link including Slashdot and Drupal.org so I really don’t see nofollow being a “honeypot” created by search engines.

• Matt McGee on Feb 11, 2008 at 3:58 pm

  I used to feel the same way, Eric, but no longer. Using your logic, should we only use “click here” as our anchor text because that’s how Joe Webmaster does it?

  Nofollow is a tool to be used like any other, I say.

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 11, 2008 at 4:21 pm

  @Dan — I’m speaking on links outbound to another site.

  @Hagrin — My rebuttal to you on using Slashdot and Drupal would be — Would those sites continue to rank and perform well is nofollows were not in use? My gut says so.

  @Matt McGee — No, of course we shouldn’t use “click here” as the anchor text in all of our links. As I mentioned in the article, to me, links and their anchors are contextual. The anchors used should not only flow with the user experience, but they should also speak volumes on the destination URL.

  However — I *do* agree with you that nofollow is a tool that can and should be leveraged in certain circumstances… Just not often.

  Again, this post was more to inspire a healthy debate than it was to say my point of view is the only correct one.

• PPCblogger on Feb 11, 2008 at 5:23 pm

  lol

  There must be the odd million websites & blogs out there that are using no follow, knowingly or unknowingly.

  I am not sure Google has the resources to hand check all those red flags. ;)

• SEO Canada on Feb 11, 2008 at 6:11 pm

  We share many of the same thoughts, as soon as you start using nofollow tags in your site is it truly organic? And even with systems like wordpress and such using nofollow tags it is easy enough for google to do a -”powered by wordpress” or whatever CMS is used to find the more interesting uses.

• I have used nofollow for a long time on Feb 11, 2008 at 8:25 pm

  I have questioned the same thing. I have come to a conclusion that the nofollow attribute is almost useless. I used it before the “smackdown” and it never worked for me. I have found evidence that the nofollow isn’t recognized. I have no clue if it sets off a red flag or not. I haven’t even noticed a change in indexing.

  I am beginning to think it may be a bunch of hoopla. I hope that it isn’t a bad thing following the rules…

• Craig Geis on Feb 11, 2008 at 8:57 pm

  Didn’t Google invent the “nofollow” link attribute? Didn’t they define its purpose and describe its use? Didn’t Matt Cutts elaborate on the potential uses of the attribute, saying that it’s perfectly acceptable to use “nofollow” tags for PR development amongst your pages? More specifically, he said “these tools let you choose how to develop PageRank amongst your pages.”

  Why would Google open itself to doing evil by saying that it is okay to use nofollow links to control internal PR and then penalize those that do so?

  Can you provide one example where a site has been “flagged” for abusing the “nofollow” attribute?

  You stated that “knowledge” of the nofollow is a fundamental flaw. How so? If that is a flaw, then how many other tags can we name that would reinforce that flaw?

  How does using the nofollow cover our tails? What does it cover? Maybe the same argument could be made for the robots.txt?

  You asked why should we care whether PR is being passed throughout a website? If you don’t care, then try placing nofollow on all your site links. We’ll see how long that lasts.

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 11, 2008 at 9:09 pm

  @Craig — I’m loving the heated debate!

  While Google may not have invented the nofollow attribute, they have certainly pushed it harder than anyone else out there. Why? I’m not ready to assume that they’re out there fully believing in every independent webmaster’s use of the attribute. There’s no way they can trust everyone that much.

  Furthermore, I never said that Google is penalizing for the use of the nofollow. Nor have I said that sites have been flagged for abusing the technology. I’m just suggesting that by using the nofollow, you’re making them aware of your knowledge on it. As such, they may very well view your pages, site and link flow with a different perspective.

  How does using the nofollow cover the tails of site owners? Simply by not associating themselves with questionable or poor content. Wikipedia introduced these nofollows on their links in an effort to control spam.

  Finally — I’ll pass on your suggested experiment. I could not care less f Google PageRank flows from one page or another on my sites. The nofollow as you describe it is only applicable to Google and PageRank — and I don’t agree with that.

• SEO Canada on Feb 11, 2008 at 9:17 pm

  We did a test at Beanstalk with invented terms and were able to rank for them. There definitely was less strength in some of the test, but sheer numbers make up for it. Another thing we found doing lots of blog commenting with nofollow tags was good for selecting which page was most relevant for a term we wanted to rank for in the serps.

