Matt Cutts remembers that:
jaamit June 16, 2009 at 1:09 am What I want to know is, what happens to all that PageRank that evaporates as a result of all those nofollowed links? Is it the equivalent of the stash of confiscated drugs and weapons at a police station? Can Google set up an evaporated PageRank lottery every month where a lucky site can win it all (a bit like Free Parking in monopoly)?
Still not being convinced, Matt Cutts replies:
I think the dial has swung too far. Seth Rietdijk June 16, 2009 at 6:11 am Correct me if I am wrong but what Matt is actually saying is that the nofollow thingy is already going on for at least a year if nothing shocking happened to your website within that year what are you guys all worrying about? I got a email from a guy who stated that I should read this post since our website is using nofollow first of all: i read the article already, secondly: our website is doing fine at this moment so why should I change it? PR calculation by the way is getting much less important anyway. So I really do not get why everyone is still brabbing about it :S
As Matt Cutts says:
Michael Martinez June 16, 2009 at 10:44 am You cannot prevent people in the SEO industry from buying into nonsense and bad advice. PageRank sculpting has always been a waste of time and resources.
Matt Cutts is rather skeptical:
Thanks for the update and the clarification on several points. I ve never been a fan of PageRank Sculpting and I m now glad that I didn t go down that route. I m still amazed that the certain changes that Google makes to the algorithm go unnoticed while other factors get a lot more attention.
Matt Cutts brings more details:
Unbelievable.For a year now, I have effectively been penalised for using a rel= nofollow in a responsible way.I can think of many other reasonable uses that do not amount to page sculpting, where sites will have been penalized.
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Rajeev Motwani From: Matt Cutts /26709687
Having that in mind, Matt Cutts wonders:
So ordinarily there s a 10-15% chance that a surfer gets bored and leaves a page to another random page. Given a page with 10 links, that leaves 85% chance that a random surfer will click on one of those links (though in reality, probably the chance that a surfer will click on a link that s near the hot spot page upper left will be higher).
Similarly, Matt Cutts adds:
If the assumption here is that webmasters will remove the nofollow attributes in response to this change, then why did take more than a year for someone from Google to present this information to the public? It seems that if this logic had anything at all to do with the decision to change the nofollow policy, Google would have announced it immediately in order to encourage webmasters to change their linking policies and allow access to their pages with high-quality information.
Matt Cutts might have an idea about it:
I think the dial has swung too far. Seth Rietdijk June 16, 2009 at 6:11 am Correct me if I am wrong but what Matt is actually saying is that the nofollow thingy is already going on for at least a year if nothing shocking happened to your website within that year what are you guys all worrying about? I got a email from a guy who stated that I should read this post since our website is using nofollow first of all: i read the article already, secondly: our website is doing fine at this moment so why should I change it? PR calculation by the way is getting much less important anyway. So I really do not get why everyone is still brabbing about it :S
Matt Cutts thinks about it:
So, I d appreciate if you can give us a simple solution to this, may be a few guidelines to follow while using the nofollow tag, or linking generally, so that a webmaster can just write it down his white board, and focus on his content rather than fretting over complex calculations.
For this reason, Matt Cutts says:
You can try to sculpt your pagerank if you wish, but fixing the issues you may have with your site structure and architecture would benefit you more in the long run. Also; unless you are very skilled with pagerank and SEO, you should probably not attempt anything as it could lead to unintended consequences.
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
So ordinarily there s a 10-15% chance that a surfer gets bored and leaves a page to another random page. Given a page with 10 links, that leaves 85% chance that a random surfer will click on one of those links (though in reality, probably the chance that a surfer will click on a link that s near the hot spot page upper left will be higher).
Similarly, Matt Cutts adds:
If the assumption here is that webmasters will remove the nofollow attributes in response to this change, then why did take more than a year for someone from Google to present this information to the public? It seems that if this logic had anything at all to do with the decision to change the nofollow policy, Google would have announced it immediately in order to encourage webmasters to change their linking policies and allow access to their pages with high-quality information.
