Google Changes Treatment of PR 'Saved' by rel=nofollow Sculpting

[elgoog]

Note: might be a rumour

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020141.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3925952-5-20.htm

The rel="nofollow" attribute still blocks PR transfer through that particular link. But it no longer creates an increase in the PR that is transferred by other links on the page. The blocked PR now just falls into a black hole.
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The rel="nofollow" attribute... implemented jointly by the major engines... was initially intended to block PageRank credit from blog comments. Its use was expanded by Google to blog transmission of PR credit from paid links.

Questions arose about whether it might be used to "sculpt" PageRank flow within a site. With PageRank sculpting, you could block PR transmission to unimportant pages, and channel the rest to pages you deemed important.

Prior to rel="nofollow", if you had 10 outbound links from a page, each of those links transmitted 10% of your outgoing PageRank. There was considerable discussion here on WebmasterWorld, among other places, about whether "nofollowing" some of those links would increase the amount of PR sent to the remaining pages....

The consensus ultimately was yes... if you nofollowed half of those 10 links, eg, the remaining 5 would now each transmit 20% of the PR credit available from the page... and you'd be giving extra credit to those pages that weren't nofollowed. This consensus was confirmed publicly by Google.

The announced change now means that the pages that aren't nofollowed will no longer get the extra linking credit. That credit will now be divided evenly among all links, but nofollowed links will still be blocked from crawling.

[Chips]

So even though sculpting your internal links still will stop leaks to pages you do not care to rank... about us, sitemap, sign up pages etc. It won't increase the percentage of rank to the pages that do not have that attribute in the link.

So, do you think it really matters now whether or not you use it on internal links?

Thanks for sharing!

[elgoog]

So even though sculpting your internal links still will stop leaks to pages you do not care to rank... about us, sitemap, sign up pages etc. It won't increase the percentage of rank to the pages that do not have that attribute in the link.

indeed, if it ever did increase the % of pr to the other pages...

using dofollow to aboutus etc. will at least keep the pr wthin your site
you can preserve it an link back from those pages to important pages

or use a javascript file to link, instead of a normal link......

[Engineer]

Interesting.

I think elgoog is right on the money about internal links. Now it no longer makes sense to nofollow any of your internal links, because doing so (apparently) just throws the link juice away. Better to send it to "about us" (or wherever) and then from that page, link back to your homepage or other pages in the site via the navigation.

I do think that we should all continue using nofollow on our affiliate links, though. The last thing we should be doing is passing PR to the casino websites. Once these sites get a high page rank, they can start appearing in the serps for phrases that affiliates typically target, which is bad news for the affiliate.

In sum: Dofollow internal links, links to link partners, and links to sites that are useful to your visitors and have good reputations (such as jackpot graphs), and continue to use rel="nofollow" on affiliate links to casinos.

[elgoog]

As nofollow intentionally was ment for....

[Engineer]

Exactly.

[pgaming]

I do think that we should all continue using nofollow on our affiliate links, though. The last thing we should be doing is passing PR to the casino websites. Once these sites get a high page rank, they can start appearing in the serps for phrases that affiliates typically target, which is bad news for the affiliate.

Big believer in using the nofollow tag and it totally makes sense. Good for SEO purposes as well. I recently bought a few sites and am slowly inserting the nofollow tag.

greek39

[raphnix]

With that kind of new policy, I might have a hard time improving my average internal PR. Almost 25% of my website pages have PRs and some haven't yet.

[ddm]

yeh saw that yesterday, looks like I'll just be just nofollowing affil links in future.

[Chalkie]

So am i correct in thinking that regardless of what you do to your internal links each internal link from a page will detract from its PR.

This must then follow that a page with 100 internal pages linked from the home page will result in a lot of PR loss and of course a low PR.

If this is so, does this mean that it will be better to have fewer internal links from the home page and better to have a few 2nd level pages linked from the home page and all internal pages linked from them.

If anyone can work out what i am trying to say i would love to hear what you think.

[LiveCasinoPartners]

Consolidation of affiliate links is then a must. I will now try to have a proportionally high content page inner links compared to outbound affiliate links with nofollow tags. If there is no PR sculpting, then our nofollow affiliate links are diluting our overall significance.

For example, let's say i have a page with 30 outbound links all with nofollow to my aff programs. I should try to place a lower quantity of those links in a more optimnal way. Place them strategically in the most converting regins of the webpage and reduce non-performers. That way you are reducing the amount of outbounds that are not "sculpted", thereby increasing your overall relevance.

