Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Matt Cutts mentioned the change at SMX Advanced last night. Excellent summary in Search Engine Roundtable [seroundtable.com] post.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of howling over this change.
So PR sculpting still will help to keep certain pages out of the rankings, but it no longer helps to boost other pages - and that was one motive for webmasters who used the technique on internal links.
The rel="nofollow" attribute... implemented jointly by the major engines... was initially intended to block PageRank credit from blog comments. Its use was expanded by Google to blog transmission of PR credit from paid links.
Questions arose about whether it might be used to "sculpt" PageRank flow within a site. With PageRank sculpting, you could block PR transmission to unimportant pages, and channel the rest to pages you deemed important.
Prior to rel="nofollow", if you had 10 outbound links from a page, each of those links transmitted 10% of your outgoing PageRank. There was considerable discussion here on WebmasterWorld, among other places, about whether "nofollowing" some of those links would increase the amount of PR sent to the remaining pages....
Learning About PR Sculpting: internal links with rel=nofollow
[webmasterworld.com...]
The consensus ultimately was yes... if you nofollowed half of those 10 links, eg, the remaining 5 would now each transmit 20% of the PR credit available from the page... and you'd be giving extra credit to those pages that weren't nofollowed. This consensus was confirmed publicly by Google.
The announced change now means that the pages that aren't nofollowed will no longer get the extra linking credit. That credit will now be divided evenly among all links, but nofollowed links will still be blocked from crawling.
Yes... there will be lots of howling and even more re-sculpting for many.
The few large sites I watch or work on haven't seen any changes in rankings or traffic. I wouldn't just assume this is correct and make changes without some good tests first.
Might be time to move to non-followed java links for some of this functionality (when it can't be accomplished in robots.txt files).
Are we now going to see webmasters reverting to many of the older, less "honest", techniques to keep unwanted pages from sucking unnecessary link juice from their money pages?
Similarly, Google also indexes some types of form navigation, they establish a "virtual link" on their web map and also send PR and link juice.
The most future-proof approach I see is processing through a server-side script and keeping the spiders from crawling that script. There's an extreme amount of cleverness being attempted by Google and other search engines these days.
Has anyone seen rankings on sites using sculpting change?The few large sites I watch or work on haven't seen any changes in rankings or traffic. I wouldn't just assume this is correct and make changes without some good tests first.
Excellent question. Matt Cutts had in fact several times hinted that PR sculpting isn't all it's cracked up to be.
If it turns out that there aren't many changes in large sculpted sites, then some classic concepts of "link love" distribution (as distinct from just PageRank distribution) may need re-examination.
A biggie. I'll be hawking MC's blog for a post on this.
Does this also mean that putting the nofollow tag on outgoing links to other sites won't increase the total PR that is kept within the site?
I'd rephrase "kept within the site" as "reserved for use" within the site, because the "nofollow" would prevent the PR from being transmitted, but I think the answer should be yes.
Wikipedia would be an interesting site to watch in this regard, as many of its pages have a very large number of nofollowed links. Or, it may be so far above the competition anyway that this change is not going to affect it.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:18 pm (utc) on June 3, 2009]
One common need in sculpting is to keep certain "utility pages" from soaking up link juice, since they aren't much good in the search results. You know the ones - "log-in", "my account", "shipping rates", "privacy" and all that.
Most sites want to show those options on every page, for their user's convenience. But that means those pages get a lot of internal link connectivity - they easily can end up with very high PR. So I often create a single page containing all those utility links and display that URL through an iframe. Now there's only one URL with links to those utility pages.
I guess that's the end of links in blog comments?
I went with the latter and am happy I did now...
Edit: I just saw tedster's comment above, made while I was typing. I guess the answer to my question is "yes".
[edited by: gsmith at 11:17 pm (utc) on June 3, 2009]
Most sites want to show those options on every page, for their user's convenience. But that means those pages get a lot of internal link connectivity - they easily can end up with very high PR. So I often create a single page containing all those utility links and display that URL through an iframe. Now there's only one URL with links to those utility pages.
Exactly. With my sites, I use ASP or PHP scripting (include files) for footers, headers, etc. for showing those utility links.
Question: So should we expect a huge drop in PR for internal pages after Google's next PR update?
The more comments with links that a blog article gets, the less PR will be sent through any of the do-followed links on the page.
On a sidenote: Google announcing something relatively important, even controversial, in such an obscure and confusing way seems a bit awkward to me, and not yet entirely believable either. Not very Googley, to say the least. Then again, if this turns out to be true, perhaps they've bowled us a googly?
googly \googly\ n. (Cricket) a cricket ball bowled as if to break one way that actually breaks in the opposite way. (definition [define.com])
How very relevant ;-)
All I can think of, is that maybe there are two PR calculations going on... one for links within the site and one for outgoing links to other domains (actually, maybe three, if links to sub-domains of the same domain are also involved).
Is this already live, or is it something that is 'coming soon'? Or are there several steps, and one or more has been done, with more to follow?
Where? Show one place. Never once did they confirm this idea. Worst webmaster FUD in history.
If the misuse of "nofollow" were to become a problem, then Google could simply adapt and refine its policy to deal with it.
Never once did they confirm this idea.
Maybe not explicitly - but certainly by implication, with statements such as "you might not want to waste PageRank on such pages."
Whatever the case, I'd say Matt has now publicly confirmed that things "used to work" that way, by announcing that they "no longer" work that way.
And no, he never implied what you are saying he did imply. To the contrary see the above link with his quote where he says the direct opposite. That nofollow was the granular eqyuivalent of a "link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out". That tactic discards pagerank. What he says now is the exact same as he said then.
The challenge will be to add more navigation links etc. without crossing the threshold that makes Google dismiss pages for being "too similar".
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to beef up my internal cross-linking.
my emphasis added...
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.
Is this still the case, or are they now used for discovery?
In my first post in this thread, I'd said... "...but nofollowed links will still be blocked from crawling," which may have been an overstatement in any case.
Also, what have Yahoo! and Bing said regarding this? Remember, there were three of them that supported this attribute, not only Google. So, what is happening with the other two?
It's corporate PR at it's best.
HI BING!
Seems BING actually has G scared.
Anyone who's been following MC lately should see that BING has Google somewhat worried.
Nofollow?
Sound and fury...much ado about nothing.
bada BING, bada boom.
------------
In case this IS real.
lol who cares about PR sculpting? (people will find a way to do this anyways),
it will DESTROY blogs.
Talk about Google-bowling a page.
So I'm back to my earlier conclusion... (lol, nice verifying synchronicity, as the newest BING commercial comes on while writing this).
This is MC trying to take focus away from BING!..
don't be mislead by such Google FUD nonsense.
oops, too late.
[edited by: whitenight at 1:26 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
