In my last post, The Secret to Long-Term SEO Success – Ditch the Engines, Follow Your Customers, I went over the importance of targeting real people over search bots to achieve long-term results. And just last week, news in the SEO community presented a perfect example of what I was talking about – the nofollow link debate.
In case you missed it, Google czar Matt Cutts announced at SMX Advanced that the nofollow link attribute doesn’t work to funnel PageRank internally (as SEO’s had originally thought). Rather than conserve PageRank and link authority, nofollow actually results in waste.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land explains that “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.”
This change in how Google attributes PageRank has stirred a lot of debate in the search marketing community. Some SEO’s are frantically making changes to their site architecture, while others are calling Google’s bluff (Google doesn’t always do what it says after all). If the nofollow change is in fact true, SEOs who are using it as a key strategy stand to lose. It doesn’t pay to chase the algorithm.
Nofollow was originally created to combat blog comment spam and to prevent penalties from paid links. Webmasters later discovered that the attribute could be used to “sculpt” PageRank (i.e. funnel link juice and ranking potential to the most profitable pages). Whatever its application, nofollow only exists to direct search engine robots. It’s essentially a band-aid used to cover up flaws in Google’s algorithm.
The nofollow attribute is unnatural and goes against the practice of optimizing for real people. In other words, it shouldn’t be included as a strategy for long-term SEO success. Sure, it’s beneficial to keep up-to-date on the latest tactics and to utilize any tools that the engines give you, but that should always be secondary to optimizing for real people.
So what should you do? Nofollow the nofollow attribute and anything else used to artificially manipulate the search engines. Stick with what works – a solid site architecture, link-worthy content, and a diverse high-quality link profile. That’s what will give you long-term sustainable results in SEO.
