I just discovered something important. It’s a change in the Google PageRank algorithm.
Firstly, a bit of SEO background. Each page on the web is assigned a given weighting known as PageRank. The amount of PageRank each page has generally depends on the following factors:
- the number of external links pointing to it – that is, the number of links that exist on pages that have a different domain name to that of your site;
- the number of internal links pointing to it – that is, the number of links that exist on pages within the same domain on your site;
- for each individual link, the PageRank that applies to the page on which the link exists;
- again, for each individual link, the number of links that occur on that page.
To avoid confusion, I need to make it clear that I am not talking about the general indication of PageRank that Google makes available, which is a number from 0 to 10 that gives a rough idea of the importance of each page in logarithmic terms. I am instead talking about the exact value Google assigns to each page, which is not revealed by Google.
Let’s say a page on the web attracts ten links from external websites. The page could have a “link juice factor” of 10. Let’s say this page has five outgoing links on it. Each link would pass a “juice factor” of 10/5 = 2, in simple terms.
Some time ago, Google introduced a rel=”nofollow” parameter that can appear in links. This was introduced because Web 2.0 sites generally allow site visitors to add active links to the site. For example, this occurs with blogs.
The purpose of this parameter is to indicate that the website owner does not endorse the content that appears on the external links. This is important because if you link to pages that Google considers spammy (“a bad neighbourhood”), your ranking in the search engine could be adversely affected. Using rel=”nofollow” indicates to the search engine that you did not place that link. It stops any link juice from flowing through the link that is declared as nofollow, and it stops your page from being adversely affected by linking out to spammy sites.
If a link was designated nofollow, it used to mean that all of the available link juice would go through all of the links on the page that were not designated nofollow. So, for our hypothetical page with five external links, if one of those links was designated nofollow, the remaining four links would pass a link juice factor of 10/4 = 2.5.
This changed a couple of years ago. Now it is the case that if a link is designated NoFollow, the link juice that would have gone through that link simply evaporates. So for our page, each link passes a link juice factor of 10/5 = 2, except for the nofollow link which passes no link juice.
This has a huge effect on popular blogs which may have a large number of links in comments. These links are usually external links and declared nofollow by the blog.
For more detail, please refer to this article from Matt Cutts.
If you want to preserve the link juice for your site, you need to come up with a way to limit the number of nofollow links on your site. I am only going to make a suggestion as far as WordPress is concerned (and I’m not running the plugin I’m going to talk about on this blog at the time of writing). That suggestion is as follows:
The SEO Super Comments plugin.
It doesn’t solve the problem, because any links in the comments themselves will still be active nofollow links. What it does is to create a new page for every comment left by a user, and the link at the start of the comment that would have directed a user off-site (and been nofollow) will be changed to a link to a new page on your blog that just shows the comment (which is not nofollow). That new page will have the original comment link intact. So it mitigates the problem, because instead of losing all that extra link juice, the link juice goes to the special page that exists because of the comment posted, and since that page has all of your regular links on it, the link juice will flow back to those pages on your blog.
The only other option that I am aware of is to create links that Googlebot can’t follow, e.g. using flash. Be careful with Javascript, because Googlebot does follow some of Javascript now.
What’s your opinion? I don’t think I’ve come up with the ultimate solution here, so please add your thoughts.
Why not simply go back to what we had before evil Google invented the damn no follow tag?
Just make all this do follow.
Or have I missed something?
[Reply]
davtom Reply:
October 9th, 2010 at 15:31
The point of all this, Alex, is it’s pagerank sculpting.
Nofollow allows you to control the flow of “link juice” around your site. It’s an SEO technique. If you’re not using it, it’s likely that your competitors are – and successful sites like Wikipedia do it.
If you have links pointing to your site, they are useful for two reasons:
(a) they improve the strength of that page of your site in the organic listings (SERPS);
(b) they improve the strength of the pages you link to. Most of which will probably be other pages on your own domain.
With (b), you don’t want that diluted – and if you have a really successful blog article, for example, there could end up being tens or even hundreds of outgoing links that people post. That’s going to dilute your SEO efforts for the pages that you link to.
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Hi Dave!
This whole do-follow / no-follow thing is much over rated, IMHO.
Furthermore, many people understood it wrong. They believe that having external links on a page, ‘bleeds’ the rank from that page and thus it is lowering their chances to get good SERPs – which is a widely spread HUGE misconception.
