Comments on: Nofollow Change: Why Life Just Got Tougher for Niche Sites

By: Fred @ One Project Closer

Fred @ One Project Closer — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:32:55 +0000

Interesting article – but I don’t see the end of niche sites in sight. We will see a shift from the big web sites to remove pagerank sculpting activities – but I think you’ll find that the link acquisition strategies of niche sites are more focused on long-tail, and that those links are what primary drive rankings. Pagerank sculpting is one of 2 dozen ways niche sites try to outperform the big boys… the others aren’t going away.

It was revealing for us though… We had spent a few hours sculpting our site in the past… what is revealing for me is that I need to be more judicious about exactly what content I want to put on the home page and in the sidebar of my articles…

Fred

By: Stuart Morris

Stuart Morris — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:06:28 +0000

No follows are followed and even presumably passing some PR. The long and short of the article is that opening the doors to your deeper pages is going to back up the Niche sites. We tend not to look at PR or funnel it as much as build pages we need and get them indexed. Our primary site’s rankings speak for themselves, and think we need to move past PR, No-Follows.. etc,, That was a toos me a link comment.. LOL

By: blenderhead

blenderhead — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 01:48:45 +0000

when i was young, i used to like custard… but now i don’t like it so much anymore. i like cereal though just fine. hope this helps in some way.

By: Steve Morris

Steve Morris — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:09:28 +0000

Your working on the assumption that nofollow tags are not followed but the evidence suggests that they are followed but do not pass page rank. Google will follow a link with a nofollow tag – allegedly .

But I am depending on second hand information with regard to this evidence, one way to check if a nofollow link is followed is to set up a page within a directory with no incoming links other then nofollow and see if it’s indexed

By: Christine

Christine — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:59:34 +0000

I am inclined to agree with your theory. Around the time you published it, my little niche site went from receiving hundreds of referrals from Google to none. Traffic from other search engines who receive data from Google declined later.

By: Matt Leonard

Matt Leonard — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:53:09 +0000

I’m aware that they were always technically crawlable. I’m stating that with more priority placed on them (more followed links) the likelihood of more deep content remaining indexed is greatly increased. When dealing with a large site, there are issues with things such as pagination. With a focus on deeper content, large sites should look for ways to address things that would otherwise have been non-worthy projects.

By: Alan Hammond

Alan Hammond — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:30:33 +0000

You say that ‘deep content’ pages will now be crawlable with the nofollows removed. They were always crawlable so there’s no change there. The change is that their page rank will now be higher.
I don’t think pagerank is such an important issue for deep content pages as most won’t have a great pagerank anyway. Other factors are likely to be more important.
And fans of siloing will tell you that if the deep content pages are in a silo of related content they will still appear well in SERPs.

By: @steveplunkett

@steveplunkett — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:00:43 +0000

After ScarySEO, October and some of the late night eavesdropping on others.. i cratfed an experiment to prove nofollow was complete poo poo….

the people that participated have been msg me all week.. “this is what you were talking about”

yes it was…

as early as decemeber a site with nofollow blocked the page from going to #1 in 4 hours.. all the sites that didnt use no follow or had them on by default in comments but had no comments..

all went to #1 in 4 hours.. (the google spider interval at the time)

the people that then removed no follow had theirs to front page in about a week or so… but the damage had been done..

those people that never used nofollow will be at an advantage.. because for those that did… it’s still attributable to the domain.

(yes, everything flows back to the domain.. what u do now counts 5 years from now.. think about it)

By: SEO_Dr

SEO_Dr — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:34:51 +0000

This will have a big impact on blog comments. Here for example, each of our links will be causing the PR to ‘evaporate’, so moderators will have to be far more selective. It could be the death of user generated content.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:41:57 +0000

I was never completely sold on the idea that PageRank sculpting (as you call it) really worked. It didn’t make sense to me for it to work. I believe that now and in the recent past Google has tried to program itself to look at the domain value and the value of the pages within it. The deep internal pages received a certain amount of value based on the domain itself and the other domains linking to it.

So in that respect, larger, more linked to domains have the advantage in my opinion and that’s just how life in the free market is.