Google Changes Nofollow Policy, Will You Change How You Link?

Dance the dance, walk the walk, talk the talk or whatever you wish to call it. With Google recently announcing they changed how nofollow links are treated about a year ago, will this new knowledge change how site owners manage their internal and external links?

It was common practice for about the last 5 years to “sculpt” a sites pagerank by using the nofollow tag to keep the PR juice from flowing to pages of little value, like your contact and privacy policy pages etc. Previously, if you had 10 links on a page and you nofollowed all but 2 of them, those two would get all the PR juice and the 8 that were nofolowed got none. Well, this has changed and now under the same circumstances the 8 that are nofollowed still get no PR juice but instead of the remaining 2 getting all the PR juice they will now each get their equal share as divided by all links on the page whether followed or not, so instead of getting 50% each those 2 followed links will now get 10% each.

This policy change or shift impacts blogs a lot more than other traditional types of sites due to the ability of visitors to comment on the posts that are published, prior to this change, simply having a nofollow tag on the commenters link would preserve the PR juice for the followed links on the post pages, allowing bloggers to sculpt where the PR juice went. Now, on very popular blogs the available PR on any given blog post could be divided by hundreds of outgoing links, making any followed links on the page worth a lot less that they would be if you only had a few followed links you selected yourself.

Personally, I am not going to change how I do anything. I have already removed the nofollow tag for my comments anyhow, so this change will impact me very little but I am sure there are many bloggers out there who will see this as being quite detrimental to their overall ability to profit by including followed links in paid reviews etc as those followed links will only be able to cast a much weaker “vote” to the linked page after dividing it by however many links are on the page.

I’d love to get some feedback on this post, so please chime in with your opinions.

21 thoughts on “Google Changes Nofollow Policy, Will You Change How You Link?”

  1. Good call about not changing anything around here. Your content is really good and that’s enough to keep people coming back for more and telling other people to visit your blog. That in my opinion is the most important thing that a blogger should focus on and not page ranks or serps.

    • Thanks for stopping by and leaving such a nice comment, it’s really nice to know that someone out there thinks what I post here is worth reading :-) I appreciate it.. I hope you stop by often and feel free to tell your friends.. Also, if I ever need a lab coat I know where I will be going lol… isn’t internet marketing great :-D

      • You’re very much welcome. :D Also, I love the theme you are using. Especially the way the bookmarking buttons are revealed as I scroll down the page.

        Thank you too for the reply. I guess that’s another thing that would really encourage people to come back to your part of the Interwebs.

  2. I’m definitely not gonna stop ‘sculpting’… At least not for a while.

    I still dont believe in Googles announcements 100%… well, i might be a little paranoid :D
    …And it doesn’t take too long sculpting the page anyway, so way not proceed for a while :)

  3. Personally I don’t give a hoot about PR, I get good results from my outstanding content. I follow most links, specifically for those that contribute to the conversation and will not change a thing. This whole no follow thing destroyed blogging, It was no longer worth making the effort to comment because there nothing in it for me.

    Do Follow, It makes sense
    .-= Guy McLaren´s last blog ..Coolest Guy on the Internet =-.

  4. I randomly came upon your site and REALLY like the couple of blogs I read. So happy to know there are people out there who still do what they want they way they want. keep going.

    • Hi Joe and thanks for stopping by. I am also a firm believer in the “it’s my site so I will do as I wish” concept lol.. so, don’t expect me to change how/what I do any time soon. Thanks for the compliment, I appreciate it.

  5. I really care about my site PR. Search engine make PR mesurement is not without reason. For me it’s the only tool to recognize our site importancy and popularity. Of course the content supports greatly on PR settlement.

  6. I don't really like the PR concept to begin with. Google itself proclaims in no uncertain terms that web sites should created for humans, not robots, then they put things like nofollow in place. Does a human visitor look at a link and say, “well, that one's no follow, so I'm going to ignore it”? No way, if its interesting, they click it.

    Another related problem is how google decides which sites are relevant to one another in link building. What I mean is this. Imagine I have a website about motorcycles. You have a website about a your outback game farm. On my motorcycle site, I link to your farm because its a great place for off road motorcycling. Does google see the connection, or do they see motorcycle vs farm = no relevance?

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