Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, has indicated that the utility of the ‘nofollow’ tag is no longer what it used to be… and may no longer be worth implementing at all.

Google originally introduced the ‘nofollow’ tag in January 2005 to allow website owners, particular blog owners, to identify and discount non-trusted external links, such as those contained in blog comments.

The attribute was designed to: (a) stop search engines from following such links, and (b) discount their ‘link value’ by not counting them in calculating the Google PageRank of the destination page nor in the anchor text when counting keywords for that webpage.

An unintended consequence, it seems, was that search engine optimization experts, Internet marketers and website owners started using the nofollow tag as a way to control PageRank distribution within their websites.

By using the nofollow tag in links to certain pages, for example, no PageRank would be distributed to those pages, thereby preserving more PageRank for those links (i.e. destination pages) that did not carry the nofollow tag.

It appears, however, that Google doesn’t like such ‘PageRank sculpting’, and if what Matt Cutts said at the recent SMX Advanced conference in Seattle is right, we should probably reconsider our use of the nofollow tag.

Specifically, Search Engine Watch reports that, according to Matt Cutts, while the nofollow tag will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page to the destination page, the value of that PageRank will not be preserved and distributed among the other links on the webpage and their associated destination pages.

In other words, PageRank will still be distributed among ALL the links on a given webpage including those with the nofollow tag… but in the case of those links with the nofollow tag, their PageRank will disappear rather than be sent anywhere.

So, in simple terms, when it comes to the PageRank a link can send, it’s a ‘use it or lose it’ scenario.

What all this means is that you may be better off having fewer, trusted links on your webpages than having lots of trusted and non-trusted (nofollow) links. After all, if you still have a lot of non-trusted or unworthy links on a given webpage, they’re effectively devaluing the ‘link juice’ of the other, trusted links on the page.

Source: Kevin Newcomb, “Google Changes Course on Nofollow,” Search Engine Watch, June 3, 2009

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