Last updated on June 28th, 2009
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web Spam team, made a surprise announcement today regarding the nofollow attribute for links according to a Search Engine Watch article.
Nofollow links were originally developed by Google in ’05 to fight spamming on blogs. By 2007, they developed into a powerful tool for professional SEO’s who use them in a practice called PageRank sculpting, which diverts PageRank to more important pages on a site.
Rather than having link juice going to a static “contact us” or “about us” page, it can be going to pages that yield conversions.
But according to Cutts, who made the bombshell announcement at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, nofollow may not continue to work like SEOs think. Danny Sullivan explains it well, simply speaking:
“If you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.”
See this forum thread at Sphinn and blog post from Rusty Brick for more insights.