Over recent weeks, the SEO community has been commenting furiously at Matt Cutts’ revelations on the relationship between nofollow attributes and PageRank sculpting with regard to SEO strategy. At the SMX conference, Cutts proclaimed the notion that sculpting internal link structure using the rel=nofollow attribute causes PageRank to evaporate.
To illustrate this principle, in Matt’s blog, he uses the example of a page with 10 ‘PageRank points”, and 10 outgoing links, with 5 of these nofollowed. Originally the 5 followed links would receive 2 points each. This has now changed, Cutts explains “More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the 5 links without nofollow would flow 1 point of PageRank each.”
The upshot of this has meant widespread confusion, with an entire community of professionals divided on what to make of this news. We see posts from SEOs explaining frantic removal of nofollow attributes in fear of frittering away PageRank, and others expressing outright disagreement with this principle.
With Cutts quoted the same week as saying “You should only use a nofollow if you don’t want a page indexed at all” It is easy to see why many SEO’s, especially those who have undergone complex & time consuming nofollow strategies, are quick to dismiss this principle. But instead of proclaiming these ideas as untrue, we should take a step back and examine why Matt Cutts has taken this chance to illustrate nofollow as part of an internal linking strategy.
I think it’s safe to assume that what Matt Cutts is saying has been somewhat misinterpreted by many within the SEO community. After all, in his webmaster central video, Cutts clearly states that prioritising PageRank to areas of your website which are more valuable, (those which drive revenue for example) is an obvious strategy, and is certainly not unethical as many best practice advocates would claim. After all… we are all free to create the link architecture on our sites as we please.
Matt Cutts (and Google’s for that matter) advice will always centre on creating great content to attract links, and letting these links determine the priority areas of your site. In my opinion, avoiding the assumption that site structure and nofollow attributes are synonymous in achieving this is the message.
PageRank sculpting is very much an important aspect of SEO, however, solely basing your strategy to achieve a good structure on implementation of nofollow attributes is not the way forward. PageRank sculpting should centre on specifying priority areas of your site incorporating best practice structural design and usability, and more so avoiding spending huge amounts of time rolling out a complex nofollow strategy…. as many have in the past.
Tags: natural search, Nick Moores
I *think* I know the answer, but what would you suggest as the method to manage linkjuice flow to/around contact/terms/privacy pages?
I can’t help but notice that you are nofollowing nine internal links on this page ( excluding the one that you’ll probably use for my URL above)
Hi Bob,
One solution to manage linkflow juice would be to consolidate all those lower order pages like privacy and terms & conditions onto one single page. SEOmoz summed this up well on a recent blog post, which is worth reading >> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting.
It would be interesting to hear what solution you had in mind, if it’s different to the consolidating pages solution.
Thanks, Chris
I think that was the response I was expecting - although I figure you still need to be careful in not having three links to three different fragments - the link would need consolidating as well as the page (which isn’t made clear (at least to me) in the seomoz article).
Attentive to the recent effort put into this redesign / new site, I will watch closely to see your changes in response to this.
Chris, are you sure there is any real benifit in linking to pages such as terms and conditions. After all, as most of the information on terms and conditions etc is standardised, why would you wish to link to it? Regardless of pagerank flow?
Hi Ben,
That’s a fair point and I guess it’s dependant on the type of site and what is included in the terms and conditions, which should decide it’s importance. If you are an ecommerce site for example then it’s a legal requirement to clearly display your website terms and conditions under the ecommerce directive (http://www.ekmpowershop.com/support/articles/legalrequirementsforecommerce.asp). However, you could you noindex/disallow it if you didn’t want it to appear in the search results.
Thanks, Chris