rel=nofollow is enough?

[onetry]

I wonder if adding rel=nofollow is enough to avoid google to assign less PR power to my page if there are 100+ links on it.

Regards.

[tedster]

The rel="nofollow" attribute in an anchor tag tells Google not to vote any PR to that link. But the PR of the original page does not automatically change because of that action.

If there are other links on the page, such as links to other pages on your site, where you do not include the rel="nofollow" attribute, then those links will recieve a bigger vote and this "should" circulate more PR to those pages. If those pages have a link back to the original page, then their increased PR can be circulated back and this may increase the PR of the original page.

This is the theory, based on the original PageRank paper. Check out our PageRank FAQ [webmasterworld.com] thread for more in depth discussion. It's in the "Hot Topics" area, which is always pinned to the top of the Google Search forum's index page.

Matt Cutts has recently announced that Google modified the way links are weighted - and the recent PR Update has held lots of surprises, mostly in the area of lower PR than expected. It may not even be completed, and it may not even be accurate - Google hasn't said.

So I don't think anyone can be 100% sure that things right now are working the precise way that pure theory predicts. My best guess is that some increase still circulates thorugh internal links, but it may be dampened a bit.

There were sites that had top rankings almost exclusively from their own internal PR. I don't think that is a healthy situation in Google's view -- they really want PR to be a measure of how OTHERS value the site. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is a new factor involved for intenral PR circulation. Again, this is still speculation on my part.

[Halfdeck]

There were sites that had top rankings almost exclusively from their own internal PR. I don't think that is a healthy situation in Google's view

I seen that happen with my own site but Google's PR based supplemental index is a countermeasure to that syndrome IMO.

For example, say you have a 100,000 page site with very weak IBLs. The low PageRank from those IBLs get split into 100,000 pieces. Ideally, you get 100,000 pages indexed, have all their PageRank flowing to the home page or whatever page you want to rank. But because most of those 100,000 pages have very little PageRank, they get deindexed from the main index, showing only as supplemental results. Since those low PageRank pages don't flow PageRank (they're not in the main index, so how can they?), you have less PageRank and anchor text pointing to the home page.

Now if you have enough authority to get 100,000 pages indexed, then yes, internal PageRank/anchor text will work in your favor.

[soapystar]

i dont think the amount of weight a link carries has only been modified only in this update for high link pages. I noted way back that the more links on a page then the less pr each extra link passed on. So each link on a 10 link page might carry 1/10 of the total pr less damping, but say 50 links on a page then each link carried way LESS than 1/50th the pr less damping. I also believe the links further down the page, or placed in certain ways, carried an additional damping factor.