• James Duthie on Feb 11, 2008 at 9:40 pm

  Interesting discussion and an interesting take on nofollow. While I don’t directly work in SEO, I know those who do and regularly talk to them about it.

  Interestingly, their opinion in converse… inserting a few nofollow links shows the search engines that you’re considering adn abiding by their guidelines. They see it as a positive way to show search engines that you’re doing what they want you to.

• Matt Cutts on Feb 11, 2008 at 10:03 pm

  “It is my belief that using the nofollow with the purpose of controlling the flow of links or link juice is a gigantic red flag in the eyes of the engines.”

  Nope, it’s not. Or at least, not at Google. I wouldn’t know about Yahoo/MSN/Ask, of course. :)

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 11, 2008 at 10:17 pm

  @ Matt Cutts — “Nope, it’s not.” — No, it really IS my opinion! Damn you Google… You’ve stripped me of all I’ve had, and now, you’re after my opinions too?

  If not a gigantic red flag, how about a little tiny, lego sized flag?

• SEO Canada on Feb 11, 2008 at 10:24 pm

  Wouldn’t it only be a red flag for internal structure usage? I thought Google’s stance on topics such as Blog Commenting that they should be nofollowed as they can be submitted automatically in a sense (or advertisers).

  It has always baffled me why so many BLOGs / Forums have nofollows to things like their register pages and such, or even more bizarrely links like Home. But of course I defer to you Matt as your Google’s Champion to the SEO Masses :)

• Felipe on Feb 11, 2008 at 10:45 pm

  Your analogy between a closed bag and human curiosity and (search) engines isn’t accurate: though our brains hardly forget instantly what they saw (it’s a syndrom called Alzheimer), computers and scripts have no difficulty to completely reset their memory, forget about informations, free their memories, not consider certain parts of information flow, etc if their creator has decided so when designing them. PHP: reset(var), DB: drop table and good luck after that! You can ponder information with 0 or 1 (forget about it or take into consideration) or else go with neural networks, fuzzy logic and ponder millions of information sources that mimic (badly) what our brains can do. Brains only have the latter option.

  Now, has Google decided that after all nofollow would be be a nice honeypot? I don’t know. Is it possible? Yes, maybe. Can we draw a definitive conclusion? No.

  Do you have one example of a site being harmed by using the nofollow attribute or is it only a belief as you stated it in your introduction? If it’s a belief, well, nobody except Google can tell if you are wrong or right (and if Google told us they don’t, it would be a statement we couldn’t verify as long they aren’t caught using it against sites breaking their rules).

  Did Google created this attribute for that reason? No, it’s far more convenient and helpful at telling them “this link has no interest at all; don’t bother evaluating how tiny it is, it’s zero” and that’s why they created it. Any other use of nofollow isn’t as convenient as this one for engines. Though, yes, that doesn’t exclude that it could be used at secondary tasks.

  Btw, HTML5 will introduce (in many years) far more link attributes (noreferrer, search, help, license, archives, feed and there are 14 other ones) so when 90% of the sites coded in HTML5 will use them, there will be flags everywhere for engines ;)

• Loren Baker, Editor on Feb 11, 2008 at 10:51 pm

  @ SEO Canada : In some cases, it may make sense and be an easy fix to use a nofollow back to “Home” if the CMS defaults to a default.asp homepage or something similar.

  In such an occasion that’s an issue of laziness, not SEO. Or if the publisher is building an incoming links campaign to that specific page then directing the link juice to other internal pages which may be intended to be more valuable than the home page.

  For example take a forum or blog post. If my blog post was a one shot deal about, say, SEO t-shirts, and attracted a lot of incoming links that say “t-shirts” would it make sense to send that juicy link goodness back to the homepage of SEJ which is very general or optimized for “search engine news”?

  No, it wouldn’t. It would make much more sense to direct that juice to a t-shirts store page on the site or maybe a t-shirt shop that I like.

  The homepage gets a lot of link love, more or less 98% of the site’s link love, but maybe harnessing the link love of one page to point to something relevant would make more sense… taking full advantage of nofollow.

  OT : Are you trying to outrank Dave or something with your ‘Name’?

• Loren Baker, Editor on Feb 11, 2008 at 10:56 pm

  @ Matt : I have a question (raises hand).

  If I have a site and its FAQ page has numerous links to internal pages like Contact Us or About Us, like more than 3 links, would it make sense to NoFollow the second and third link so it does not look like that site is trying to do multiple internal links to the same internal page under an authority page like FAQ?

