Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Could you say that the introduction of the nofollow attribute has allowed Google to implement more strict borders for over optimisation? Now we can nofollow "home" links without removing them as a user feature and Google has left us no excuse to have over optimised sites!
Nofollow is a blessing and a curse!
[edited by: tedster at 9:27 am (utc) on Dec. 10, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
Wordpress.com uses rel=nofollow for internal links. BLOGGER.COM uses rel=nofollow.
Hmmm, both of them are Blogging Platforms with UGC. They both fit the profile of
rel="nofollow"
What matters the most is to have a great site and to make sure that people know about it, but, once you have a certain amount of PageRank, these tools let you choose how to develop PageRank amongst your pages.
This to me sounds like a direct confirmation that nofollow can be used to influence the flow of PR through your site? Is matt lying to us?
Right, all you who say it isnt in Gs interest to penalise SEO. You're 100% wrong.
Anyone who has followed Googles recent U-turn on SEO practices will know that Google does not have any problem with ethical, white hat SEOs and actually has guidelines to advise people on what to look for when hiring an SEO.
Hmmm, both of them are Blogging Platforms with UGC. They both fit the profile of rel="nofollow" usage. They are prime candidates for its use and what it was intended for.
lol, i'm gonna entertain this argument cause its you, pageone. ;)
But they are using them on their OWN internal links.
Not outside COMMENT links.
They are evil spammers and one day when Google slaps the crap out of everyone using rel=nofollow for internal links -
They will go down in flames, yes?
If you truly believe that (which i'm pretty sure you don't) then I suggest you keep an eye on Blogger's (especially) use of internal rel=nofollow.
If they suddenly remove them, you know ahead of time of the impending DOOOOM that's coming for the rest of the web.
Anyone who has followed Googles recent U-turn on SEO practices will know that Google does not have any problem with ethical, white hat SEOs and actually has guidelines to advise people on what to look for when hiring an SEO.
Also, since you bring it up
[google.com...]
Page 18 and 19 are about nofollow, and using it to stop sites benefitting from your reputation, or your site being associated with theirs. Its the trust thing again.
"What matters the most is to have a great site and to make sure that people know about it, but, once you have a certain amount of PageRank, these tools let you choose how to develop PageRank amongst your pages. " can equally be read as stopping boiler-plate pages outranking content.
[edited by: Shaddows at 12:03 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2008]
They are evil spammers and one day when Google slaps the crap out of everyone using rel=nofollow for internal links - They will go down in flames, yes?
Nah, only those who got caught doing something else after the nofollow raised a flag. ;)
I personally feel it is a signal and it goes both ways. I'm not as skeptical as I once was but I'm still not convinced. < Ya, I was telling someone earlier today that I may not be the brightest bulb but I'll surely be the longest burning one. :)
I respect Matt Cutts and his position at Google. I'm not into this whole Cuttlett thing so I'm not that quick to jump on board with everything stated at the public level. I will agree that Google have become a little more friendlier toward SEO in general but, have you noticed that they are now becoming a Q&A for all of the basics? Google have been slowly refining their online documentation that I am now recommending that all new SEOs spend the time and read the Google Webmaster Guidelines and associated documents along with the W3 of course. I've even found myself over there a bit more lately as they have been making quite a few updates that I was not aware of. I usually wait to see them hit the front page of WebmasterWorld but I'm finding a few that never even made it to discussion. :)
How do Yahoo! and Live handle
rel="nofollow"
Page 18 and 19 are about nofollow, and using it to stop sites benefitting from your reputation, or your site being associated with theirs. Its the trust thing again.
Well if you sincerely believe it's about "trust".
(something i argued ad infinitum with EFV and has yet to be proven otherwise since it first came out)
then I wouldn't use it.
(or I would keep a close eye on sites that use it and their rankings)
My tests have always said different, even when it was ONLY for "comment spam".
Add to that, the most popular, most "trusted" sites on the Net, are using it now as well.
I'm not worried about it at all.
I've been using it for 2+ years and the ALGO has never indicated rel=nofollow had anything to do with trust
or whether "I like my own pages or not"
Nah, only those who got caught doing something else after the nofollow raised a flag. ;)
If rel=nofollow is the first thing "raising flags" for SEO'ed sites, then Goog is denser than we could possibly imagine.
Just pointing out to others that want to take Google's proclamations as gospel when it supports their position, and ignore it when it doesn't.
Reasonably sure it isn't about trust. Am interested (at "NoFollow 101" level) whether nofollowed links are removed from the PR distribution calc or included but 'waste' PR.
I have much more interesting questions as well, but maybe for another time
@P1R- ye, but Google is almost entirely focussed on the user experience. No tidbits on gaming the system.
Of course in SEO, like poker, you can be a winning player just by doing the basics, because so many people are either clueless (not people here) or do stupid things trying to be too clever by half.
And like poker- trying to emulate moves you see the pro's do, well, you better know what your doing.
@whitnight
Never said it did :)Just pointing out to others that want to take Google's proclamations as gospel when it supports their position, and ignore it when it doesn't.
If you have three majors in control and all three handle the attribute a bit differently, how do you deal with that?
The others are whales for the taking. Or is it donks?
