Google should punish sites that abuse NoFollow

[enterscope]

Links are always DoFollow and search engines crawl links regardless. Google even uses NoFollow links in their algorithm so the question is does using NoFollow in your site benefit you at all?

I would think Bloggers that make all of their outbound links NoFollow to boost SEO would only be making things more complicated for Google to determine which links are relevant to article.

To me, it would be best to keep all your links DoFollow accept maybe comments, and then manually add the NoFollow attribute to your non-relevant links.

I'm sure Google is aware of the DoFollow fuss and the trend of webmasters making their links noFollow for SEO. How do you think they will handle this?

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by enterscope.com

I would think Bloggers that make all of their outbound links NoFollow to boost SEO would only be making things more complicated for Google to determine which links are relevant to article.

Hmm. If I understand you correctly you think that using the NF attribute has an effect on the SEO of the site where the attribute is used. To the best of my knowledge, it does not. You can't, for example, retain PageRank by using the NF attribute. Webmasters tried that shortly after the NF was introduced; it was called PageRank Sculpting and Google put a stop to it.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Originally Posted by enterscope.com

To me, it would be best to keep all your links DoFollow accept maybe comments, and then manually add the NoFollow attribute to your non-relevant links.

I have a question for you,
Why do you have non relevant links on your pages in the first place?

What added value to these have for your readers?

[enterscope]

Originally Posted by HTMLBasicTutor

I have a question for you,
Why do you have non relevant links on your pages in the first place?

What added value to these have for your readers?

You make a good point, but take for instance Social Media buttons like Twitter and Facebook. You don't want to be losing link juice to some buttons and they aren't necessarily relevant to the content.

[overeneltec]

whatever, I never use nofollow links

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by enterscope.com

You make a good point, but take for instance Social Media buttons like Twitter and Facebook. You don't want to be losing link juice to some buttons and they aren't necessarily relevant to the content.

But you can't save link juice that way.

Let me reiterate. When the NF attribute was first introduced clever webmasters figured out they could 'sculpt PageRank' with it. Google updated the algorithm so that you can't do that. Basically, they divide all the PR between all the links on the page whether they have the nofollow attrribute or not. And then they pass the 'share' along if the link is followed.

So, there is no reason to add nofollow to a link for your own Link juice reserve, as it were.

[curier]

i tried something ones, i had 20 pages from my web site in the footer - like a site map ( these before the algorithm changes ) and one day i put all of the pages nofollow besides one. In the next week the page that was left dofollow, rank #1 . So dofollow, nofollow matter

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by curier

i tried something ones, i had 20 pages from my web site in the footer - like a site map ( these before the algorithm changes ) and one day i put all of the pages nofollow besides one. In the next week the page that was left dofollow, rank #1 . So dofollow, nofollow matter

When did you do that? Because Google said it put a stop to PR sculpting a long time ago.

[rypher21]

either way around, its up to you whether you want to have dofollow which has more weigh than the nofollow one...its a matter of strategy

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by rypher21

either way around, its up to you whether you want to have dofollow which has more weigh than the nofollow one...its a matter of strategy

How do you figure? I think the OP is talking about whether to have links on his own site followed or not ...

[Dan]

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

But you can't save link juice that way.

Let me reiterate. When the NF attribute was first introduced clever webmasters figured out they could 'sculpt PageRank' with it. Google updated the algorithm so that you can't do that. Basically, they divide all the PR between all the links on the page whether they have the nofollow attrribute or not. And then they pass the 'share' along if the link is followed.

So, there is no reason to add nofollow to a link for your own Link juice reserve, as it were.

I wasn't aware that each link no matter the attribute took a "share" of the juice. Until recently my homepage probably had an excessive amount of links on it. The reason for this was that we communicated our changelog to the front page (sites added, changes made, sites removed). The sites removed was massive. Since we are so strict, it could be in the high hundreds to thousands versus say an actual handful of links that were "added". The removed links were all NF. I hadn't realised they were all copping a "share" as it were, even if that share isn't passed on to them, they are still taking a slice out of the pie that the others who are worthy could be eating.

I'm glad I made the change a couple of months ago to turn that off.

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

When did you do that? Because Google said it put a stop to PR sculpting a long time ago.

Pagerank Sculpting, to my knowledge, was a scam that certain SEOs pushed a while back which was knocked on the head by Google, and is largely considered these days to be an official scam.

Yes certain SEOs worked out you could filter the juice a certain way, but just as soon as it began it was stopped.

So the actual scam itself was to pretend that Pagerank Sculpting still worked (clearly some people are still under the false impression that it does). It was perpetuated for a long long time after it was killed, simply because certain SEOs had an agenda to protect by pretending you could still do it (i.e. they charged clients money to pagerank sculpt their sites for them via internal link manipulaton including the heavy use of NF --- and they wanted to continue to make that easy money by selling their unassuming clients the idea that it works, even though it had been stopped).