Google Says Sculpting Ok, But Not Using No-follow

[ktaylor310]

No, because the "nofollow" attribute prevents the passing of link popularity in Google.

See, I'm not talking about some wacky "PR sculpting" scheme. I'm talking about good old-fashioned site architecture. Like webmasters in the know have been doing for years before anybody ever heard of "nofollow."

Torka called this one!

Per Rand Fishkin today regarding Google's change in the way it passes link juice:

Tragically, while this action won't hurt spammers or those seeking to manipulate Google, it will seriously harm many thousands of sites that have employed nofollow internally as it was long considered a best practice (and messaged as such to the SEO community by the same source as this reversal). I suspect it will be several years and many re-designs before a lot of sites are able to clean up this solution-turned-problem.

I'm saddened to say that given this change, we, as SEOs, are going to have to also recommend the best practice that comments (in all forms of UGC) no longer accept links. Full blog

[thomas09]

Hi,

It was a great reading which has enhanced my knowledge.

Thanks...

[plcpeggy]

Is there a way this can be translated into simpler terms?

I have a Press page where I link out to a lot of different websites (that link to my site through a legit review, etc). Is it better for me to not link back or to nofollow those links or to just link back to the article where my site is mentioned?

thanks!
peggy

[ktaylor310]

You might try this article written by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land: http://tinyurl.com/mpslc6

[HomeComputerGam]

Useful article and diagrammed well.
I'll probably end up using iframes for what I want to keep to myself.

From the man himself.

[Hsekhar]

Originally Posted by ktaylor310

You might try this article written by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land: http://tinyurl.com/mpslc6

That's one good article. With this kind of reversals none can guess how this SEO thing is going to change by the very next day!

[phanio]

Does it hurt - does it help - this just made it a bit more unclear for me. Great post!

[mzcat]

Thanks for the information!

[ktaylor310]

Does it hurt - does it help - this just made it a bit more unclear for me. Great post!

It honestly depends on who you talk to. Since SEO is far from an exact science there are different opinions as to what effect it will have now or with regard to future algorithm changes. Bottomline, Google made the change a year ago (even though they only now announced it), so if you haven't noticed any big difference in your ranking most SEO's are saying it may not be worth the effort of going back and removing the "no-follow" attribute. You should make a decision on a go forward basis though. This was a new development, so I would keep reading about it and see what happens over the next couple of months. I'm sure that people like Rand Fishkin will be testing various methods and will follow up w/results.

[royhunters]

Great post kim, should clarify page rank for a lot of people if nothing else. I read all of Matts blog about the subject and I am not sure everyone still gets it and I dont think the change was immediate 1 year ago, I think as certain other parts of Google'e system was changed, it created a bit of an evolution that made it less noticeable.

What I am trying to figure out is what is the benefit of the change. Or should I say who? I dont see google better today than it was last year, maybe a little more frustrating with results than before. The popular stuff seems to be very watered down with content... Kinda like a twitter user following 14,000 other twitter users and only looking at it on Friday????

I dont get it.