When Google Changes to No Follow

A sunny morning, to start activities on this day I want to write about some changes expected to be coming to Google in terms of the no-follow attribute. These no-follow changes have some pretty significant implications for lots of things, first and Foremost though it seems these changes are specifically geared to mitigate, to some degree, the Effectiveness of PR sculpting.

Now, PR sculpting is a fairly advanced concept a lot of folks may not fully understand. So, I figured I would try to provide some explanation of at least the general ideas involved. That seems like the best way to go about explaining why Google is looking to make some sort of change in their treatment of no-follow. If you understand PageRank sculpting, on other words, you will get why Google might not like it so much.

I expect I will have at least 5 people 'way smarter than me' hop in the comments or rip me in Twitter for leaving out 'this' or 'that' in terms of the subtle nuances of PR sculpting. My response to this would be; for the purposes of this article, the subtleties are immaterial. So simmer down. I would be remiss however if I didn't add a little warning in here for people to thoroughly read up and make sure you understand PR sculpting before you start slapping no-follows all over your site. You really can screw your site up if you do it wrong.

So what the heck is it anyway? I'm so glad you asked. We'll start with the concept of your Page Rank 'power' or 'authority'. This is the overall 'value' of a given page in terms of how much 'authority' that page has to pass along via it's outbound links. You have no doubt heard people talk about 'link juice', that's what link juice is. The more important (in Google's eyes) a page is, the more link juice it possesses.

Now think of your website as a bucket (or maybe an elegant punchbowl or some kind of fine china bowl if a bucket is too base of a mental image for you). Your bucket contains all of your link juice. Now think of your outbound links as tiny holes in your bucket. Your link juice flows through the holes and passes on your page's authority.

Now, the PR sculpting theory holds that the more holes you have in your bucket, the more your link juice is spread around or diluted. This is at least in part supported by the search engine accepted and approved concept of Crawl Efficiency (see the Vanessa Fox video or article for more on that). Search engines aren't going to spend forever crawling and indexing every link on every page, so the concept of crawl efficiency basically means you prioritize the important stuff for them.

How do you do this? Well you stick no-follow attributes on non-important links. PR sculpting theory takes this one step further and says that ALL outbound links count as a hole in your bucket, so you would then want to make more liberal use of no-follow to help direct the flow of the link juice. For example; if you had navigation links at the top of your page, in the side bar and again in your footer, PR sculpting would say you add no-follow attributes to all but one set of them. Less holes = more juice flowing through the holes that are left. Get the idea? Good.

Now, there are some rumors or suggestions that Google may be going to change how they look at no-follow in relation to how the link juice is passed along. So if you had, for example, 10 outbound links on a page and no-followed all but 2 of them, effective PR sculpting would funnel all of your juice through those 2 and not dilute it all over 10. Google, being ... well, Google does not like to have situations where people can 'control' the value of links - especially for the purposes of ranking better in Google.

So much buzzing and grumbling ensued when it was suggested that Google might not look at no-follow in quite the same way moving forward. If you have 10 links and no-follow 8 of them in other words, they were still going to count you as having 10 holes in your bucket instead of sending more love to the 2 regular links you didn't add no-follow to.

By the end of the show, there still hadn't been much at all in the way of an official word from Google on the subject. However, I very strongly suspect we will have one soon. The implications for counting no-follow links 'against' you in terms of authority passing ability raises all sorts of difficulties.

For one, let's say you have a popular article that gets 500 comments. Most everybody that leaves a comment also leaves a link. Generally these links are no-followed. If more links = some sort of diminished or diluted authority of a page, that would seem to suggest your fantastic article that got 500 comments was maybe not as good as an article that only got maybe 5 comments.

Second, the whole no-follow thing was Google's idea to begin with. It's very existence is arguably not much more than a Google helper to assist them in managing the whole link economy they created out of their heavy reliance on links as a ranking factor.

Google hates paid links because paid links have the potential to impact search results and if you can buy links you can essentially raise your result in Google. The problem is, paid links have been around longer than Google.... we used to just call them ads. So, Google decided if you slap a no-follow attribute on a link, it meant you were not trying to pass your page authority on to that link and therefore weren't being paid to elevate said link in their index.

Now, it seems like Google is starting to see people using no-follow to emphasize links via the PR sculpting thing and they want to do something about it. A cynical person might say they sound like they are trying to have their cake and eat it too... but a Google person would just say they are just trying to protect the integrity of their index. Personally, I'm all for Google protecting the integrity of their index... but I think it gets to a point when maybe they need to do something about their index's over-reliance on inbound links as a ranking factor. Maybe then they wouldn't have to sweat this sort of thing quite so much and/or dump the burden of link formatting and management off on the webmasters and the SEOs of the world. Those guys have enough on their plate as it is.