  I’ve seen internal rankings increase when we take the multiple links out.

  But in this case, I’d think using NoFollow would make the FAQ page look like it is only directing one link to an internal page while also addressing usability standards which say we should include multiple links in the FAQ page.

  Yeah, this may be a bit OT to Eric’s post, but just thinking out loud.

  Thanks, LB

• SEO Canada on Feb 11, 2008 at 11:08 pm

  Outrank Dave?! That would be the day, if you mean Dave Davies my boss at Beanstalk. And SEO Canada is nothing like ranking for SEO Services :P I mean the only way I could would be to bribe someone like Matt Cutts…. My term is just for fun :)

  For a side job I repair PHP based CMSes. And let me tell you it sometimes could classify for Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs, although not everyone can think of code as possibly being dirty :)

• Russell Page on Feb 12, 2008 at 12:00 am

  very interesting thought. It is funny to me how often we need to think about what could be seen as dodgy by the se

• Badi Jones on Feb 12, 2008 at 1:28 am

  Personally, I use internal nofollows to block pagerank from useless pages, and direct it to more important pages.

  In a pretty recent article/ interview with Matt Cutts, he pretty much gives the ok for using nofollows to “sculpt” pagerank.

  “Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages” (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru)

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 12, 2008 at 8:28 am

  @SEO Canada — The red flag, IMO, appears when you suddenly use it (or, begin using it). Like the Wikipedia situation, nofollows can and are still being introduced to control spam submissions and links.

  @Felipe — Excellent and well written response! I apologize for coming up with a poor analogy, but I do hope that my stance on the subject was presented as intended.

  I love that you’ve read as deep into the issue so as to consider the technology behind the algorithms in play. I would not agree though that it’s a simple True/False scenario. Look back to some of the papers available on the Hilltop Algo and I’m sure we could agree it’s more complex than your comment suggests. Nofollows may be involved in some simple triggers, but how those triggers are interpreted in the rest of the algorithm must be complex.

  As you indicated though, this is but one man’s belief… And, as you also stated — we cannot draw any definitive conclusion based on the information available.

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 12, 2008 at 8:50 am

  (Posted on Sphinn, worth repeating here as well for comment subscribers.)

  Have we all forgotten the roots of the nofollow attribute?

  I’m really surprised that no one has spoken about the origin of the nofollow’s usage. We assume (and I led one to think that way in my writing) that a nofollow impacts the flow of link values on all sites we work with. While that’s assumed to be true, the nofollow was introduced to prevent spamming in the blog community.

  Yahoo said as much on their search blog:
  (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000069.html)

  I’m pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search is one of several organizations in support of a technique that should help combat weblog comment spam. Others involved are: Google/Blogger, MSN Search, Six Apart (TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal), and WordPress.

  Other links of interest on this include:
  http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx
  http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

• Acute accent on Feb 12, 2008 at 8:55 am

  Saying that the use of nofollows is a red flag about the optimization of the site implies that SEOing a site is manipulating search engines and that search engines are working to identify SEO’d sites.

  I think however that search engines are in the business of producing relevant results, that should be enough in their plate.

• Allan Stewart on Feb 12, 2008 at 9:49 am

  Google want you to use No Follow because it makes their life easier. DaveN recently pointed this out with an example of his blog being slammed because of the do-follow.

• Geld Lenen on Feb 12, 2008 at 10:47 am

  I also don’t think that there will be red flags for websites that use nofollow. Like Eric noted, the search engines came up with the nofollow attribute.

  But on the other side, it would be a really smart move ;)

• Mark Barrera on Feb 12, 2008 at 11:06 am

  So are you assuming that all of us have something to hide?

  Not all SEOs are sporting their black-hats all over town and many still play by the rules and thus have nothing to hide from Google.

  I also agree with the many others that there are soooo many sites with nofollow (the majority of every wordpress blog out there) so that red flag is probably not waving as high as you think.

• SEO Canada on Feb 12, 2008 at 11:06 am

  Yes but their main reason was for external links, internally is where we are talking about red flags flying. LOL and I don’t think it made Googles life easier as they had to add it to the algorithm but it made their SERPs more relevant from all us blog spammers… I mean err :)

• KDye Vertical Leap on Feb 12, 2008 at 11:27 am

  Even before Matt Cutts added his comment on this one, I was shaking my head. I’ve had websites improve rankings because of the use of NOFOLLOW. It’s great for dealing with duplicate content issues if there is no other way of handling them.

