As you likely know, blogs are a great and informal way to build long-term search engine rankings. But how will Google’s new NoFollow PageRank policy announced in yesterday’s SEO-e post affect blogs’ ability to get the most link juice they can for their parent websites?
Search Engine Roundtable gives a good explanation of the effects this change can potentially have. For instance, if you have 10 links on a page and nofollow 5 of them, the 5 that are followed will only get half credit now.
Therefore, if you have 40 links on your page and 15 of them are nofollows, over 1/3 of your links will be wasted according to SER’s example.
Blogs automatically generate nofollow links through user-generated comments – so technically, this change will have a pretty big impact on sites that include blogs since search engine optimization professionals use nofollow links in a practice called PageRank sculpting – or diverting PageRank to more important, higher conversion pages.
See the conversation at WebmasterWorld for more insights.