Jun 19, 2009
Google has recently posted some trivia on the use of nofollowed links. I had to check the clock to make sure this wasn't one of their April fool's stunts. It's not, which is a bit scary.Matt Cutts sums it up right here in an interview with Danny Sullivan.
Matt: You can think of it as evaporating.
Wow, ok. Oh, by the way, Google has been crawling Javascript links too.
Matt: As Googlebot got smarter we started changing our advice on this. What we haven't mentioned is that elsewhere, even on the onclick, you can put a rel=nofollow on a link within javascript, you can do that if you want to be completely safe, I expect to see those stay safe.
Optimising your links
Right. So for those who have been busy sculpting their pagerank via the nofollow attribute (which is what Google designed it for) it now appears that we have been shooting ourselves in the foot. All our nofollowed links are actually working against us by reducing our PR, and our javascript links are being clicked on.So - how do you link to something that is a bit average quality or you don't really vouch for it? Nofollow has now lost it's shine, and the javascript option is gone too.
Options
Which leaves precious few options. The obvious one is no links. I speculate there will be a plethora of Wordpress plugins released soon that give no link at all. In lieu of a link, you will need to copy-paste a plain-text URL into a browser window if you wish to visit the site. Not especially great for usability, but now one of the few ways to preserve your PR so you might understand webmasters going down this path.The other option that springs to mind is a flash based link. This could be complex because Google's crawling of Flash sites is constantly improving, so you might need to embed your links into an external XML file or obfuscate them somehow. This approach would be an accessibility disaster, but I can definitely see webmasters going down this path too.
POST
The third option, and perhaps the best option I can think of is HTTP POST. Google doesn't follow through POST forms, because POSTing data can potentially change the contents of a website. POST forms often contain things like delete buttons, and you don't want spiders running around clicking those all over the place.Google confirms this on their blog, illustrated by the following comments.
For good internet citizens (and according to the REST bible), the rule is that a robot should not invoke POST methods, because they may have side effects. GET methods are supposed to be programmed so that they have no side effect.
I hope Google respects these rules too.
@Gael: As mentioned in the post, we'll only be retrieving GET forms, not POST.
OK, so how about we add a POST form with a single submit button. The form POSTs to redirect.php?r=www.domain.com which then does a 301 redirect to the actual link.
- This isn't a link, so it doesn't need to be nofollowed.
- It's POST, so Google will respectfully ignore it.
- The user will end up where they want to be.
- You can use CSS to disguise the submit button and make it look more link-like, perhaps even using javascript to edit the statusbar rollover information. Unfortunately, I don't think you can get the context menu for 'open in new tab' to show up.
I'm giving serious thought to making this change to the blogs I administer.
Nice one Google
Google has their head in the clouds if they think webmasters are going to ignore this change and simply go about their business of 'creating great content' and not worrying the fact that half their PR is heading down a black hole. I think the way websites link together is going to change, and expect usability/accessibility of websites to go backwards as a result.
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22 Comments
Brett Taylor - Jun 20, 2009
I may be ignorant, but I thought that rel=nofollow was invented to fight co-opting public feedback spaces (comments) from turning into linkfarms without a website owner's consent: to make sure certain links to external websites were not interpreted as 'recommendations'.
I never thought it was for doing on your own pages.
PageRank sculpting never worked in the first place. Google pulled the rug out from under all the sculptors more than a year ago and no one noticed. As recently as this Spring major advocates of sculpting were claiming that they had improved rankings for themselves and their clients -- all without knowing that Google had already defused their ammunition.
Rather than try to save this long-dead concept, why not just focus on good, fundamental SEO principles and leave PageRank sculpting in the trash heap of really stupid SEO ideas?
Brett Taylor - Jun 25, 2009
"Google even uses nofollows for this purpose - Matt Cutts mentioned using nofollow links on Youtube so the featured vids on the homepage don't get an overdose of link juice if Googlebot happens to stop by."
