Google’s Nofollow Changes

If it is not clear from Google’s recent comparison of SEOs to “criminals,” the search giant has taken an even more antagonistic stance against organic search marketers than usual recently. The latest evidence is a significant change in the way the “nofollow” attribute works. In the past, nofollow conserved a given web page’s PageRank by only passing relevance (or ‘link juice’ in industry parlance), and the tagged link would not be followed by spiders.

A bit fuzzy? Let’s say that each link on a page is a shot glass, and PageRank is a bottle of … ginger ale. Sure. Normally, the ginger ale is poured out of the bottle and fills up each of the shot glasses. The nofollow attribute prevented some of the shot glasses on the page from being filled, which means more ginger ale for your website.

Now? Well, now, it’s like the bottle of ginger ale fills up those shot glasses and then starts pouring a bunch of ginger ale on the floor. Any of the PR that would have gone to the nofollowed links is still lost into the ether. This is bad news for overenthusiastic nofollowers, especially for site owners who nofollowed their internal links. Blogs with lots of comments, this affects you too.

This does not mean, however, that nofollow is now useless. It is still beneficial as a tool for keeping certain pages or sections of your site from being crawled.