PageRank Sculpting Isn’t What It Used To Be (or What’s Going on with Nofollow?)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009There’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.