Matt Cutts might have an idea about it:
I think the dial has swung too far. Seth Rietdijk June 16, 2009 at 6:11 am Correct me if I am wrong but what Matt is actually saying is that the nofollow thingy is already going on for at least a year if nothing shocking happened to your website within that year what are you guys all worrying about? I got a email from a guy who stated that I should read this post since our website is using nofollow first of all: i read the article already, secondly: our website is doing fine at this moment so why should I change it? PR calculation by the way is getting much less important anyway. So I really do not get why everyone is still brabbing about it :S
Matt Cutts thinks about it:
So, I d appreciate if you can give us a simple solution to this, may be a few guidelines to follow while using the nofollow tag, or linking generally, so that a webmaster can just write it down his white board, and focus on his content rather than fretting over complex calculations.
For this reason, Matt Cutts says:
You can try to sculpt your pagerank if you wish, but fixing the issues you may have with your site structure and architecture would benefit you more in the long run. Also; unless you are very skilled with pagerank and SEO, you should probably not attempt anything as it could lead to unintended consequences.
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Friday, August 14, 2009
Rajeev Motwani From: Matt Cutts /26692740
Matt Cutts might have an idea about it:
I agree that the more facts that you provide and if you were to provide the complete algorithm, people would abuse it but if it were available to everyone, would it not almost force people to implement better site building and navigation policies and white hat seo simply because everyone would have the same tools to work with and an absolute standard to adhere to.
Matt Cutts shows how it is done:
Dave (original) June 16, 2009 at 7:54 pm Matt, don t you fear creating an uneven playing field for Google if we have 2 basic Webmaster types?
For this reason, Matt Cutts says:
I ve never been particularly enamoured with nofollow, mainly because it breaks the do it for humans rule in a way that other robots standards do not. With other standards (e.g. robots.txt, robots meta tag), the emphasis has been on crawling and indexing; not ranking. And those other standards also strike a balance between what s good for the publisher and what s good for the search engine; whereas with nofollow, the effort has been placed on the publisher with most of the benefit enjoyed by the search engine.
In contrast, Matt Cutts replies:
Alex L. June 19, 2009 at 5:58 am Hi Matt, we are currently about to upload a mayor project that includes applying no-follows to a numerous amount of links. This project was not conceived as a method of sculpting the site but because in out webmasters tools google alerted us that the site had too many links and this could affect crawling. This is mainly because we have a high listing and because we offer the users many filtering options which makes for great user experience as several surveys indicated. The idea of the no-follows was to apply them to these filtering links to tell google not to follow them. Do you think this is the way to go?. After reading your post I am affraid that we might be making a mistake.
Before going any further, Matt Cutts wants to get this straight:
Titus June 17, 2009 at 4:14 pm Is this a serious bug in the Google s Algorithm or Just a simple SEO mistake on my part?
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
I agree that the more facts that you provide and if you were to provide the complete algorithm, people would abuse it but if it were available to everyone, would it not almost force people to implement better site building and navigation policies and white hat seo simply because everyone would have the same tools to work with and an absolute standard to adhere to.
Matt Cutts shows how it is done:
Dave (original) June 16, 2009 at 7:54 pm Matt, don t you fear creating an uneven playing field for Google if we have 2 basic Webmaster types?
For this reason, Matt Cutts says:
I ve never been particularly enamoured with nofollow, mainly because it breaks the do it for humans rule in a way that other robots standards do not. With other standards (e.g. robots.txt, robots meta tag), the emphasis has been on crawling and indexing; not ranking. And those other standards also strike a balance between what s good for the publisher and what s good for the search engine; whereas with nofollow, the effort has been placed on the publisher with most of the benefit enjoyed by the search engine.
In contrast, Matt Cutts replies:
Alex L. June 19, 2009 at 5:58 am Hi Matt, we are currently about to upload a mayor project that includes applying no-follows to a numerous amount of links. This project was not conceived as a method of sculpting the site but because in out webmasters tools google alerted us that the site had too many links and this could affect crawling. This is mainly because we have a high listing and because we offer the users many filtering options which makes for great user experience as several surveys indicated. The idea of the no-follows was to apply them to these filtering links to tell google not to follow them. Do you think this is the way to go?. After reading your post I am affraid that we might be making a mistake.