• Jenny on Feb 12, 2008 at 11:40 am

  I don’t get it. You’re talking about nofollow not allowing search engines to follow links, but it seems to me that you’re saying that it’s a bad thing? Or an extra effort. I’m so lost.

• Miguel Salcido on Feb 12, 2008 at 11:45 am

  Wow, what a conspiracy theory! This is ridiculous. In the Google Webmaster account you will see many nofollow links showing up as counted in your backlink profile. So to say that by using the nofollow you are hiding something in a brown paper bag of sorts is not true. Google still sees and follows the links, they just are not supposed to pass authority through that link.

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 12, 2008 at 11:53 am

  @Mark Barrera — I’m not assuming that all of us have things to hide. In fact, the contrary is true. We’re all taking the time to educate ourselves on SEM related topics. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here on SEJ.

  Like you appear to, I’m in favor of white hat techniques and practice them regularly. As such, I don’t use nofollows to pass or control link benefits in a static content environment. nofollow attributes on a link were intended to prevent user generated spam, not for you (the rheotorical you) to control what pages on your site are most worthy of your link juice.

  @Jenny — It’s an extra effort, yes. It’s also (arguably) a sign of SEO initiatives on a site, as their use could be for the purpose of controlling PageRank, link juice, etc.

  @KDye Vertical Leap — I’m speaking of nofollow being used in an a href, not as a META tag. I agree that nofollow within META parameters is a way of policing duplicate content. Let’s not forget the use of robots.txt, .htaccess files, etc. though for more appropriate spider control on dupes.

  @Miguel Salcido — Exactly my point! They see the links. They know where they come from. They even know where they point to!

  As I stated above in the comments, they cannot and will not forget that information.

  Now, if they’re reusing that information in Webmaster Central, could they not also use that in their algorithms?

  If a site has 1,000,000 inbounds, ALL of which are nofollowed with the same anchor text — do you think Google will simply discard those links in their figures?

  Perhaps that’s an exaggeration — but you probably get what I’m driving at here.

• Craig Geis on Feb 12, 2008 at 12:11 pm

  “Like you appear to, I’m in favor of white hat techniques and practice them regularly. As such, I don’t use nofollows to pass or control link benefits in a static content environment. nofollow attributes on a link were intended to prevent user generated spam, not for you (the rheotorical you) to control what pages on your site are most worthy of your link juice.”

  @Eric
  You’ve gone beyond not having a leg to stand on to implying that those that use nofollows for controlling link juice are using black hat techniques.

  Please tell me that I am misunderstanding you.

• Miguel Salcido on Feb 12, 2008 at 12:14 pm

  Eric,

  I love debates like this, thanks for starting this post!

  “Now, if they’re reusing that information in Webmaster Central, could they not also use that in their algorithms?”
  Why yes they COULD use the links in their algo, but not for counting link popularity. Or at least that is how it is supposed to go.

  There is NO doubt in my mind that Google has been accumulating massive amounts of data over the years because data is very powerful, especially all of the toolbar data! I also believe that Google looks at the traffic your site receives as a function of the authority that it will give a domain, by using Google toolbar data AND Google analytics data!!!

  SEO will continue to be commoditized and the future will only have room for boutique SEO firms that will be VERY privy, similar to traditional ad agencies. So all you self proclaimed SEO experts better start looking for another job. ;-)

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 12, 2008 at 2:10 pm

  Craig, you are misunderstanding me in this context. In fact, I’m in agreement with a lot of your comments above and appreciate you taking the time to make the contributions you have.

  I tend to make things more complex than they need to be. Hopefully this is more clear…

  nofollows should be used on a per link basis to police the potential for user generated spam.

  That is why the engines have adopted the use of the element and requested it’s adoption. They eagerly want a world of less link spam, and the adoption of nofollow has created a world where we are all more aware of the power from one single link.

  Using a rel=nofollow to control link status within ones own site does not constitute black hat efforts.

  It simply alerts the engines to the fact that you may be trying to massage the flow of links in a controlled environment. My suggestion is that this process is one that may alert the engines to some degree.

  Furthermore, this use is not what the rel=nofollow was created for. That doesn’t mean you’ve crossed the line at all. As someone on Sphinn phrased, it simply means that you have evolved the usage of nofollow to suit your needs.

