Date: 14 Aug 2009 Comments: 1

Shifting gears away from email marketing, I wanted to call out an interview that SEOmoz has posted today with Matt Cutts, the face of the Google search quality team.  The interview delves into the use of Page Rank Sculpting (or utilizing the “no follow” tag – rel=nofollow) to influence the Google bot’s indexing of pages on your site.

Recall that in June of 2009 there was a bit of a bombshell dropped on the SEO community when Cutts suggested that Page Rank Sculpting is no longer an effective means to building site traffic.  This was a common tactic used by SEO Engineers to flow traffic to deeper pages within the site by essentially blocking the less important pages from the search engines.  Many SEO Engineers would tell their clients that this was some innovative maneuver that no one was doing and that their traffic would sky rocket.

The statement that Google no longer recognized this commonly abused tactic as a benefit was one surprise, but the suggestion that it might actually be hurting search results was crushing for a large swath of the SEO community that put such faith in implementing this across client sites.  In the video I linked to above, Cutts states that it is still acceptable to use no follow tagging when you’re linking to external sites that you do not have 100% familiarity with or trust in.  However, he recommends against using no follow tags to pages within your own site.  In fact, he advised to take the time and remove them from your homepage and if it is easily done to remove them throughout your entire site.

I’m a bit cynical and don’t believe everything that emerges from Google HQ.  Yet, this is something I would agree to do.  At this point, there are a myriad of other tactics to deploy that can increase traffic.  I suggest removing no follows entirely from your site and if you are consulting with a client do not even think of bringing this topic up.  All they have to do is a quick search and there will be enough articles to raise red flags.  And when a red flag is raised in the mind of a client you’ve got big problems.

In the comments of the SEOmoz post Rand Fishkin offers up the following:

I just wanted to add that given recent experience with a few sites, I might be wary of removing nofollows entirely from a site. There have now been three sites we’ve seen (through consulting, friends and Q+A) where removal of the nofollows led to a dramatic loss of traffic. In each case, it appeared that this was because Google was indexing fewer of the deep, long-tail targeted pages (all of these sites were relatively large). And, in each case, putting the nofollows back on seemed to fix the problem.

Now, obviously, these could all be weird cases of coincidence, but it seems pretty unlikely. The one I was able to observe most closely certainly showed fewer numbers of pages indexed in Google right after and that number went back up after the nofollows were replaced.

My personal advice right now is – if you’re just starting a new site or re-designing, choose your links intelligently so you don’t need to use nofollow. However, if you’re thinking about pulling all those nofollows off what you’ve already got, that could be a bit dangerous and you should monitor it carefully.

No one seems willing to say cut this off completely just in case there might be some smidgen of a benefit to be had.  I prefer to be better safe than sorry on this one and look for other ways to grow site traffic.  If you have a large site, maybe you test this out but watch traffic and rankings very closely.  You see the new shaved head that Matt Cutts is sporting in the video?  He does not look like someone you want to mess with!