The PageRank and Nofollow Conundrum
Posted by admin on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment 
People take SEO
too loosely. It is a
science in one way
or another, there
are some rules
provided by Google
(and other search
engines playing a
catch up) and the
rules are to be
followed strictly in
order to achieve the
right results. And
it’s supposed
to be a given to
follow them, if you
want to succeed
anyway.So it baffles me
when people talk
about SEO so
loosely. PageRank
and the nofollow
attribute on links
is one example. All
other factors aside,
PageRank is sort of
an arbitrary number
that we look at when
thinking in terms of
site quality of
ranking on Google.
We know that
it’s one one
of about 200
parameters Google
uses to rank
websites in the
search results, but
it’s about all
we get from Google.
And so we want to
use it effectively
on our sites.
It makes sense to
pay attention to
what they say at the
very least. After
all, we want to do
well in their search
engine. But then,
very often on
various forums I can
see people openly
stating false
information as
facts. Such as that
nofollow attribute
prevents search
engines from
following the links,
in other words it
makes the links
invisible.
That can’t be
further from truth,
and in some cases
can pose a real
problem for your
website. The latest
post I can find
about the issue from
Matt Cutts says:
So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
That means nofollow
attribute
doesn’t make
links invisible, it
just doesn’t
account the PageRank
to the target page.
It does, however,
take it away from
your page and
that’s
important.
So why it is wrong
to say that search
engines don’t
follow links with
the nofollow
attribute?
It’s not just
semantics and it
means different
things. The first
problem with that
is, that by saying
so you imply that
the target page will
not be indexed if
it’s not
indexed already.
However, it may very
well be. By ignoring
nofollow links
you’re
ignoring the extra
exposure to search
engine bots.
The second and the
main issue is that
you’re wasting
your PageRank with
nofollow links. If
you think you can
have as many
external links as
you wish on your
page, and as long as
you add the nofollow
attribute, all of
your PageRank stays,
think again. The
above quote from
Matt Cutts says
otherwise.
Normally that is not
a big of an issue.
Certainly you
shouldn’t care
about it if
you’re just
working on a random
site. There are far
more important
factors in SEO as
evident by what
Google tells us and
what we can see
ourselves.
But if, for example,
you have thousands
of comments on one
blog post, most of
which have links to
external sites and
your page becomes
like a link farm
more than anything,
consider that
nofollow attribute
will not save your
PR – it will
evaporate from that
page. A random page
like that will not
do much harm, but if
you’re working
on your site’s
architecture with
specific SEO goals
in mind, and you
make such mistakes,
it can and will
affect your success.
A solution to the
problem, other than
removing all links,
is a two-step
external
linking. And
what that means is,
basically, instead
of having a 100 of
external nofollow
links on one page,
to place each
external link on its
own page. Such a
page would then have
only one nofollow
link and the PR
leakage would be
minimal. Better yet,
you can have no
links at all, but
redirect the page
via meta refresh or
Javascript (a
“redirecting,
please
wait…”
page).
