I was just reading a report of a speech given at SMX Advanced in Seattle where the speaker, Matt Cutts, stated that NoFollow links no longer conserve page rank but that they in some cases the evaporate it. The example given was as follows.

You have Pagerank of 10 and that page has 10 links on it. 5 of the links are NoFollow. At this point the belief was that the remaining 5 links would get a PageRank of 2. Cutts stated that the while the NoFollow links would pass no Page Rank, the remaining 5 links will only get a PageRank of 1.

I am not certain if any one else had seen this but I wanted to post it just in case.

Can you please explain what a no follow is? I have an idea but I just want to make sure I am not in the wrong direction. Thanks!

A NoFollow Link is an HTML attribute that tells search engines to ignore the linked page when considering page rank of page that it is linked to. To use the example that was in my original post, if your main page has a page rank of 10 and it has 10 linked pages there derived pagerank would be 1 each (10/10=1). But if you only want 5 of those pages to get PageRank you use the NoFollow code on the other 5 pages, making a derived pagerank of 2 for the 5 pages you want to focus on. But, as the speaker at SMX in Seattle stated, the reality is the pages without the NoFollow code would still only derive PageRanks of 1 anyway.

Thanks for the explanation.

no follow can not be added as your backlinks but it can drive traffic to your page.

I think most of us already aware of that btw can you share the link about the speech of Matts?

I really do not think using the no follow or even do follow links on high quality websites will affect their PR. From time to time webmasters might like to link to other valuable resources they find over the net and there is no problem.

Sorry to post old news. I have only been on here for the last month (when I discovered the site). The article I originally read was linked to an e-mail I had but deleted and can no longer find. Here is a link to another site that actually tells the story better.

http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/...-nofollow.html

No follow doesn't benefit to google, because of the suspected spam around the corner.

As I am new to this whole story (just read about it in the last few days and posted yesterday) the only person I have heard make definitive statement on nofollow's is Matt Cutts. As he is Google, does anyone know if Yahoo or MSN had said anything.