One of the most discussed topics in the search engine optimization realm is the whole saga around Google changing the way websites should be sculpted with nofollow links.
The easiest way to explain what Google have done is to look at a little comparison scenario:
If you have a website which has 5 links pointing to other pages, each of these 5 pages would get X quantity of link juice divided by 5. Now, if one of the links was a nofollow, the four remaining links would get X quantity of link juice divided by 4, thus meaning that adding a nofollow would result in giving the 4 remaining links more link juice.
What Google have done now is said that by nofollowing a link won’t result in the remainder links getting more juice. So, if you have 5 links with 1 nofollow, the 4 followed links would each get X quantity of link juice divided by 5 – not 4, like before!
Now, as you can imagine, this changes things in a huge way and therefore it’s caused quite the storm in industry. The scary thing is that most people don’t even know about this!
So you ask, what does this really mean? Let’s look at a simple example – Imagine all those comments on your blog, where the user’s name is a link to their website and is normally a nofollow, ye? Well, there will be no point having these as nofollows anymore – So what you’re doing now is decreasing the link juice to all the other links on your website – you see why this is a HUGE deal?
So, how do you sculpt your PageRank then? Well, accordingly to the SEOMoz blog, you have 4 options:
Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don’t want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)
Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)
Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links
Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors
SEOMoz was kind enough to put together a WhiteBoard Friday on this very topic and if you’re into PageRank and SEO, then this is a must watch..
Incredibly interesting isn’t it? Just shows how on top of things SEOs have to be to stay ahead of the game!
Ok, forgive me if this is a stupid question, but:
Before:
Incoming Juice -> My site -> 100 outgoing links
After:
Incoming Juice -> My site -> 5 outgoing un-no-followed links
Something like that, right?
Doesn’t that mean that the links you’re linking to in your posts (ie, the ones relevant to the majority content on any given page), get a much higher boost?
And won’t that reflect positively on your site as an authority on the subject? And boost PR?
Right now, you’re “promoting” sites that have very little-to-nothing to do with your content (links in comment author fields, etc), but suddenly you can switch that off with nofollow.
Or am I missing something? I didn’t watch the video (no time).
~ Wogan
Well, each outlink you give, gives authority to the site you’re linking too. If both sites are relevant to the content being spoken about, the external site gets wonderful link juice and potential for PR increase. The site linking to the external site benefits a little bit cos of the relevancy, but less than the external site, therefore you’ll technically rank lower (cet par). However, on things like comments and so forth, or sites you didn’t want to send link juice to, you could use nofollow’s, but Google has changed its algorithms, so this doesn’t work as it did and we need to be careful about losing PR.
Make sense?