nofollow and pagerank sculpting in seo ~ Books I Like

Friday, October 23, 2009

nofollow and pagerank sculpting in seo

what is page rank?

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. It is named after Larry Page and is used by the Google Internet search engine.

what is nofollow?

"nofollow" is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking (i.e. show not pass on page rank) in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring. In common mans words "nofollow" is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchor text.

what has changed?
According to Matt Cutts (Google) offers a simplified description of the PageRank process, where a page's value flows out to the various pages it links to equally. When the nofollow attribute originally came on the scene, Google would just remove those links from the equation, according to Cutts. So if a page with 10 "PageRank points" to share had ten links on it, and five were nofollowed, each regular link would pass two PageRank points.

Cutts today said that Google changed this practice more than a year ago to keep the nofollowed links in the equation, but not passing any PageRank points. So in that same example, the regular links would each pass 1 PageRank point, and the nofollowed links would still "use up" their allotted points, even though they did not pass those points on. You can read the full article here...

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