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.
wikipedia...
Wiki's a horrible site to use as a case study.
Follow the more popular social networks, Yelp, etc, to see how their rankings do, for confirmation.
lol, again assuming one even believes this.
With my sites, I use ASP or PHP scripting (include files) for footers, headers, etc. for showing those utility links.
This is not the same thing as a sculpting technique. The final source code that the server generates still includes all the links, and that's what the spider gets.
Include files can help simplify your maintentance, but the search engines still have no idea how your server generated the final page source.
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I agree with pageoneresults, I'd like to see something official from Google on this, and I will not just rely on second hand reports from SMXa. In fact, I'll still test whaever Google says is the case before I go with it.
But all the reports I've seen from SMXa do agree that Matt announced this real change in scoring:
If a page has ten links and one is nofollowed, in the past each of the remaining links voted 1/9 of the available PR. With this change, their vote power stays at 1/10 the available PR.
And if this approach is what goes into production, then Google had better differentiate between internal and external linking situations, or as whitenight says, we've got a new Google-bowling alley. Every nofollowed link on a UGC page will leach away some PR from any dofollowed links on the page.
Man, I wish they had announced this just 45 days ago, I wasted 2 weeks planning out improvements and applying them...
(you didn't just hear me use the lords name in vain, I promise)
And if this approach is what goes into production, then Google had better differentiate between internal and external linking situations
Upon further consideration, I hope Google IS implementing this.
I can't wait the see their results cluttered with About Us and Privacy pages.
Oh sure, it's a 3 month bump to Adwords, but a lifetime lost of market share.
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Any hardcore geeks know IF, and WHERE, G is getting the computing power to even run such extra calculations?
What a waste of their investors profits to be spending time trying to "police" something that will be worked around very quickly anyways...
what effect will yanking nofollow sitewide have on a 4 year old site
It's going to depend on several things:
1. What Google really does (see the above mentions of the potential for FUD)
2. How widely you appled the rel="nofollow" attribute. Most likely you will only see any ranking gains you got from this approach revert to what they used to be 45 days ago. The challenges might come on UGC pages that have built up more links in the meantime.
Removing rel="nofollow" attributes might have some very strange effects for websites that deployed more intensive sculpting, such as selectively no-following some main navigation links on some pages, or trying to drive PageRank deeper into paginated results pages.
Any advice?
Let's assume your site has a privacy policy, a terms of use policy, a twitter account, an RSS link and maybe a contact link... very reasonable.
BEFORE
Placing nofollow on these links eliminated them from the calculation completely, a good thing.
after
Now all 5 of those links drain the value of all other links on the page. If I nofollow them they receive nothing BUT just because they are there the other links have less to work with.
See the problem here? Less is now more since this change is live.
As a webmaster I'm going to axe my RSS and twitter links, I'm going to combine my terms and privacy policy into one very long page and the contact link will get converted into an email address image without a link.
HOW does this help visitors? It really doesn't and as you know ranking on page 2 of search engines means no traffic so when you find yourself there the links have to go else nobody sees your pages.
My categories are all nofollow from every page but the index and my traffic is good. Do I go and pull the nofollow now, creating some 30,000 new internal links?
huh?
As a webmaster I'm going to axe my RSS and twitter links, I'm going to combine my terms and privacy policy into one very long page and the contact link will get converted into an email address image without a link.HOW does this help visitors?
huh? you just said your traffic was good.
We don't even KNOW yet what's going on with this issue, and you're already changing everything around cause of a RUMOR?
Hold on, tiger! Let's see if this is REAL first, then you can go change your entire site structure, right?
It's not like they are banning sites that use it (again IF this is even true)
Time to remove nofollow links
Not a good idea, just have a few and not many. If you don't link out to other authority sites your site holds less authority. Google still sees the link even if it's nofollow.
