5 Effects of Google Ignoring Nofollow Based PageRank Sculpting

Recently Matt Cutts from Google made a statement in which he clearly stated that PageRank scuplting using No-follow tags will not be possible anymore and this created a strong hullabaloo in the SEO world. Let’s take a look at what Matt said and how exactly does it affect the World Wide Web, SEO or otherwise.

What Matt Said about PageRank Sculpting and No-Follow

Earlier No-follow could be used to sculpt PageRank by restricting the flow of PageRank to the no-followed links and the additional PR juice available would flow into the remaining links. However, now no-follow would still prevent PR from moving onto the no-followed pages but would not add additional PR juice to the remaining links, it would evaporate. To illustrate it further look at the highly simplified equations below:

Earlier
PR10 -> 5 Links -> 3 links No-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 5 each

Now
PR10 -> 5 links -> 3 links no-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 2 each
-> Balance 6 for the other 3 links Evaporates

A Concern in the Blogosphere – Losss of PageRank

Sites with too many links (particularly blogs with loads of comments and links in them) might lose PageRank or will have very little PageRank

No Real Concern for Losing PageRank

What Matt said didn’t talk about how a page might lose Page Rank it talked about how the PR is distributed among outgoing links. It has been long stated that PR doesn’t leak. It is just a vote for other sites – when you link to a site you give them some PR power but you don’t lose any of your PR. So if you have thousands of links on your page that would actually reduce your potential to pass PR to other pages but would not affect your own Page Rank.

You can see the original PR formula here . Though I am sure this must have gone through multiple iterations but it would help to understand the basics and confirm the fact that there is no risk of losing your Page Rank by linking to other pages.

So, No-follow doesn’t help PR Sculpting – How does it effects the Web ?

• It becomes more difficult to increase your PageRank now as most pages would get a substantial reduction in their potential to pass PageRank to other pages

• Overall reduction in the tendency to link to other websites as most sites would like to retain their potential to pass PR to fuel their own pages ( through internal navigation). This could actually mean detrimental to the basic principle of WWW.

• Blogosphere gets affected as a substantial part of it involves user generated content and links play a major role in this. So less number of links = less citations, lesser resources

• Old school methods ( pre no-follow era) for PR sculpting like putting links in iframes, Flash, JavaScript links etc would come into play. Google is now rendering basic JavaScript as well, so that might not be a full proof method. Putting not so important links or user generated content area in AJAX would probably add to the list.

• In all likeliness, niche websites would have relatively higher competition – There are authority websites on every industry but in spite of there existence there are various niche websites that survive and do good. This happens not because the authority websites do not have content on those niche segments but because they would often focus more on broader terms that drive more traffic and profit and care less about the niche segments and at times even link to these smaller sites when covering those niche areas. This helps them to retain their focus on the broader terms and maximize profit rather than diluting there effort over a wide variety of keywords. These links to the smaller sites are always no-followed. Now when the sites realize that using a no-follow would not preserve the PR for its own pages and it actually evaporates, they would stop linking to external niche sites and build their own pages on those niches. Because of the website authority, in most cases these niche pages on authority websites would start beating the niche websites in SERP.

I am sure there will be other impacts of this as well; it’s for us to wait and find out. If you can think of any other possible effects of this new Google policy of disabling PageRank Sculpting with no-follow tag please feel free to add in comments.