Sphinn - Matt Cutts & Google on Appropriate Uses of Nofollow Tag

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Matt Cutts & Google on Appropriate Uses of Nofollow Tag

Posted By: lorenbaker 365 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://groups.google.com)
Category: Google SEO

Nothing on Paid Links and No Follow here, but Matt goes into detail on funneling PageRank via NoFollow and which internal links should use NoFollow.

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from dannysullivan 365 days ago #

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Sigh. Part of me still feels there's a giant contradiction here (and I've told Matt this). Google has gone on in the past about not doing things too special for the search engine (like you know, cloaking content), and now there's this semi-push to use nofollow to better channel PageRank. I sort of think shouldn't Google just figure this stuff out? Sure, I know a savvy site owner might as well help themselves. But if I'm blocking some links because they aren't helpful to search, then shouldn't Google give me a nocontent tag like Yahoo?

from JohnWeb 364 days ago #

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Answers to other questions by other Googler' as well, including Matt's. http://sphinn.com/story/8822

from Halfdeck 364 days ago #

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"I sort of think shouldn't Google just figure this stuff out?"

Danny, sometimes we need to think like tech geeks instead of marketers to understand why Google cannot figure this stuff on their own. Google can't just read your mind and decide "hey, I think Danny values this page more than this page over here."

"Google has gone on in the past about not doing things too special for the search engine"

Matt Cutts has clarified his view in a video he made last year that webmasters should optimize for BOTH users and search engines. There's nothing sneaky about linking with targeted anchor text to your own articles, is there? You do that often when you write articles on SEL. That not much different from blocking juice from an internal page.

Also think about this - if you had a supplemental page that was really aggravating you and a TOS page with a TBPR 5, what's so wrong with borrowing a little juice from the TOS page, channeling it to the supplemental page, and getting it back into the main index?

I think SEOs need to step back and stop thinking politically about every SEO tactic (e.g. nofollow is bad because its associated with paid links, paid links is bad because its against Google's guidelines, etc). All I'd ask is "Does it work"? If the answer is yes, then that's all I need to know.

from dannysullivan 361 days ago #

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Halfdeck, Google tries to read our minds all the time. PageRank's original paper talked about trying to estimate which links were most clicked on, most important, etc. Google can see links from across the web, see various patterns and so on. That's why I'd rather see them figure out how better to tell that a link should count regardles of it being paid or not. And the reality is, they already seem to do this. Just because Wikipedia puts nofollow on links does NOT mean Google has to discount those links -- only if it wants to.

from Halfdeck 361 days ago #

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"Google tries to read our minds all the time."

Danny, true, but I didn't say Google doesn't try.

Here's some things we do as webmasters to guide Google:

- Install 301 redirects to resolve canonical issues
- Use robots.txt to control crawling
- Use keywords in TITLE tags to tell Google what a page is about
- Use internal links (/ vs. /index.html, for example) consistently to prevent Googlebot from getting confused.

Nofollowing links to control PageRank is no different than installing 301 redirects to consolidate PageRank. Both tactics "sculpt" PageRank flow.

So why do you find nofollow unsettling while you, I assume, have no problem with 301 redirects?

"That's why I'd rather see them figure out how better to tell that a link should count regardles of it being paid or not."

I don't disagree with that. There are some "paid" links (not the TLA variety though) that improve search results. But what does paid links have to do with using nofollow on "free" internal links?

Like I said, if you have no problem with using 301 redirects to prevent PageRank split, I don't know why you'd have problem with using nofollow to redirect PageRank flow.