If you’ve got nofollow links on your website, better listen up. Google’s head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, recently divulged that Google is no longer allowing PageRank sculpting.
For those of you I’ve already lost, here is a quick lesson on the history of PageRank sculpting. In the recent past, you see, Google allowed websites to determine how they would spend their own PageRank. They did this by inserting nofollows onto certain links in order to give more credit to the dofollow links.
PageRank, you must understand, was like a bank account. The higher a site’s PageRank, the more money in its virtual bank account, which it could spend on outgoing links. These outgoing links would then give the linked-to sites higher PageRank (or, more money in their own virtual bank account).
If a site had, say, $20 worth of PageRank, with ten outgoing links, it could put nofollows on five of those outgoing links to give the dofollow links $4 each in authority instead of just $2.
But Google recently proclaimed that all this has changed. Recently at SMX Advanced, Cutts explained that Google has many ways in which it determines (and not the website) how a site can spend its authority money.
It makes sense – Google wants to be the one who determines how it will crawl websites, and not be told by webmasters.
Of course, it’s not the first time that Google has made such a drastic change to its algorithm. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a huge shock to webmasters around the world, many of whom have spent countless hours carefully placing nofollow links in order to conserve PageRank, who have now discovered it was all for naught.
It is also a worry for niche sites, as SEO expert for Cruise Critic Matt Leonard explains here. These niche sites have, until now, thrived on the fact that many larger sites disguise their deep content with nofollow links, since they were under the impression this would help make their content more crawlable.
With this change, however, the bigger websites are likely to remove their nofollow links, since the benefit they once saw from them has been taken away. Thus, their deep content will be followed by Google’s spiders, and could potentially knock many niche sites off the board.
Another problem webmasters are having with this change is that it seems to reward those sites who didn’t bother listening to Google in the first place, and never bothered with nofollow links. They didn’t spend those hours carefully choosing which sites to endow with authority, and which not, and now they seem to be the winners.
The main problem everyone seems to have with the change is that it’s created a lot of work for website builders. But Google wants to remain one step ahead of the game – and it doesn’t want to be told what to follow and what not to. In the end, after the headache of relinking, it could make the web a far more democratic place to search.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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