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Matt Cutts on the PageRank Sculpting/NoFollow Issue
SEO News Source: http://www.mattcutts.com
Published: Jun 16, 2009 - 09:36 am
Story Found By: Skitzzo 1436 Days ago
Category: SEO
Matt explains his comments about nofollow links & page rank sculpting.
 Comments9 Comments  

Comments

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from Skitzzo 1436 Days ago #
Votes: 0

The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.Matt, if my site is losing the PageRank why would I care whether it gets passed along to the linked site?Whether it’s you’re intention or not, you’re effectively killing off the automatic blog links with this move.

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from seoz87 1436 Days ago #
Votes: 0

My two cents...Q =If I run a blog and add the nofollow attribute to links left by my commenters, doesn’t that mean less PageRank flows within my site?I guess its better to pass Page Rank to commentators than just WASTING it for nothing. I mean if I implemented no follow on comments then it doesnt help me to stop the PR to my site so this means that I am simply wasting my PR for nothing. The better option is to pass it to my readers.[*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.To all the suckers who disagree with me on this issue in past..READ IT AGAIN AND AGAIN..PS:he still not SURE bout it  :Ptry try try....hmmmNo-Follow = Its all bout PageRank ;)

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from bwelford 1436 Days ago #
Votes: 1

In the light of this, perhaps the easiest way to get your minds round this is to accept the PageRank Null Hypothesis:http://sphinn.com/story/117224

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from onreact 1436 Days ago #
Votes: 2

Basically Google ridicules the whole SEO industry: "You were too stupid to notice, we dumped it a year ago". Also Google acknowledges that nofollow was a failure that backfired. With it the Google algo stopped working as desired as people tried to hide more and more content behind nofollowed links. So Google had to adapt.Last but not least I wonder what happens to all the poor guys who sold PageRank sculpting with nofollow to their clients who spend thousands of dollars on it over the time. Not only do they have to undo that (which luckily can be done by search and replace in minutes) but the time paid was wasted. Will clients want their money back? Will they sue SEOs for damages? Luckily I haven’t used nofollow much myself but how can you trust Matt Cutts or Google again and listen to his advice now that you know that it can be outdated for over a year?

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from incrediblehelp 1436 Days ago #
Votes: 5

LOL same as it always has been.  You never needed the stupid nofollow or what Google sold it as, you just need some smart internal navigaiton and architecture. 

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from footinmouthdisease 1435 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Ok so...a nofollow tag on a link causes the link juice that would’ve flowed through that link to "evaporate"..so then by suggesting that paid links should be flagged with a nofollow tag since they should not influence search engine rankings google has found another way to punish paid links. Right?

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from seoz87 1435 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@ footinmouthdisease (WTH is this name)Google reacts to the paid links by considering the website status. There are websites that are spending one hefty amount of budget on paid links and Google isn’t penalizing them. Moreover these paid links are so obvious that  a child can distinguish them. But Google not penalizing this site since 2001.And its not about one site there are millions os site doin paid linking and link exchanges on regular basis. So the key is maintain the mix and balance of links and content.

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from Bakis 1434 Days ago #
Votes: 1

What about wikipedia?They are no following all their external links but the internal links are all do follow…Plus they get all the backlinks from tons of other pages… This way the dominate the serps using the no follow attribute to circulate the pagerank juice amng their pages… Why don’t they get slapped?

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from oysource 1428 Days ago #
Votes: 0

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level

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