Some Questions can't be answered by Google
A few days ago Google’s webspam team’s head Matt Cutts dropped a bomb by clarifying how Google calculates page rank flow on pages with links with nofollow attribute. Nofollow attribute was initially introduced in 2005 to curb the blog comment spam. The idea was to add nofollow attribute to each of the user comment link. This helped in minimizing the comment spam as their was no link juice flowing to the spammers’ websites. SEOs started using this technique to control the pagenrank flow on the website by adding nofollow to the appropriate links. About an year ago, Google changed how they calculated the flowing pagerank for the nofollowed links. I wouldn’t go into the details on how it affects Pagerank Sculpting, you can read it on Matt Cutts’ blog.
This leaves SEOs in a tight spot. There are pages on the website which are generally linked globally (say ToS or Disclaimer). You don’t want them to get the link juice because the pages are not that important. Using nofollow for these pages was highly encouraged, but now adding a nofollow to these pages would waste x% of link juice from your web pages. Another main problem is with the nofollowed links in the blog comments – say you have 5 internal links on your blog page and 195 comments (with nofollowed links) you will only be passing 1/200th of the page rank per link as compared to 1/5th of page rank per link. Any competitor can add comments to blog posts with links to hurt your page rank flow.
What should webmasters do to get in control of their page rank flow again?
There are a few work arounds for this, but most of them are not elegant and will force you to choose between user and search engines.
- Remove links – good for search engines, but not very usable for users. It will also make it difficult to find website for someone who commented or wants to read your terms of service.
- Use iFrames instead of nofollow – Iframes can be used to display content like comments or unimportant footer page links. The iframe page itself will need to have noindex, nofollow meta tags. Although this is somewhat reasonable solution, it will introduce the long gone iframes to most of the web.
- Obfuscating links using complex javascript – Emails/mailto links are generally obscured using javascript to avoid them being harnessed by spambots. With the similiar javascript, visitors can be redirected to the links using js. Note that Google started parsing simple javascript and treats JS redirects as regular links.
It would be a lot easier for small websites to change these nofollow links globally soon. However, big sites will take long time to decide on what they want to do and get all the changes on their website.
Photo Credit: myklroventine
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