I can see how that would help, if sculpting works that way, however I don't think that's justification to say that it actually does work. Do you really think the person responsible for coding the YouTube homepage has close relations to the Search team and has inside information about SEO techniques? I say that this guy is just following everyone else's advice, and not getting 'hot seo tips' from the ivory tower.
Google do play it pretty close to the chest; I don't think that anyone not in the search team at Google has secret knowledge of the ranking process, and even then probably only a few people have the whole picture.
If non-search-team-Google had secret knowledge, that would be biased, and eventually that knowledge would leak out somehow, and people like Harvey would have learned about that; Google doesn't want that to happen.
How about using similar techiques to those that hide emails from spambots, i.e. use javascript to create the link and hence only real users will be able to see the link.
@MichaelMartinez
There are perfectly good, legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want to waste your website's PR on portions of your own website. For instance, a website of mine has an affiliate portion, containing over 50,000 pages. It is entirely 100% duplicate content. I promote my site by fashioning unique pages on my main domain, SEOing it properly, and when someone orders, I forward them to my store.domain.com, containing the dupe content. I have absolutely no desire to burn up all my PR throwing it away at my dupe content portion of my website, which I know google will dump dupe pages continually out of the index. Nofollow used to be a good option to not waste my site's PR. Now I think I'll try posts and see if that gets me where I need to be.
This is by far the most effective nofollow replacement i have seen:
http://www.saschakimmel.com/2009/06/how-to-hide-links-to-avoid-nofollow-pagerank-sculpting-issues/
Be interested to see your opinion on it.
That is a great Idea. It really makes sence. I do a bit of on-page myself but would using post links all over the place not take a bit extra time?
Also random off topic question. I am trying to develop my on and off page knowledge where can I train online that is really good?
Thanks Guys
We made JS script to hide links with attribute rel="nofollow". It works on wordpress, phpBB or any php-dynamic website.
More details on: http://positionmaker.pl/Artykuly/hide-nofollow-links
If I was a SE optimizer, I'd probably think differently. But to me, Google has become <b>too</b> important to care about its standards. I'm getting reasonable traffic, and few, but decent comments. To me, that's good enough.
Nice insights. I also don't know yet why Google made this change. But I sure don't want my PR be cut into half. I guess everyone should start reading up on POST.
@Harvey, this is an excellent idea to avoid spammers form posting on the site. Spammers think the comment is followed. still cant avoid much spam in the site.
"So - how do you link to something that is a bit average quality or you don't really vouch for it? Nofollow has now lost it's shine, and the javascript option is gone too."
It seems you have misunderstood how Google has modified it's policy on the nofollow attribute.
If you don't want to vouch for a link, nofollow still does its job properly - no linkjuice flows to the target site. The only difference is you now don't conserve it for the page in question.
Love the wordplay in the ragepank.com domain name btw - A+ for originality!
In my last comment I failed to mention that the post method seems to be a *very* nice solution to conserving pagerank when linking out.
To further disguise these as legitimate anchors, you could add a snippet of js to alter the appearance of the pointer:
onMouseOver="style.cursor='pointer'
or a jquery solution
This is a great idea. As Google continues to refine their algorithm to discount spammy links and moves toward semantic search, and considering that most blogs have a low pagerank, I don’t foresee the benefit of do follow links continuing much longer. I also think this will contribute to Google losing relevance as eventually the only search results you will get are for mega conglomerate organizations that have been around forever.
This is really a great idea to avoid spammers great idea I really appreciate your work thanks for sharing this post with us.
This is a great idea
I think this is a great idea to avoid spammer Thank you for sharing this cool plug in! I have just downloaded and installed it.
Great idea to avoid spamming...it really make sense thanks..
Hey that's very informative. Thanks for sharing this information. As google updated the page rank, i wanna know what's the main factor google is considering.
OK, check it out. Comments on this blog are now rendered using a <button> tag within a POST form. I'm pretty sure this is no longer considered to be a link.
Would love some feedback on this idea.