Before going any further, Matt Cutts wants to get this straight:
Titus June 17, 2009 at 4:14 pm Is this a serious bug in the Google s Algorithm or Just a simple SEO mistake on my part?
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Rajeev Motwani From: Matt Cutts /26692739
Matt Cutts intervenes and adds:
Great topic and most of the discussion is interesting as well. Love the feedback from the Power SEOs . Matt thanks for the response to Chris_D s comment:
Matt Cutts brings a word of caution:
Yuro June 17, 2009 at 4:07 am So What you are saying is that page rank sculpting is not an important issue, page rank is just one of 200 factor that determine serps. Webmaster doesn t have to worry about this stuff because the impact is miniscule, right?
However, Matt Cutts states that:
Great topic and most of the discussion is interesting as well. Love the feedback from the Power SEOs . Matt thanks for the response to Chris_D s comment:
While it may be true, Matt Cutts thinks:
zanakin June 18, 2009 at 3:28 pm Firstly, we should notice the new nofollow rules is fair. If you want to modelize surfers behaviour (Google s goal), you have to ignore nofollow links but have to count it. Now there s the wikipedia case. Okay Wikipedia provides a great unique content but wikipedia s SEO success comes from a systematic nofollow use (AKA SEO Black hole). The new nofollow rules will reduce the link juice capacity of each wikipedia page. Of course deeper wikipedia page will suffer the most and should drop in the SERP. If wikipedia drops in the Google index, this is perhaps a good news for another knowledge product . knol (by Google)! Surprised? My 0,02€
Matt Cutts notices:
Q: How do you use nofollow on your own internal links on your personal website? A: I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I d recommend that you do the same. I don t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results. Even that s not strictly necessary, because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages.
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Great topic and most of the discussion is interesting as well. Love the feedback from the Power SEOs . Matt thanks for the response to Chris_D s comment:
Matt Cutts brings a word of caution:
Yuro June 17, 2009 at 4:07 am So What you are saying is that page rank sculpting is not an important issue, page rank is just one of 200 factor that determine serps. Webmaster doesn t have to worry about this stuff because the impact is miniscule, right?
However, Matt Cutts states that:
Great topic and most of the discussion is interesting as well. Love the feedback from the Power SEOs . Matt thanks for the response to Chris_D s comment:
While it may be true, Matt Cutts thinks:
zanakin June 18, 2009 at 3:28 pm Firstly, we should notice the new nofollow rules is fair. If you want to modelize surfers behaviour (Google s goal), you have to ignore nofollow links but have to count it. Now there s the wikipedia case. Okay Wikipedia provides a great unique content but wikipedia s SEO success comes from a systematic nofollow use (AKA SEO Black hole). The new nofollow rules will reduce the link juice capacity of each wikipedia page. Of course deeper wikipedia page will suffer the most and should drop in the SERP. If wikipedia drops in the Google index, this is perhaps a good news for another knowledge product . knol (by Google)! Surprised? My 0,02€
Matt Cutts notices:
Q: How do you use nofollow on your own internal links on your personal website? A: I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I d recommend that you do the same. I don t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results. Even that s not strictly necessary, because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages.
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Rajeev Motwani From: Matt Cutts /26666810
Matt Cutts scans the other's answers and reply:
youfoundjake June 15, 2009 at 10:16 pm Wow, what surprises me most about this is that its been happening for over a year, and no one noticed. Another item I saw addressed in this was the 3 way linking, and how that has become less effective due to the decay factor to fight the Infinite PageRank loop. Good to know.. So, after everything is said and done, don t cut corners, create great linkable content, and mind your site architecture.
Before going any further, Matt Cutts wants to get this straight:
If you have 10 links on a page, 5 being normal, 5 going to pages with a noindex meta tag, and the page has 10 points. Do the 5 normal links get 2 points each, or 1 point each?
Before going any further, Matt Cutts wants to get this straight:
P.S. having turned on the nofollow indicator plug in on Firefox a long time ago, I have seen some of the abuse on this. However, I still don t think that this way is the best method to combat this. You could of just downgraded the trust score on sites that had abused the nofollow thing to silly levels.
