CNN's SEO Technique

[dailypress]

I did a View Source on CNN's internal page and noticed they have not included a "NOFOLLOW" tag to the links under MOST POPULAR ON CNN.

How does Google view pages having links to not necessarily the most related pages but the most view page?

Am I missing something?

[MLHmptn]

PR10...Any questions?!

[robzilla]

You seem to be missing the fact that websites are built primarily for users, not search engines, and those users probably want to see the most popular stories. It is, therefore, not really an "SEO technique," but "giving the users what they want." How Google "views" those links is, in this case, largely irrelevant, and slapping a nofollow attribute on them would be pointless, especially (but not exclusively) in light of "recent" developments [webmasterworld.com]. On the contrary, CNN probably benefits from having that list of popular stories on so many pages, as it gives those stories, most of which are probably highly sought after, a bit of a boost.

[dailypress]

PR10...Any questions?!

I never questioned the amount of backlinks CNN has.

thanks robzilla for the link and comment. I'd been struggling on how to add nofollow tags to the "most popular links" module i installed on my site.

MATT CUTTs:http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Q: Why did Google change how it counts these links?
A: For one thing, some crawl/indexing/quality folks noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).