Member Avatar for MktgRob

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.

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Short answer: Matt Cutts clarified in 2009 that using rel="nofollow" to “sculpt” PageRank doesn’t conserve the page’s link equity the way many SEOs assumed — some of the link value simply evaporates rather than being re‑distributed to the remaining follow links. That is the origin of the “nofollow kills PageRank” interpretation. (mattcutts.com)

Big-picture update since then: Google changed how it treats link attributes in 2019. It introduced rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" and said nofollow, sponsored, and ugc are now signals (hints) rather than absolute commands; crawling/indexing behavior for nofollow was relaxed in March 2020. In short, the mechanics that upset people in 2009 were real then, and Google’s handling of link attributes has evolved since. (developers.google.com)

Practical takeaways you can apply right away:

  • Stop using nofollow as an internal PageRank trick. Focus on clear information architecture and selective editorial linking instead. (mattcutts.com)
  • Mark paid links with rel="sponsored" and user-posted links with rel="ugc". Use rel="nofollow" only when none of the above fit or you want a conservative, backwards-compatible signal. Example: <a href="https://example.com" rel="ugc sponsored">link</a>. (developers.google.com)
  • Don’t rely on nofollow to keep a page out of Google. Use noindex (meta) or robots rules when you need to prevent indexing or crawling. Remember that nofollowed links can still be discovered and sometimes used as hints. (developers.google.com)

For and others watching this historically: the SMX/Matt Cutts point nailed an important limitation of PageRank-sculpting. The modern rule is simpler — annotate links honestly for transparency (sponsored/ugc/nofollow), fix your site structure if you need to concentrate authority, and use noindex/robots when you want to block pages outright. (mattcutts.com)

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Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

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!

Member Avatar for MktgRob

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.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

Thanks for the explanation.

Member Avatar for phoenix06007

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

Member Avatar for bobchrist

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

Member Avatar for snapshot

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.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

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

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.

Member Avatar for bettsnirvana

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

Member Avatar for MktgRob

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.

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