Is PageRank Sculpting Effective And Will Google Kill The Nofollow Attribute?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 Comments (2)

Here’s another interesting new angle on a product that may be a good one, but since I haven’t used it I can’t vouch for it. But the interesting thing about this article is a startling statistic:

- nearly 15 billion links (~3% of all links) are using the nofollow attribute

- over 11 billion of those were internal (73% of instances of nofollow)

What’s this mean? Most of the people using nofollow as an attribute are doing it for PageRank sculpting reasons. They’re not selling links at all, which is the original reason Google introduced nofollow so that link sellers could sell links and not be penalized for selling PageRank. Instead, it’s being used differently. Three quick questions:

Does this mean link sellers are still selling PageRank?

Is the PageRank sculpting practice all that effective for those webmasters who are using it?

Will Google kill the nofollow attribute?

If you’ve been reading this blog the last few days then you know that Google’s Matt Cutts has publicly stated that PageRank sculpting is not all that effective. Is that just Googlespeak for “don’t do it guys”? Maybe Google really doesn’t like PageRank sculpting and their just trying to find a nice way of discouraging webmasters from doing it. Nevertheless, it appears their efforts aren’t working. People are doing it anyway.

That leads to the question, Will Google kill it? Will nofollow be trashed as a failed experiment? Would webmasters using PageRank do better in the long run by not using it? What do you think? Is Google on the verge of pissing off a lot of big site owners again with another change to its algorithms or will this just blow over as another development in Web history?

Comments (2) Category: Link Building

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2 Comments

Comment by Les

Made Thursday, 18 of June , 2009 at 6:58 am

It’s an interesting statistic. I wonder if it includes blogs and in particular comment links. The majority of blogs have nofollow as the default on comments and there are an awful lot blogs out there.

I was amused to read Matt Cutts when he said he only used nofollow on his RSS feed. Of course, he didn’t mention that his comments were all nofollow. He also said we shouldn’t go out and nofollow our comments to protect link juice – of course he doesn’t follow his own advice.

It will be interesting to see what the final wash is on this issue particulalry since it is not new – Google have been ignoring (for page rank) nofollow for over a year now – and no one really noticed!

cheers
les

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 18 of June , 2009 at 7:08 am

@Les – You are correct it should be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next 6 months or so…yeah no did notice! I have personally not looked at Google Page Rank for at least 2 years as far as I am concerned Google visitor growth is much more important to a business that Google PR…