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Rethinking Page Rank Sculpting
Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell earlier last month which reverberated around the global SEO community. In case you haven’t heard, the way the HTML nofollow attribute works has now changed. Historically, the nofollow attribute could be used to direct the flow of Page Rank around your site to those pages which were more commercially important, rather than ‘waste’ it on pages such as ‘legal and privacy’ etc. By stopping the flow of page rank to pages you do not want to rank, there is more which can be distributed to those pages which are more important from a search perspective. The new change means that you cannot conserve internal page rank by nofollowing links, as any extra Page Rank simply evaporates.
Matt was quoted saying: “…More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each… at first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t”
Why didn’t anyone notice the change? Perhaps it’s because that SEOs have long since learned to pay less attention to the little green bar in the Google toolbar and focus more on rankings and ultimately conversions. The nofollow update may have manifested itself as an overall drop in page rank. This would have made a small blip on the radar as rankings would have most likely remained stable.
In light of this, optimising internal link flow in my opinion has not changed, even though Matt Cutts says that Page Rank sculpting is not necessary. The reality of the situation is that all web pages are not created equal and there are still many instances where controlling the flow of internal page rank is useful.
How to best accomplish this now is still up for debate. Javascript, iframes, and using noindex have all been suggested as ways of continuing to accumulate Page Rank. Some people have also recommended doing nothing. SEOs know that this is a game changer in terms of delivering optimised pages, one thing that is certain is that page rank sculpting using ‘nofollow’ is dead.
This article was written by Wilson Jno-Baptiste, a senior SEO consultant at Altogether.
Flickr image by Kaidohmaru