I agree, the link juice that you may get for your internal links will be less, if you have many outbound links on that page… but it will not de-rank anything…. except…
when you outlink to places with bad reputation, indeed.
However, many times an outbound link may, in fact, help with the page’s own rankings, when pointing to a highly reputable source of info (Wikipedia, for instance) – a fact that very few people know… (blink)
I think there are also benefits from having many comments on a page (SEs love these pages) but one should carefully look at the outbound links left in comments and reward the really truthful comments and good content with the do-follow tag.
This would provide even more incentive for those members of the community to return and get involved time and time again…
…while on the other hand, there is no reason to leave a comment with one, or even two links or more, sit on your blog when the commenter only says: “Great post!”
Back to the topics at hand, I’ll go have a look at the plugin you suggested… as now I’m curious…
Steve Lorenzo SEOVirtuoso
[Reply]
davtom Reply:
October 9th, 2010 at 15:46
Hi Steve!
I agree with all of that. Especially about linking out to good sites (with regular dofollow links).
About examining the links: It’s a good idea, but it’s not easy to do, at least, not with WordPress. I don’t know whether there is a plugin that makes it selectable.
I suppose the other thing is that if you are spending time examining the links, you are using up time that you could use to create content, build backlinks, etc, and improve your own SEO. So it would be altruistic of you, and indirectly helping Google (by telling them what’s good and what’s not), but not necessarily of benefit otherwise.
If you allow dofollow links, I agree that people “in the know” will like to come to your blog and comment, but does it attract more spam comments? In some of my blogs, despite using both a captcha and WP-SpamFree, I find I still get comment spam which I think is manually placed.
I define comment spam as a comment posted with links to commercial sites, often with specific anchor text, in which the comment has nothing to do with the article.
Dave
[Reply]
Steve Lorenzo SEOVirtuoso Reply:
October 9th, 2010 at 16:05
Well…
I believe it all depends… if we talk about a very high traffic blog, yeah, sure… there may be many spam comments, although if you decide to moderate all of them, you may just login and delete the spam before allowing publishing (although you may lose some momentum if you go to sleep ha, ha, ha…)
I personally decided to use Intense Debate as a commenting platform on my latest blogs, combined with CommentLuv as a plugin available inside IntenseDebate too.
You may setup IntenseDebate to allow automatic posting for people with a score higher than a given value, where the score is calculated from all the comments posted all around the web with Intense Debate, hence a spammer has less chances to get a good scoring, while a true commenter does.
I think there is also a plugin probably, that would allow a live link in the comment only after a certain number of valid comments left on a blog (I’ve seen this on a few blogs) so that a spammer would have no interest to spam manually, as they would stand no chance to get enough of their comments through the system before their link becomes active…
None of the above would stop automatic spamming though… and the risk gets higher with your own blog’s higher rankings.
There is no perfect system, but I believe that ultimately, rewarding people for their good comments would be beneficial for both parties.
Now, I have yet another plugin to look for (the one I just mentioned I’ve seen in action somewhere, lol)
Talk soon,
Steve Lorenzo SEOVirtuoso
[Reply]
davtom Reply:
October 10th, 2010 at 01:18
I like the sound of what you suggest, Steve. I’m gonna have to look up those plugins.
I also agree that for people in the know, allowing dofollow would encourage further comments and both parties would in that case benefit.
I just had to remove about 20 trackback spams from this page… sigh.
Hi Dave,
What are your thoughts on this.
On sites where I have news items, I may have three links all pointing at the same url. (Heading, image and the ubiquitous read more…)
The heading link is as normal but I use nofollow on the other two. My theory being that if I have 30 links on a page pointing to internal pages and these are triplicated then this could give them more weight than other links on the page/site. Also if any of these links point to an external url then better not to have them triplicated incase this is seen as spamming.
[Reply]
davtom Reply:
October 10th, 2010 at 01:15
Hi Syd,
What you are doing is called pagerank sculpting. There’s nothing wrong with that.
What would be nice would be to find a way to “hide” the nofollow links from Googlebot (in a white-hat way, i.e. not to engage in cloaking). Then the extra links would not detract from the link juice that goes out from that page.
I think some special Javascript that Googlebot doesn’t understand could do it (basic stuff is not OK because Googlebot understands it to a certain extent).
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