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.