I wonder if Cutts and Google are above saying something is so just to keep people from manipulating pagerank, even if it is not true, as a way of keeping people from cheating? I guess we will never really know.
[edited by: MrHard at 4:12 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
it was something knowledgeable webmasters were able to use as a tool
Most web sites have all these pages that are a waste in terms of Google PR, so there is some equality in that regards, when only some very knowledgeable webmasters can use a few tricks to avoid this natural dilution, I think it's rather unfair, and should not be used as a sign for the quality of the site. It's up to Google to adapt their algorithm, factor in the reality of wasted PR, and realize what pages are important or not in a web site, whatever the PR distribution.
The pages could help other similar pages without category links weighing in, if the rumors are true then this method of declaring importance is lost and pages will need to have fewer links on them, perhaps even removal of any similar links feature, to keep them ranked?
Nofollow didn't harm the naive and as a tool it allowed you to add more links and features to a site without being penalized. If the rumor is true, as a webmaster you have to keep in the back of your mind that if you add loads of links the article may very well no longer rank well.
Less is more, if the rumors are true. Hope that was more clear.
edit: even more simple - Matt Cutts says in his video to consider carefully which pages you link to so that your money pages do well in the rankings. If that's how it works the logic can be applied to all pages. Less links per page = better results for the pages receiving links?.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 4:24 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
...to keep them ranked?
Remember, that nofollow was just an easier way to sculpt PR (since it was less coding). Advanced SEOs were doing it well before nofollow was a glimmer in web2.0's eyes.
So you just have to pull out your trusted PR sculpting program and employ the same techniques.
It may take a little more coding but it's not going to deter anyone who serious about doing it effectively.
It may actually help the many webmasters who were using PR sculpting nofollow incorrectly to begin with.
In other words will it help (slightly) sites that were never SEO'ed?
[edited by: AnkitMaheshwari at 4:38 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
Something's wrong here.
Forums and blogs with a lot of comments now get hardest hit?
I'll admit I have a suspicion that Google would prefer to be the sole decider on a links merit, and if true this change would reduce the use of nofollow, but Google doesn't know our sites or our goals as well as we do.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 5:26 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
Nofollow, rather than sculpting pagerank, will, if this rumor is true, reduce internal pagerank. Every nofollow link used on one's site will serve no other purpose than to reduce the total aggregate pagerank within the site.
Here's an example:
Regular Linking:
Home Page PR: 5 (two internal links below)
Linked Page One PR: 4
Linked Page Two PR: 4
Total Site PR: 13
Nofollow Linking:
Home Page PR: 5
Linked Page One PR: 4
Nofollowed Page Two PR: 0
Total Site PR: 9
If this rumor's true, then nofollow for internal links will *disappear* and the only way to sculpt PR will be by amount of links only.
[edited by: Critter at 5:34 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
I guess that's the end of links in blog comments?
Not only blog comments, all user generated content - forums, reviews, etc. What a change ... Web 2.0 has been hit ..
Note, however that the problem can be alleviated by a massive internal interlinking. Like if you have a hundred of internal links on a page, then the overall impact of a few user inserted nofollow links will be negligible.
Another huge impact in my view is that advertisements now suck the linking juice! Even if you use "nofollow" tag with all banners as per google guidelines. Less ads, more PR on the site. Need to use JS ad insertion from now on ...
#1 - Matt Cutts's new definition of pagerank sculpting is the same as internal link structure.
#2 - It's widely known that not all links are valued the same, links within content seem to rank highest.
#3 - Matt Cutts, in front of a knowledgeable webmaster audience, suggests pagerank sculpting doesn't work how top SEO's believe it does. Others present at the conference were left with the impression that a nofollow on an internal link is a pure loss of pagerank.
#4 - Matt Cutts still talks about "not wasting" pagerank on login pages (example) but that doesn't make sense when you consider that pagerank is wasted the second you put a login link on your page, nofollow or not. This in turn suggests it's not lost at all.
