The New NoFollow Rules
Apparently, the “NoFollow” attribute has changed slightly with respect to Google. According to PageRank Sculpting Leaves NoFollow Tags Behind, NoFollow tags no longer turn-off what PR would be passed, allowing the other links on the page to share it—it simply evaporates.
In other words, if you had 10 links sharing 10 points of link juice, normally, each link would pass 1 point of link juice. In the past, if you used NoFollows on 4 of the links, that meant that the remaining 6 Links would each pass 1.666 points of link juice. This allowed you to sculpt how link juice flowed through your website.
Now, the 6 links would still only pass 1 point each—the other 4 points are simply lost.
New Sculpting Strategies
The article recommends, and I agree, that you simply look hard and long at your website’s architecture and organization. Removing unnecessary links from the web pages higher-up in the hierarchy still allows you to sculpt your PR.
Another idea, however, is to use a scripting language, such as Javascript, for less important links, such as About Us, Privacy Policy, or Legal. This way, the link juice flows as it should to those pages with the greatest level of importance. Whether this is considered “black-hat” or not is debatable. Although I would definitely call it a shade of gray.
In the End…
In the end, the trouble and the advantage gained by masking links with a scripting language simply might not be worth it. Rethinking and organizing your website might simply be a better way to enhance your website for crawlers and users alike.
However, if you find yourself in a particularly competitive niche, sculpting might just be the edge you need to come-out on top.
Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spursfan_ace/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
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January 25th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Interesting, I didn’t realize you could sculpt your PR that way. If a link is using a script instead of clean HTML, does it not pass PR?
January 25th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Only if the crawler “sees” the script as a link. If it can’t figure out what it is, then its nothing.
It is generally thought that it is difficult–although not impossible–for crawlers to following javascript links. And that’s when developers are trying to make them crawler friendly.
You could technically create links that are so crawler unfriendly that they would not appear as links to a crawler. But, to some extent, that would border on black hat activity.
January 26th, 2010 at 8:28 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Malcolm Cooper and Matthew Yarro, Matthew Yarro. Matthew Yarro said: JuiceeLinks: The New No Follow Rules http://bit.ly/5Hs4df [...]
February 5th, 2010 at 11:51 am
Great post! You provided some really informative information on the “no follow” links. This is a big thing in the link building arena and so many get confused with the terms like “no follow” and “do follow”. Thanks for putting out this info and clarifying for people just what a “no follow” link is.