Is anyone else confused by the whole Google ruckus going on right now with regards to “nofollow” links?
What the dickens is going on?
Well, to prevent blog comment spam, Google implemented “nofollow” years ago as a parameter webmasters and blog owners could use in links to stop the link passing PageRank and being counted as a “vote” for the site the link pointed to. There was much rejoicing in the blogosphere as the dastardly blog comment spammers were defeated (or not).
Anyways, the dastardly SEO optimisers used “nofollow” in links to their privacy pages, legal pages and other webpages to “conserve” PageRank and send the wonderful “Google juice” to the pages they wanted to rank highest in the search engines. Google accepted this as pretty much a side effect of the introduction of “nofollow”, and all was well and jiggly with the world.
Until Matt Cutts (a Google uber-meister, engineer, or somesuch), recently said that nofollow now doesn’t work like the SEO guys thought it did. Instead of helping conserve PageRank, nofollow voids what would have been passed through the link had it not be nofollowed. Well, that threw a spanner in the works and everyone in the SEO world howled in rage! It didn’t help when Matt added that the change had already been implemented, and no-one noticed… “we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t“.
Leslie Rhode said, “no way dude” (ok, he actually said, “First, the entire idea is just competely silly to start with and would have noticiable and really really bad ramifications that every SEO on the planet would have already noticed.”) and various other SEO’ers put forth ideas for working with Google and their new way of working with nofollow. One analysis I particularly like is Dr Andy Williams’ explanation of the changes and their effects, here.
So, what should you do?
Relax. Link to people who provide good content, nofollow any links that may potentially link to bad content (like your user-generated links) and then create more great content yourself in the time you would’ve spent worry about “pagerank bleeds”!
Source : neilshearing.com
What the dickens is going on?
Well, to prevent blog comment spam, Google implemented “nofollow” years ago as a parameter webmasters and blog owners could use in links to stop the link passing PageRank and being counted as a “vote” for the site the link pointed to. There was much rejoicing in the blogosphere as the dastardly blog comment spammers were defeated (or not).
Anyways, the dastardly SEO optimisers used “nofollow” in links to their privacy pages, legal pages and other webpages to “conserve” PageRank and send the wonderful “Google juice” to the pages they wanted to rank highest in the search engines. Google accepted this as pretty much a side effect of the introduction of “nofollow”, and all was well and jiggly with the world.
Until Matt Cutts (a Google uber-meister, engineer, or somesuch), recently said that nofollow now doesn’t work like the SEO guys thought it did. Instead of helping conserve PageRank, nofollow voids what would have been passed through the link had it not be nofollowed. Well, that threw a spanner in the works and everyone in the SEO world howled in rage! It didn’t help when Matt added that the change had already been implemented, and no-one noticed… “we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t“.
Leslie Rhode said, “no way dude” (ok, he actually said, “First, the entire idea is just competely silly to start with and would have noticiable and really really bad ramifications that every SEO on the planet would have already noticed.”) and various other SEO’ers put forth ideas for working with Google and their new way of working with nofollow. One analysis I particularly like is Dr Andy Williams’ explanation of the changes and their effects, here.
So, what should you do?
Relax. Link to people who provide good content, nofollow any links that may potentially link to bad content (like your user-generated links) and then create more great content yourself in the time you would’ve spent worry about “pagerank bleeds”!
Source : neilshearing.com
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