PageRank Sculpting Isn’t What It Used To Be (or What’s Going on with Nofollow?)
There’s been a lot of talk of late about PageRank sculpting as it relates to nofollow tags. Why? Because the way PageRank works changed just over a year ago and now they’re telling us.
PageRank has always flowed like this to pages from links that are not nofollowed (affectionately known as dofollow).
When you add a nofollow tag to a link, you stop PageRank from flowing. This result remains unchanged; but now, you’re not adding any benefit to the other (dofollow) links on the page. They still pass the same percentage of PageRank, as if all the links were dofollow:
What does this mean? Nofollow isn’t as strong as it once was. You can’t use it to PageRank sculpt.
Should you stop nofollowing? No, I don’t think so. To those pages like your Search page, Contact page, and perhaps Privacy Policy, I think nofollows are still a great idea. They are pages where you wouldn’t necessarily need PageRank to flow.
There’s a lesson to learn here. If you don’t trust a website enough (or just don’t want to pass the PageRank) to dofollow a link, you probably shouldn’t be linking in the first place.
The right way to PageRank sculpt? An intuitive site architecture – for both searchers and search engines.
Nicki Hicks
Sculpting is an art
Tags: dofollow, nofollow, PageRank sculpting
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 am
There are certainly other conditions where you might not trust the downstream website and you’re not exercising direct control over the linking such as links in blog posts. If you don’t allow any links in blog comments, you cripple the value of the blog.
Vern
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Vern,
Well said.
I’ve even heard of bloggers offering dofollow links in their comment section in order to gain better, more thoughtful comments. It may increase comment approving time, but well worth it for the commenter!
July 20th, 2009 at 2:56 am
Commenting in Do follow blogs make back links. It helps to improve page rank of the website. Thanks for the nice post!