Nofollow-let them or take them out?

[Mach2]

Hi fellows!

I´d like a specific opinion of you.

I´m more a reader than a writer here, but now I´d like to know your opinion about nofollow. I manage a website where there are many nofollows applyied to some internal links, made to Page Rank sculpting atempt.

Now, with the new nofollow directives by Google, what do you recomend? Take away all of them or leave them as they are?

Thanks in advance!

Marc

[Mach2]

But Slinger,

Google had a major update on its PR from a month to here... who can garantee that this PR update of your websites where not a coincidence with your rel=nofollow strategy? ;)

Bye!

[Shaddows]

Also, what happened to you traffic and rankings. I really couldn't care less if my PR went up, if the stuff that matters went wrong.

[Trevor]

I think everyone does not really understand the true meaning of the rel=nofollow

This is what it means...

rel=nofollow does NOT mean that the search engine won't follow the link to your site and count it as a back link...

What rel=nofollow means is that you WON'T get the PR rank benefit from the site you are placing your link on, that's it that's all.

Each link you get, you want it coming from a relevant site, if you have no rel=nofollow links to your site, this type of linking will not look natural at all.

You want your link building to look as natural as you can.

Hope this helps people.

[honestman]

There is another use of rel-"nofollow" which seems problematic. Google and others recommend it to indicate that the site you are linking to is a paying link. If your use rel="nofollow" for such links to external sites--as do I--will having many such legit customers look "unnatural?" I have not seen evidence of this thus far, but I am not clear on how this is interpreted, after all, having many customers is normally a good sign for an authority site when combined with or without non-paying customers.

[FranticFish]

rel=nofollow does NOT mean that the search engine won't follow the link to your site and count it as a back link...

What rel=nofollow means is that you WON'T get the PR rank benefit from the site you are placing your link on, that's it that's all.

Not according to Google.

"How does Google handle nofollowed links?

We don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web."

taken from [google.com...]

[Trevor]

FranticFish, I am not to sure how old that information is that you posted but, I have articles from articlebase I believe and they are no-follow, but in my Google webmaster tools section under links pointing to my site, Google has them listed.

[martinibuster]

but in my Google webmaster tools section under links pointing to my site, Google has them listed.

It feels as if this has been discussed in the link dev forum at least a hundred times in the past year. It seems as if this comes up at least once a week. There is a huge misunderstanding about this. So here we go... again. ;) I'm going to have to put a sticky about this so we stop repeating this answer over and over again.

Google has always shown samples. Even the WMT tool results are only samples. That means it shows links that count for ranking and links that do not count for ranking. This has been the case since Google began showing backlink data.

[webmasterworld.com...]

I hope this clears up the misunderstanding about what your WMT results mean.

Best,

mb