#5 - Matt Cutts's speech apparently created a consensus that nofollow doesn't belong on your website at all unless it's to block user generated links. This would mean that nofollow is only useful as a spam deterrent.
#6 - Other search engines ignore the tag completely.
My final thought on the issue, we're losing a valuable tool.
Besides an attempt to sculpt pagerank to all the right places I used nofollow to recommend several sites to people who visit my site. In light of the fact that nofollow may actually just kill rank instead of make it flow elsewhere i'm considering removing the links and replacing them with images/logos. Why? Because the more sites I recommend via link the harder it is for my pages to rank well... and that's a shame.
edit: scratch that last sentence, I know of directory pages holding PR5 with no incoming outside links and they have several hundred links on the same page. These types of pages appear to be treated much the same way as category pages. Talk about mixed messages...
[edited by: JS_Harris at 8:45 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
1) The timing is stunning. Need an idea to steal the SEO news-cycle? BING!
2) If true, this new policy will have a dramatic influence on the future development of the internet. And I for one am glad.
Here's the thing. I really, really hate the way NF is deployed by the more selfish webmasters. I bang on about it every now and again- how the future web would be a group of islands, with every site hoarding PR and not pushing it to other linked pages. I have asked the question on these boards as to how G would cope if major web publishing packages and CMS started tagging every OBL with nofollow? How w1ould the G algo cope?
FUD or not, this announcement may halt the slow but steady march to OBL NF proliferation. Whats the point of adding an NF to an OBL when you still lose the PR? Before, it was possible to add value for your visitor, but not 'pay' for that value-add by passing PR (or anchor text value) to the referenced page.
For all non-UGC sites, I really hope this is true.
For UGC, this is horrible. The more successful you are (the more UGC you have), the more OBLs you are likely to have, the LESS equity you preserve for internal links.
I would imagine UGC sites, like Ecom, will have to get an alorithmic boost to rank along side their Info rivals. In fact, it is worth remembering that G does have a mechanism for "normalising" results so that Ecom sites can gain parity with Info sites, even with substantially less links, and no prospect of .gov or .edu endorsements.
Finally, the natural result of this policy announcement will be to remove outbounds from sites completely. Expect a algo rebalancing so that outbounds to relevant sites give contextual ranking boosts (query-dependant).
[edited by: Shaddows at 9:01 am (utc) on June 4, 2009]
As a webmaster I'm going to axe my RSS and twitter links, I'm going to combine my terms and privacy policy into one very long page and the contact link will get converted into an email address image without a link.
I have always had those links in an iframe, with that iframe content being generated from an external JS file.Never needed nofollow, and never seen Google poke around in the JS file. It's obfuscated and chunked anyway so there's nothing in there to grok as a URL.
I don't understand how this change is going to benefit them in improving the search results?
Easy- for two main reasons
1) It eliminates one form of arcane maniplation, thus levelling the playing field.
2) It preserves the basis of their algo by disincentivising the proliferation of nofollow OBLs
That's their theory. The reality is
1) Advanced SEOs will replace this arcane technique for another one (such as g1smd's above)
2) It disincentives OBLs entirely.
I haven't tracked YouTube urls in the search results closely enough to know whether this makes real sense or not. But if anyone does such tracking, it might be a good place to look for the effects of this change in scoring.
I believe that the only outgoing links that should be allowed to pass pagerank should be paid for links - ie the webmaster gets a benefit, all other links - before this change of course, should have been nofollowed.
Er, right.
So, how would you imagine you yourself acheived any rankings? No one is linking to you. No one is linking to anyone.
By what criteria do you rank (i.e compare) two sites? No relevancy info, no backlink power.
PR would be meaningless. At which point, why hoard it?
No it doesn't. It suggests exactly what he's always always always said. If you don't want pagerank to go to a page, you can stop it from going there. 'Prevent' and 'don't send' are how he has always described its use.