Matt Cutts can't forget that:
James Strutton June 18, 2009 at 1:29 pm How does this all relate to disallows in the robots.txt? My ecom site has 12,661 pages disallowed because we got nailed for duplicate content. We sale batteries so revisons to each battery where coming up as duplicate content. Is PageRank being sent (and ignored) to these internal disallowed links as well? One of our category levels has hundreds of links to different series found under models, the majority of these series are disallowed. If PageRank acts the same with disallows as it does with nofollows, are these disallowed links are hurting our
While it may be true, Matt Cutts thinks:
If you have 10 links on a page, 5 being normal, 5 going to pages with a noindex meta tag, and the page has 10 points. Do the 5 normal links get 2 points each, or 1 point each?
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
youfoundjake June 15, 2009 at 10:16 pm Wow, what surprises me most about this is that its been happening for over a year, and no one noticed. Another item I saw addressed in this was the 3 way linking, and how that has become less effective due to the decay factor to fight the Infinite PageRank loop. Good to know.. So, after everything is said and done, don t cut corners, create great linkable content, and mind your site architecture.
Before going any further, Matt Cutts wants to get this straight:
If you have 10 links on a page, 5 being normal, 5 going to pages with a noindex meta tag, and the page has 10 points. Do the 5 normal links get 2 points each, or 1 point each?
Before going any further, Matt Cutts wants to get this straight:
P.S. having turned on the nofollow indicator plug in on Firefox a long time ago, I have seen some of the abuse on this. However, I still don t think that this way is the best method to combat this. You could of just downgraded the trust score on sites that had abused the nofollow thing to silly levels.
Matt Cutts can't forget that:
James Strutton June 18, 2009 at 1:29 pm How does this all relate to disallows in the robots.txt? My ecom site has 12,661 pages disallowed because we got nailed for duplicate content. We sale batteries so revisons to each battery where coming up as duplicate content. Is PageRank being sent (and ignored) to these internal disallowed links as well? One of our category levels has hundreds of links to different series found under models, the majority of these series are disallowed. If PageRank acts the same with disallows as it does with nofollows, are these disallowed links are hurting our
While it may be true, Matt Cutts thinks:
If you have 10 links on a page, 5 being normal, 5 going to pages with a noindex meta tag, and the page has 10 points. Do the 5 normal links get 2 points each, or 1 point each?
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Rajeev Motwani From: Matt Cutts /26223430
Matt Cutts notices:
Rob Johnson June 15, 2009 at 10:24 pm Thank you for a clear explanation of no-follow and page rank. I still have a few questions, which are mentioned by people above. I hope to see a reply from you soon! Thanks Matt
Matt Cutts shows how it is done:
righteous June 19, 2009 at 8:20 am Thinking of page-rank always makes my head hurt. Can we be 100% sure that the nofollow tag will not leech out PR? We don t really know what google is doing do we? Regards, R
In other words, Matt Cutts puts it this way:
Andy Beard June 15, 2009 at 10:15 pm I take it using noindex, nofollow on your date based archives isn t deliberate then?
In addition to this, Matt Cutts states:
Dennis Kubes June 16, 2009 at 6:02 am Interesting article. I don t think the Nutch algorithm currently takes nofollow into effect. I will have to see about adding that. Also hadn t thought about decreasing the rank value based on the spammyness of sites a page is linking into. My guess on how to do it would be determining the spammyness of individual pages based on multiple page and site factors, then some type of reverse pagerank calcuation starting with the those bad scores, then overlaying that on top of the good pagerank calculation as a penalty. This is another thing which would be interesting to play around with in the Nutch algorithm.
Matt Cutts is rather skeptical:
Alfredo June 17, 2009 at 2:29 am Hi Matt, what if i have these referrer links inside my site? For example, my domain is http://www.domain.com I have a link to an inside page http://www.domain.com/referrer123456/page.html on my site, but the original link is http://www.domain.com/page.html would it make sense if i add nofollow to http://www.domain.com/referrer123456/page.html to prevent duplicate content penalty right? I tried link rel canonical and i still see duplicate urls on the google index.
