What Now with no Follow

There has been a practise in the SEO world for years now known as page rank sculpting. Page rank (pr) being Googles quality metric for sites ranging from one to ten. The premise is this. Every site has a certain amount of pagerank. It accrues it through domain age and inbound links. A link from a page rank 7 site will send more pr to the linked site than one with a pr of 3.

So, a page with lots of pagerank will have a better chance of ranking well in Google. The page rank sculpting idea is centered around pushing pr only to certain pages of a site. Buy using the nofollow attribute on certain links Google is told to not follow links to certain pages and not to give them any pr. This would result in more pr flowing through the remaining pages. This was said to work wonders on large sites where there was a lot of pr flowing. On small five page sites the impact was negligible.

Recently Matt Cutts from Google announced that the algorithm has changed and that the way the nofollow tag is treated in regards to pr flow is not the same as it once was. Now what happens is that pr can still be restricted to pages using nofollow but the pr that flowed to that page is lost. It no longer has the water in a dam effect where it just flows somewhere else.

So what now with nofollow. It was originally used to stop spammers from getting links and pr from blog comments. But if you nofollow a comment link now you're not getting any benefit and neither is the commenter. It's now more of a case of , do I waste pr linking out to someone instead of just nofollowing the link.

With regards to nofollows within your navigation link structure I would recommend removing them altogether as they're only going to lose you pr. I had noticed a pr drop in a few of my internet marketing sites before the announcement. To inform the search engines of which pages are more important I would now recommend that you just link to them often from through out your site.