Until now I have been assumming that the nofollow makes an outbound link inmune to affecting the overall link profile. Now that it has been suggested that is not the case, i will certinaly optimize and reduce outbound affiliate links.

So, what do you guys think?

[Chips]

Consolidation of affiliate links is then a must. I will now try to have a proportionally high content page inner links compared to outbound affiliate links with nofollow tags. If there is no PR sculpting, then our nofollow affiliate links are diluting our overall significance.

For example, let's say i have a page with 30 outbound links all with nofollow to my aff programs. I should try to place a lower quantity of those links in a more optimnal way. Place them strategically in the most converting regins of the webpage and reduce non-performers. That way you are reducing the amount of outbounds that are not "sculpted", thereby increasing your overall relevance.

Until now I have been assumming that the nofollow makes an outbound link inmune to affecting the overall link profile. Now that it has been suggested that is not the case, i will certinaly optimize and reduce outbound affiliate links.

So, what do you guys think?

I think I played one too many tournaments and drank one too many whiskey sours to understand what the heck you just asked.

If I understand this and prob. don't... I think if you nofollow your affiliate links but let the rest go untouched your overall site will spread the juice evenly.

[LiveCasinoPartners]

I think I played one too many tournaments and drank one too many whiskey sours to understand what the heck you just asked.

If I understand this and prob. don't... I think if you nofollow your affiliate links but let the rest go untouched your overall site will spread the juice evenly.

Hey Chips,
I think maybe I haven't played any tournaments to be clear enough. lol

My point is that if the nofollow links to affiliate programs dilute the overall link "power" or relevance by NOT being completely eliminated from Google's calculation of link weight then it's important to have as few affiliate links as possible. So instead of having a 1000 word page with 20 outbound links to different programs, reducing the amount of outbound nofollow links would be the way to go. For example, having one 250x250 banner (image that looks like text) in a visible center page location would be better that multiple text box in that same area with more links. That's what I am reffering to by consolidation.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting this, merely openning a discussion on the practical application of this thread's premise.

[elgoog]

http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/06/03/ ... d-for-seo/

"Matt: Initially if you had 10 links, and 5 were no followed, the other 5 would get the remaining page rank, it’s not that way these days. It bubbled up from the indexing team and it could change in the future. Whenever we see people talking about that, it is a good chance to steer the in the right direction."

I think you have a good point there WagerX,
it looks like it's best to have as few links as possible now....

[universal4]

The problem with nofollow

Let's say you have 5 text links on a page.

They use the anchors: blackjack, roulette, craps, slots, video poker.

By adding the no-follow tag to those links, you have just told the search engines that those links are not important enough to your visitors that they should not follow them.

Why would you want google to think that you are not providing good related links for those keywords?

Rick
Universal4

Side note: I have a variety of content pages which I would like to LINK OUT FROM using those very same keywords and more. If anyone is interested, please send me a pm.

[elgoog]

By adding the no-follow tag to those links, you have just told the search engines that those links are not important enough to your visitors that they should not follow them.

You're only telling Google that...
But the problem stays the same ....

[CityGuard]

One solution to minimize the links that are "leaking" PR would be to put them in a format that google does not recognize as a link. For example, I believe a while back google didn't recognize links in javascript. I believe they do now, but there may be other ways to give the visitor the experience of a link without the google bots being able to determine that there is a link. I'd been under the impression until I checked just now that google had trouble indexing flash, but understand from an article here that they are able to index links in flash.

Are there currently ways to create a link that google would not realize is a link? If so, can this be done in a manner where the user experience is not comprimosed (i.e. where all or almost all users will be able to use the link)?

[elgoog]

i think via javascript is still ok

[Buddy M]

Man, do I feel red faced asking this question, but RE: this line....

" I do think that we should all continue using nofollow on our affiliate links, though. The last thing we should be doing is passing PR to the casino websites."

I have never heard that. How is this done, I have a strange feeling it's rather easy.

Would some one please share this with me?

Thanks

[raphnix]

Man, do I feel red faced asking this question, but RE: this line....

" I do think that we should all continue using nofollow on our affiliate links, though. The last thing we should be doing is passing PR to the casino websites."

I have never heard that. How is this done, I have a strange feeling it's rather easy.

Would some one please share this with me?

Thanks

it's actually through editing your affiliate banner code. As just what the thread title said, you just have to put rel="nofollow".

Example:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>