Keven Newcomb has a detailed writeup at SearchEngineWatch about recent remarks made by Google's Matt Cutts that reveal that Google is treating the
This counteracts a somewhat shady strategy of "Page Rank Sculpting" which had been employed by some sites to pump up the ranking of linked-to sites by selectively applying the
To me this is just a tempest in the proverbial teapot. Google has tuned their algorithm so that the attribute serves its original purpose, to prevent spammers from abusing content submission points as a way of littering the net with links to their sites. It wasn't intended to be a system for gaming good karma in the search space.
As I mentioned in a prior post, our comment submission system automatically converts bare URLs into hyperlinks with the
It might be worth taking a look at a Rand Fishkin post referenced in Newcomb's article, too. He includes diagrams illustrating the change and provides a flowchart for deciding whether Link Sculpting should be considered.
The first question that you will see is "Do I have 1000s of pages not in Google's index?" If you are a Compendium customer, the answer should be "no" regardless of how long you have been using our software. Every time a post is approved for publication, our application sends out update notification pings to several services, including Google's blog search. Each individual post page contains back links to the main blog page as well as other blogs written by members of the organization. If it gets published, search engines will find it.
That means that you can spend your time bullet point #1 on the "no" branch of the flowchart: content development.
rel='nofollow' attribute on hyperlinks a bit differently than it has in the past.Basically, using nofollow will still prevent PageRank from passing from the linking page through the nofollowed link. But that PageRank is no longer "saved" to be used by other links on the page. It just "evaporates," according to Cutts.
This counteracts a somewhat shady strategy of "Page Rank Sculpting" which had been employed by some sites to pump up the ranking of linked-to sites by selectively applying the
rel='nofollow' attribute. The comments section on the article contained plenty of outrage, with at least one person suggesting that Google may be acting like an abusive monopoly.To me this is just a tempest in the proverbial teapot. Google has tuned their algorithm so that the attribute serves its original purpose, to prevent spammers from abusing content submission points as a way of littering the net with links to their sites. It wasn't intended to be a system for gaming good karma in the search space.
As I mentioned in a prior post, our comment submission system automatically converts bare URLs into hyperlinks with the
rel='nofollow' attribute. Because comments don't appear on a page until they have been approved by the blog's administrator, spammy links never get the chance to see the light of day.It might be worth taking a look at a Rand Fishkin post referenced in Newcomb's article, too. He includes diagrams illustrating the change and provides a flowchart for deciding whether Link Sculpting should be considered.
The first question that you will see is "Do I have 1000s of pages not in Google's index?" If you are a Compendium customer, the answer should be "no" regardless of how long you have been using our software. Every time a post is approved for publication, our application sends out update notification pings to several services, including Google's blog search. Each individual post page contains back links to the main blog page as well as other blogs written by members of the organization. If it gets published, search engines will find it.
That means that you can spend your time bullet point #1 on the "no" branch of the flowchart: content development.
Comments for Does Google's Shift on rel/nofollow Matter for Blogging SEO?
Leave a comment