• Miguel Dorneles on Feb 12, 2008 at 3:00 pm

  I just found this 2005 article by Danny Sullivan:
  http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

  I guess I’m OK with the outbound linking discussion. No hurt, no harms, link control. Alright! But what about inbound links?

  Here’s what Danny said 3 years ago:

  “You definitely DO NOT want to use the attribute on links to your own pages. Do that, and you’ll deprive your own pages from the chance of influencing how your other pages rank.”

  I confess I’m a bit confused on this one.

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 12, 2008 at 3:03 pm

  Great find Miguel… Interesting choice of words here by Danny too:

  “Think of it as a way to flag to them, “I didn’t post this link — someone else did.”

• Matt McGee on Feb 12, 2008 at 3:08 pm

  And yet if you go look at any of Danny’s sites (SMX, etc.), you’ll see the nofollow attribute used correctly on internal links.

  In this industry, it’s dangerous to quote and rely on an article that’s 3 years old.

• Miguel Dorneles on Feb 12, 2008 at 3:15 pm

  Yeah! You’re probably right, Matt. Thanks for pointing that out :)

• Eric Lander, Associate Editor on Feb 12, 2008 at 3:39 pm

  Matt’s on point here… It’s an old article, and the “flag” reference was said with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

• Farhad on Feb 12, 2008 at 5:24 pm

  I wouldn’t do it. I’ve always believed in building sites for users. Users don’t need “nofollow”, so I see absolutely no reason why we should faff around sticking “nofollow” attributes on links where no one but the search engines will see them.

• warren on Feb 12, 2008 at 6:30 pm

  @ Farhad
  I’m all for building sites for users, but i wouldn’t want to ignore SEO or I wouldn’t have many users. Also adding this code does not negatively affect user experience.

  @Eric
  Interesting post, also interesting to note that it appears you do not use rel=nofollow for the links in the comments here. :)

  But still I would have to go ahead and agree with most of the comments here that nofollow is a tool that can and should be leveraged in certain circumstances, until testing can prove otherwise.

• WebSite Design Orange County on Feb 12, 2008 at 7:09 pm

  When we use the Nofollow tag on our clients sites we haven’t experienced any negative impact from any of the search engines. I would venture a guess that sites that are being penalized for this tag are, more than likely, using them in such a way as to raise a red flag.

• Farhad on Feb 12, 2008 at 7:20 pm

  @warren You’re right about not ignoring search engines, and I would never advocate that, cos like you, I wouldn’t be in business without them either.

  However, i think sticking “nofollow” on links goes far beyond the realm of ignoring search engines and pretty much enters the realm of designing with primarily the SE in mind.

  In my mind, it’s yet another classic case of a Google paradox, not unlike the link selling issue.

• Suresh on Feb 13, 2008 at 6:53 am

  Use no follow tag in link help to search engines to avoid link counts as backlink. But it follow the links to crawl the pages and cache in database.

• Mukesh on Feb 13, 2008 at 10:32 am

  Brilliant post. I completely agree that nofollow is a tag only SEO guys are aware of. Secondly, Google has always recommended webmasters to make sites for visitors and NOT FOR SEARCH ENGINES..

  So why is google bent upon asking webmasters to add nofollow to their links?

• Matt McGee on Feb 13, 2008 at 12:41 pm

  That’s a complete fallacy. Google recommends you use a robots.txt file. That’s something you make specifically for search engines.

  We all need to get over this “make sites only for users” thing. If you want to work that way, go for it. But I consider search engine spiders to be part of my target audience, so I’ll use the tools available to me to help them do their job better.

• Farhad Divecha on Feb 13, 2008 at 12:50 pm

  “nofollow” attributes are not a ‘tool’.

  If you constructed your site well in the first place, you wouldn’t need to go around fiddling with nofollows to channel search flow etc. Sane linking structures achieve that objective just as well.

• Craig Geis on Feb 13, 2008 at 12:56 pm

  @Farhad or any takers…
  Would you mind explaining your process of limiting link juice to your overhead pages?

• Farhad Divecha on Feb 13, 2008 at 1:19 pm

  Simple: We don’t.

  If Google wants to rank us #1 for “Privacy Policy”, they can go ahead and knock themselves out.

  I am sure that after 10 years of being, the Google algorithm is smart enough to differentiate unimportant footer links from the important ones.

