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NoFollow and PR Sculpting, Making Sense Of It

As most of you know I have complained about PR Sculptor and the nofollow attribute for sometime on this blog. I have also posted most all other blogs that cared to bring it up as a topic.

Recently John Andrew posted his Q and A session from Domain Round Table with Matt Cutt’s:

What Matt Cutt’s Said at Domain RoundTable 2008

As always some nice nuggets in there, but I was particularly interested in this Q and A:

“Q: on use of nofollow. Directory owner, asking if nofollow helps or hurts.

Matt says nofollow is a “very simple thing”. Nofollow link doesn’t flow pagerank, dosn’t flow anchor text. Link level to say “I trust this link but I don’t trust this link”. You don’t want to flow page rank through them if you don’t trust them. Real business 3-4% of your links will be stale, don’t worry don’t need nofollow. If check them at some point, willing to vouch for them, at some point checked them for quality, then don’t need to worry about nofollow. If just a domain directory, use no follow.. it is a matter of how much due diligence you put in.”

So I follow up with a question to Matt Cutt’s in the thread and flat out ask him:

“So by using the nofollow that should not affect how other pages on your website rank right?”

Matt was kind enough to respond back shortly with:

“You’ve got it, Jaan. At most you’d see a second-order effect where PageRank didn’t flow through the nofollow links and thus ended up somewhere else on the site, which in theory could change search engine rankings a little bit.”

Well a little more clarity on the subject. I have asked him a follow up question as well, so visit John Andrew’s website to follow the thread.

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Written by incrediblehelp on April 23rd, 2008 with 3 comments.
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3 comments

Read the comments left by other users below, or:

Mark Pilatowski
#1. April 23rd, 2008, at 10:51 AM.

That’s more or less what I have always believed. It may not have a monumental effect but it could give that extra little push you are looking for.

incrediblehelp
#2. April 23rd, 2008, at 11:26 AM.

Right Mark. The talk of PR Sculpting sure has died down and I think people are realizing that it is a just a very small part of some peoples SEOing.

incrediblehelp
#3. May 5th, 2008, at 1:38 PM.

Remember Vanessa Fox that used to work at Google. Here are her feelings on the whole PR Sculpting thing:

Six Questions With Vanessa Fox

“As for PR sculpting/no follow internal links, I think first of all that 99% of sites have lots of other more pressing issues to take care of. It’s like painting the molding in your house when your walls have fallen down and you have no windows. Spend your time on the fundamentals for the biggest impact. Spending lots of time on the minutia can provide diminishing returns that may not be worth the investment. I’ve never been a big fan of PR sculpting or using nofollow for this purpose. I like the use of nofollow to discourage comment spam, particularly now that so many sites allow user submissions. I think opening up your site to user contribution is awesome, but inviting spammers to submit all the links they want makes it a little less awesome. By using nofollow, those sites may at least be less attractive to spamming and might have to spend less time dealing with it.

I much prefer use of robots.txt for internal pages that you don’t want the search engine bots to spend time crawling. And as for PR sculpting, quality external links count so much more than internal links for ranking that I don’t know that sculpting is going to make that much difference in the scheme of things. It seems like a lot of effort for little pay off.”

Adam Lasnik at Google even stops by to comment and agree with her views on PR Sculpting:

“Good stuff! Especially like hearing Vanessa’s views on PageRank sculpting (even moreso because it’s inline with my own).”

Great to hear ex-Googlers and current Googlers agreeing with us on PR Sculpting.

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