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Rob Johnson June 15, 2009 at 10:24 pm Thank you for a clear explanation of no-follow and page rank. I still have a few questions, which are mentioned by people above. I hope to see a reply from you soon! Thanks Matt
Matt Cutts shows how it is done:
righteous June 19, 2009 at 8:20 am Thinking of page-rank always makes my head hurt. Can we be 100% sure that the nofollow tag will not leech out PR? We don t really know what google is doing do we? Regards, R
In other words, Matt Cutts puts it this way:
Andy Beard June 15, 2009 at 10:15 pm I take it using noindex, nofollow on your date based archives isn t deliberate then?
In addition to this, Matt Cutts states:
Dennis Kubes June 16, 2009 at 6:02 am Interesting article. I don t think the Nutch algorithm currently takes nofollow into effect. I will have to see about adding that. Also hadn t thought about decreasing the rank value based on the spammyness of sites a page is linking into. My guess on how to do it would be determining the spammyness of individual pages based on multiple page and site factors, then some type of reverse pagerank calcuation starting with the those bad scores, then overlaying that on top of the good pagerank calculation as a penalty. This is another thing which would be interesting to play around with in the Nutch algorithm.
Matt Cutts is rather skeptical:
Alfredo June 17, 2009 at 2:29 am Hi Matt, what if i have these referrer links inside my site? For example, my domain is http://www.domain.com I have a link to an inside page http://www.domain.com/referrer123456/page.html on my site, but the original link is http://www.domain.com/page.html would it make sense if i add nofollow to http://www.domain.com/referrer123456/page.html to prevent duplicate content penalty right? I tried link rel canonical and i still see duplicate urls on the google index.
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
Monday, August 10, 2009
Rajeev Motwani From: Matt Cutts /26193467
Matt Cutts brings a word of caution:
You ve stated that any page with nofollowed links on it passes less PR than it would otherwise through any followed links. Its voting ability is reduced.
Matt Cutts has another idea:
Even the biggest sites including Google sites seem to be totally unaware of the implications.I find it amazing that youtube.com has been nofollowing its featured videos for last 12 months (still doing it as I type) when it now seems that this means i dont trust this content and i want to page rank to flow to this content . In fact a quick glance at a youtube page tells you that youtube are currently flushing 50% of their page rank (very approx) down the toilet on every page.
But Matt Cutts has a different opinion:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en answer=139394. Bear in mind that if you can make your site work without session IDs or make it so that you don t have multiple aliases for the same page, that s even better because it solves the problem at the root.
In other words, Matt Cutts puts it this way:
James June 16, 2009 at 12:48 am I think that this comment from Matt: I didn’t say that linking to high-quality sites helped your PageRank, but rather other parts of our system would encourage/reward those links.
Matt Cutts thinks that the problem is:
mcguillan June 16, 2009 at 1:01 am @Danny Sullivan I totally agree with you. It also encourages the so called power-SEOs to use old fashioned ways to sculpt their pagerank
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
You ve stated that any page with nofollowed links on it passes less PR than it would otherwise through any followed links. Its voting ability is reduced.
Matt Cutts has another idea:
Even the biggest sites including Google sites seem to be totally unaware of the implications.I find it amazing that youtube.com has been nofollowing its featured videos for last 12 months (still doing it as I type) when it now seems that this means i dont trust this content and i want to page rank to flow to this content . In fact a quick glance at a youtube page tells you that youtube are currently flushing 50% of their page rank (very approx) down the toilet on every page.
But Matt Cutts has a different opinion:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en answer=139394. Bear in mind that if you can make your site work without session IDs or make it so that you don t have multiple aliases for the same page, that s even better because it solves the problem at the root.
In other words, Matt Cutts puts it this way:
James June 16, 2009 at 12:48 am I think that this comment from Matt: I didn’t say that linking to high-quality sites helped your PageRank, but rather other parts of our system would encourage/reward those links.
Matt Cutts thinks that the problem is:
mcguillan June 16, 2009 at 1:01 am @Danny Sullivan I totally agree with you. It also encourages the so called power-SEOs to use old fashioned ways to sculpt their pagerank
Sources:
Matt Cutts
Disclaimer:
This text is automatically generated from different sources on the internet. It must be considered an experiment
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