When the whole “page rank sculpting” thing was a hot topic and all the new, up-and-coming SEO’s were no-following all of their client’s internal links, I was suspicious. I wasn’t suspicious just because I’m paranoid. I was suspicious because of WHY the no follow attribute was created in the first place.
The no follow tag was created so that comment spam and a whole host of link-dropping activities could be minimized in terms of how those links affected search rankings. People were building scripts to comment in blog posts and those comments were full of links that passed PageRank. Google hates that kind of stuff so they pushed the no follow attribute and the world signed on.
So, the no follow attribute was created to combat spam and indicate that links to a website are not necessarily trusted.
Google likes trust.
A lot of people got wise to the fact that putting no follow tags on internal pages condensed the flow of pageRank to pages that were critical to their rankings. This was a flaw in the Google algorithm that was addressed. In the meantime, some SEOs were telling their clients to add no follow tags to their “about us” pages and “privacy” pages. For a time it worked. But to me, adding a no follow tag to an “about us” page told search engines that our about page could not be trusted.
Google likes trust.
So yesterday Matt Cutts posted a video explaining that adding no follow to internal hyperlinks was really just a bad idea. Thanks Matt. I have argued that point many times. Here’s the video:
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