tedster - 2:47 pm on Aug 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

Thanks to Rand over at SEOmoz. He managed to tweeze out some precise detail from Matt Cutts about the rel="nofollow" atttribute.

Matt Cutts: "The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level." [seomoz.org...]

I've been quite resistive about the use of nofollow on internal links. Just seemed wrong to me. But Matt says it's OK, so who am I to contradict?

And how about not using nofollow links even for discovery! Totally dropped from the link graph - that one surprised me.