  However, if you go and chuck your important links alongside the unimportant ones, my suggestion would be to just separate the two (physically or graphically) rather than messing around with nofollow

• Farhad Divecha on Feb 13, 2008 at 1:26 pm

  PS: Brulant, if you are worried about search rankings for your site, i’d start by inspecting the redirect and home page URL set up. I didn’t look into it properly, but at first glance it looked like there’s some funny sort of redirection going on between ww.brulant.com and www.brulant.com/brulant

• Craig Geis on Feb 13, 2008 at 1:37 pm

  @Farhad
  I’m very aware of our weaknesses. We’re in the process of building a new site.

  Besides, since when was this a thread of personal attack?

• Farhad Divecha on Feb 13, 2008 at 1:48 pm

  @Chris … you get me wrong mate, I was genuinely trying to help by pointing out the more important issues holding your site back.

  Didn’t mean it as a direct attack. Sorry if it came across as one.

• chris boggs on Feb 14, 2008 at 3:02 pm

  Frahad I think that the struture of our own site is not really the issue here. Craig’s strategies for controling link flow are succesful, from the testing we are seeing. In fact, you may be able to get some PR for the About You page you link to from your name, simply by restructuring your internal linking, no?

• Farhad Divecha on Feb 14, 2008 at 4:13 pm

  @Chris I’m not debating the success of using “nofllow” to channel PR flow, nor am I speaking about your site structure in particular.

  All I’m saying is that we would not use the “nofollow” attribute to channel PR. We would just modify the way pages are linked, and concentrate on other factors that we think are much more important.

  Taking the example you just make about the About Me page on our site as a case in point. This isn’t a page I care about directing visitors to. Thos who want to see it, will find it easily enough. So the natural link flow towards that page is accordingly structured. If we decided that my profile page needs to receive more PR (for whatever reason), then we’d add more links towards it within our site, rather than just the 1 link from the ‘About Us’ page.

  PS: I link to that page from my name because that page describes me most aptly, as against linking to our home page, which would give readers absolutely no idea about who I am.

• chris boggs on Feb 14, 2008 at 6:35 pm

  Thank you Farhad I respect your opinion and the time you take to explain. I see what you say about the link that I chose to use as an example. You could easily change the structure of your site to make that page more “link heavy.” So it seems we are all saying the same thing but in different ways.

  ahh the way of SEO - many effective ways to a successful destination. :)

• Terry Van Horne on Feb 19, 2008 at 4:36 pm

  The question we should be discussing is the potential as a red flag, IMO, internal use of the “nofollow” attribute is the sort of “technique” (using technique in its loosest meaning) that has the potential to be perceived in the future as a flag for an over-optimized site. If it were a “standard” attribute then we could simply go to the spec and no guessing… this attribute will be abused by both SEOs and SEs. SEs don’t want it to be a HTML standard ’cause then they can make it do whatever they want going forward.

• Jaan Kanellis on Mar 7, 2008 at 11:49 am

  “Im willing to bet that the only person to know about the nofollow is involved in SEO.

  This represents a fundamental flaw with the use of the nofollow.”

  Great quote. So are we to believe Google has gifted only the people who know of nofollow attribute the ability to out-rank others that dont use it? LOL, hardly. In fact even if this PR Sculpting does work, it probably does on such a small level comparable to other SEO techniques it is not even worth doing.

• Eric on Apr 22, 2008 at 2:49 pm

  Frankly, I’ve been wondering for some time how Google continues to use links in their algo, when it has become one of the most poisoned means for measuring a site. That pendulum swings both ways: Either Wikipedia has open links and becomes a great big spam link target, or everyone covers their links and Google has little to go off of.

  Frankly, I think they have been weighing traffic to a site more heavily to counter the rash of “nofollow.” If that’s true, then driving traffic becomes important again, which is all Google cares about - finding sites people like.

• charles binns on May 6, 2008 at 7:50 am

  Interesting article - I have a web site showing some of my photographs and I recently inserted a few “no follow” tags into some of the links on my links pages - only to the commercial directories mind, not the personal web sites of photographers. My site dropped 10 positions overnight on Google for my designated key words. I quickly removed the tags and hey presto! my website moved up 10 places overnight.

  This may be coincidence and maybe my drop in the rankings was a minor glitch but it made me nervous about using “no follow “tags. Should I be or am I just being paranoid??

Leave a Comment