Yea donks. Not enough traffic to be whales =P
Until Google says differently (or at least coherently) all sculpting does is not benefit things. It can't benefit things.
But it DOES benefit things. If nofollows worked like Google say they do then third teir PR sculpting would not work: But it does. So either Google are lying; keeping it simple for the layman by talking about "trust" or they have realised the extra benefits of it and have changed how they handle it's use.
What happens when an external resource links to the destination page?
Don't confuse apples and oranges here.
Using nofollow on one's own internal links is NOT a tool for keeping pages out of the index so that's not what anyone should expect. It's just a method for funnelling PR so that some pages get a bigger share of one's existing PR than they might otherwise. Using rel=nofollow on a link will not keep the page being linked to out of the index if Google discovers the page in other ways.
If you want a page to stay completely out of the index, use <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> or <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> on that page. I do the former on hundreds of pages and it works just fine.
How would that work with outbound links on, say, blogs? It looks like what you're saying is that when you have a blog post with 20 comments, you lose PR to links within those comments, but the spammers don't actually acquire any PR - i.e. PR dies. That doesn't make any sense to me.
Why not?The opposite makes no sense. Adding more links to a page obviously should impact the other links on a page. None of this, and the random walk idea, makes any sense otherwise.
Any link with the rel="nofollow" attribute will not be used to calculate PageRank or determine the relevancy of your pages for a user query.Source: Google Help: Comment spam [google.com]
Someone please report these SEOs for trying to game the SERPs.
YouTube uses nofollow on video links all over the place.
UGC. They most definitely fit the profile for
rel="nofollow"Even Yahoo uses it on internal links once you get into some of the portal category pages.
Internal links? Like, on site internal links? Outside of UGC? That's their SEO reading WebmasterWorld and experimenting. :)
He's not likely lying, though he's always been an ESL candidate.
You just are refusing to believe what he says. You CAN influence the passing of PR through a site... by denying PR to some pages. But evidence suggests you can't increase PR to a link via this sculpting, which is what a lot of folks wish they could do.
There can be some sensible uses of the granular nofollow, but for the most part webmasters would improve their overal PR by focusing on "noindex,follow" meta tags, which will keep duplicates and crap pages out of the index, but recycle the PR of those pages rather than discard it.
Outside of UGC? That's their SEO reading WebmasterWorld and experimenting.
[edited by: Shaddows at 12:24 am (utc) on Dec. 13, 2008]
I've been looking for a reference and it's elduing me so far, but I remember it quite clearly. I've been wondering if Google still applies their own internal "nofollow" in some cases even if it's not in the source code. That could be playing into the gray bar disease, for instance, where a page seems to act as if all its backlinks are rel-"nofollow" even when they're not. My guess is that they've continued on with this.
I'm pretty sure these are online somewhere, not just comments he made in person. I'm hoping someone has better bookmarks than I do ;)
But then again, I don't devote much RAM to Goog comments :)
So maybe it's on his blog somewhere or one of the other well-known SEO sites that he visits.
I would be very interested to learn more about this internal tag, this is the first I have heard of it and it sounds intriguing!
From what I remember, tedster pretty much summed up the entire conversation about it.
I don't recall anything else that was said which was noteworthy about their "internal tag".
If you happen to cut off and strand some articles completely and they fall from the serps they can be copied and used on other sites and the thief won't get a duplicate penalty.
I vote to re-inforce that "nofollow is dangerous goods in the minor leagues" warning on this thread. Nofollow is an excellent tool useable if you can't solve your internal pagerank flow requirements with good old fashioned site structure implementation.
Yahoo Directory gray barred? [webmasterworld.com] and here again [webmasterworld.com] in the same thread.
He mentions internal systems (plural), so that kind of settles it; regardless of what those systems are, we'll never know.
[edited by: Marcia at 5:59 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2008]
[edited by: Marcia at 10:39 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2008]
(emphasis mine)
Matt's precise words were:...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...
Ok, now we can take off the tin foil hats, yes?
Nice to see we ARE at the higher octave!
Hopefully when we discuss this 2 years from now, we'll be talking about the BEST way to sculpt, instead of if sculpting works.
(a person can dream, can't they?)
I generally go down the road of nofollowing pretty much any link that doesn't pass relevant anchor text value (including images) this includes links called "home".
I am a big believer that link juice should pass up the directory structure as well as down. so I tend to create dead end pages on the third tier (nofollows on most internal links) by heavy use of nofollow and pass juice back up through some kind of user navigation (breadcrumb etc.) This seems to create natural hotspots in the site, where sections with the most third tier content end up getting the most link juice from their children. Instead of the juice being spread evenly across the site, the link juice matches the relative onsite value of a section.
What are other peoples techniques/observations?
so i look at that quite often, and try and demote individual pages that appear too high up, by trying to shift some of their page rank onto other pages by nofollowing some of their links.
i'm guessing that if you do a search like that then the pages are listed in terms of page rank.
I don't see that as true. It's easy enough to check for this on a site that has an internal page with lots of external backlinks. And even beyond that kind of example, I often see deeper pages with higher PR than top level pages and they still don't migrate to the top of the site: results.
If there is an intentional order to site: results, I'd say it has more to do with site architecture than PageRank - the kinds of metrics Google uses to choose Sitelinks.
