The Ethics of rel="nofollow"

[webpresence]

Hi All,

There has been a lot said recently about the effectiveness of the rel="nofollow" attribute with regards to internal PR.

Many SEO professionals believe that the rel="nofollow" is the golden nugget for funnelling PR from non-themed pages (contact, terms, clients, login pages etc.) to their most important on-topic pages. The Effect? The PR that was allocated to the non-themed pages will then be passed on to the on-topic pages, thus helping rankings of the latter.

I can see how this would work short term, but I can also see how in the long term the SE's will treat this as a black hat technique as the site owner is effectively manipulating PR.

An alternative to 'nofollow' would be to use a robots.txt file and exclude spiders from indexing the non-themed pages - the big question however; Would this technique accomplish the same goal and funnel PR from the non-themed to the on-topic pages?

IMO the robots.txt method will accomplish PR funnelling and is the truly ethical way to go, you may disagree though. Let's discuss!

Thanks for reading! Lee

[wige]

I should start by saying I have not read the entire patent involving pagerank thoroughly, but I have been wondering how pagerank flows in special circumstances. The patent application does not seem to mention robots.txt or the nofollow tag, but these two developments I believe came into use after that patent application. I know the original concept of the flow of pagerank was that the value of each link was based on the page's rank divided by the number of links. I have been unable to find any reference from Google or any other search engine about what happens to the page rank when a link has nofollow or points to a page that is restricted by robots.txt.

In theory, nofollow would have a more immediate effect on page rank because at the time that the spider is looking at the links, it can see that these links should not be valued. Because robots.txt is an external file, it may not be immediately obvious to the spider, so this may not be taken into account when the PR is divided.

But, there are two things that happen when a page is spidered. The first is "url discovery". This is the process of finding the links that are on the page, and adding them to the list of known URLs to be fetched on a later cycling. The second step is to calculate the value of the links on the page. The original intent of nofollow was to tell the spider that the link should not be added to the future crawls database, to restrict an administrative section of the site, for example. This is the same reason robots.txt was created.

Today, nofollow has been recommended because according to Google pagerank is no longer transferred by links so marked. Nowhere have I seen it definitively stated that these links are removed from the page rank equation.

To sum up in an example, imagine a page with ten links, and a page rank of 10. Originally, each link would be worth 1 point. Now if one link is marked with a nofollow tag, the theory seems to be that the other nine links get 1.111- points and the marked link gets 0. I have seen absolutely no statement that backs this up, and so I wonder if the nine unmarked links keep their value of 1 point and the marked link gets 0. Basically the 1 point is reserved for that link, but because of the nofollow tag it never reaches its destination.

If anyone has any documentation for or against this theory, please post it.

[incrediblehelp]

To me I don't understand nofollowing a link. It you don't want to pass the juice then why are you linking anways? Also relevant outbound surely help your document rank better.

[genetrader]

I had heard Leslie Rohde once state that Matt Cutts himself had said that the act of using NOFOLLOW to 'shift' Pagerank was not against the Google TOS and was allowable. If someonse can find that on Matt's blog and verify than the question becomes why would they start doing that?

[ArthurKay]

I use the "nofollow" attributes for links posted on my site's forum. Not that my site gets enough traffic to worry about it, but I don't like the idea of people posting just to add a link to their site. I've run a few message boards where spammers post constantly with links to all kinds of junk.

I do have a link to my website in my footer (hoping to get some traffic), but I'm not spamming the message boards just trying to build incoming links. I think the two are entirely different.

[wige]

Matt Cutts posted some comments as to the reason for using nofollow:

In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links. Let’s take the example of a forum that wants to avoid linking to spam, but the same advice applies to wikis or any other web software. If an off-domain link is made by an anonymous or unauthenticated user, I’d use nofollow on that link. Once a user has done a certain number of posts/edits, or has been around for long enough to build up trust, then those nofollows could be removed and the links could be trusted. Anytime you have a user that you’d trust, there’s no need to use nofollow links.

This quote indicates that nofollow makes the link no longer an editorial vote for the page, but doesn't discuss much about what is done with the pr that is omitted.

The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.

[nipplecharms1]

I do have a link to my website in my footer (hoping to get some traffic), but I'm not spamming the message boards just trying to build incoming links. I think the two are entirely different.

How are they different? Seems to me this is a case where you benefit twice; one with the "juice" of this forum and second with readers here that you hope visit Chi-town or are from there.

Not sure you can have it both ways. Well you can but that just makes one greedy! . And Greed is good to quote G. Gecko.

But seriously, I have used the no follow because although my customers might get a bennie from visiting a site we link to (and no, before you ask, they are not affiliates for us and we dont get a spif) I do not want the bad "ju-ju" from that site coming back to us. We link to some soft porn-type sites yet I do not want to get smeared by that brush. We have links for our customers, period.

Does that help?

My 2c and a grape soda.

Michael

[jrb@w3f.com]

I prefer the nofollow too, as I don't like putting stuff in the robots file
or the htaccess file either, because it gives away paths to places I don't
really want spyders going. Now google, and yahoo, and a few others
may follow "the rules" but it is the other spyders that I worry about.
And, they are the ones that do all the damage after looking in to every
possible nook and cranny to get info.

Yeah, nofollow is also good if you have a few affiliate links on your pages.
Since these links all go to the same looking page for all the affiliates, they
will rank poorly with google due to their duplicate content derating.

Also, Google is now starting to penalize websites with a few affiliate links
because they "might" just be redirector pages, and have no valuable content.

So, I put noIndex,noFollow on all my affiliate links, and any other links
that may have a bad taste to googlebot.

Ethical? Use it for the purpose intended, and you should be ok. (IMHO)

[RegDCP]

To me I don't understand nofollowing a link. It you don't want to pass the juice then why are you linking anways? Also relevant outbound surely help your document rank better.

I use them in affiliate products links.
As I am being "paid" to place a link on the page, I do not want to pass page rank to the affiliate site.

I tried an experiment a while back. I had a page promoting an affiliate product that ranked well in Google. I removed the nofollow and the page disappeared.. I replaced it and the pages was once again listed.

Reg

[ArthurKay]

Not sure you can have it both ways. Well you can but that just makes one greedy!

I don't argue that WebProWorld may be passing the "juice" onto my site, but they could very easily add the "nofollow" tag to links in this forum. I would still have my link in the footer hoping you would visit the site.

I think the same goes with blogs and other social sites. I simply don't want my site associated with questionable links that could hurt my ranking, so my forum has "nofollow" on every outbound link.

Plus, I doubt my site is going to gain any SEO ground as a result of being on WebProWorld. Do a link population check on my site, and you'll see it's close to zero