Google Breaks the NoFollow Tag… Now What?
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Google has now stripped away the page sculpting power of the “nofollow” tag. Up until now the “nofollow” tag has been used to block valuable link juice (Page Rank) from leaking to pages that didn’t need it. Some of those pages would be your contact us, about us, company info and any other page that didn’t need to be ranked by the search engines.
At the last SMX Advanced Conference, Google’s Matt Cutts let everyone know that Google changed the way the rel=nofollow tag works in their algorithm. Previously, the tag stopped the spread of page rank to unnecessary pages and passed that portion to the other links on the page that didn’t have the “nofollow” tag. Now it’s as if the tag is not there at all.
The crazy thing is that this didn’t just happen. It isn’t brand new. According to Cutts Google made the change sometime last year which means anyone who has been working hard on page sculpting has been waisting their time for a while. At least that was the initial reaction in the SEO community. And why wouldn’t it be; it’s been an excepted form of preventing page rank from leaking to pages that didn’t need it since 2005. That’s a long time in the Internet world.
Cutts went into further detail by explaining that even though the rel=nofollow attribute will now absorb page rank the way other normal links do it will not pass the page rank on to the target URL. Many people speculate that the tag works the same way it did and that Google just likes to mess with the SEO community every so often. I’m sure we will never know for sure.
Google changes it’s algorithms quite often so this is no surprise really. I honestly wouldn’t be a bit shocked if in 3 months it was back to normal. I’m still going to use the tag on the obvious pages. if it’s there it’s not going to hurt anything and if Google changes their mind and puts things back to normal I won’t have to go back and redo work that i’ve already done.
Hope this helps
2 Comments on this post
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Jay @ work at home said:
Never knew Google would do something like that with e NoFollow tag. It’s probably a trick. I wouldn’t bother worrying about it.
August 15th, 2009 at 11:05 pm -
PPC Search Engine said:
For online business, content is the most important factor. Having informative and interesting content in the website will entice frequent visits by more visitors. This also helps you to get quality back links easily, as quality back links are most important factor in search engine optimization.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:18 am
