Will PR Sculpting Someday Be Penalized?

[CommonDavid]

Here's my first post here

I personally love to nofollow all the privacy, contact, driving directions etc on all my clients sites, but it seems to me like penalizing for using the nofollow to sculpt PR would be just too easy. It would be the easiest thing for Google to see the above links, see the nofollow and boom... penalize.

Do you think they'll ever do such a thing? Or would it be a pointless penalty effecting people that were just doing something that was previously approved?

I would hate to have to undo all the nofollows I've done over the past year or so! haha

[chaitanya.seo]

WC to DP David.
Enjoy your stay.

[promomanagers]

Why would they penalize something they practically invented for that specific purpose?

[CommonDavid]

Originally Posted by promomanagers

Why would they penalize something they practically invented for that specific purpose?

I thought it was actually invented for comment spam in blogs?

[rainborick]

Originally Posted by CommonDavid

I thought it was actually invented for comment spam in blogs?

You're right. It was invented to fight comment SPAM and then was recommended for issues like linking to pages you really didn't intend to be associated with (ie. "bad neighborhood" suspects), and for advertising links. But Matt Cutts has discussed the practice of PageRank sculpting several times without any warnings about negative implications. And when you think about it, it makes sense that the search engines would not care if you used rel="nofollow" within your own site because there are many legitimate reasons for using it besides PageRank sculpting. For example, you can use it to prevent duplicate content issues, which is another common problem for bloggers. So, don't worry about using it.

[CommonDavid]

Originally Posted by rainborick

You're right. It was invented to fight comment SPAM and then was recommended for issues like linking to pages you really didn't intend to be associated with (ie. "bad neighborhood" suspects), and for advertising links. But Matt Cutts has discussed the practice of PageRank sculpting several times without any warnings about negative implications. And when you think about it, it makes sense that the search engines would not care if you used rel="nofollow" within your own site because there are many legitimate reasons for using it besides PageRank sculpting. For example, you can use it to prevent duplicate content issues, which is another common problem for bloggers. So, don't worry about using it.

Good point, I never thought about dup content issues.

[snowbird]

Nofollow is not designed to prevent the indexing of pages. One should use their robots.txt file or noindex meta tag to deal with that.

Using nofollow within one's own site should never be a problem.

[CommonDavid]

Originally Posted by snowbird

Nofollow is not designed to prevent the indexing of pages. One should use their robots.txt file or noindex meta tag to deal with that.

Using nofollow within one's own site should never be a problem.

Yeah, but does the nofollow avoid sending the original content to the supps?

[snowbird]

Originally Posted by CommonDavid

Yeah, but does the nofollow avoid sending the original content to the supps?

Nofollow simply stops pagerank from flowing to the destination site. That link will still be indexed.

Anyway, Google is the only SE that supports nofollow. Yahoo and Live/MSN treat them as any other link.

[lzy]

Dont nofollow have any weight at all in Yahoo, MSN?

[Lexiseek]

Originally Posted by CommonDavid

I thought it was actually invented for comment spam in blogs?.

The point of Nofollow has been conveniently bastardized to mean just about anything.

[snowbird]

Originally Posted by lzy

Dont nofollow have any weight at all in Yahoo, MSN?

Yes, nofollow links are treated as any other link to Yahoo and Live/MSN. Even Google reports these links in Webmaster Tools and they help you rank for your anchor text. The only thing nofollow links don't do is pass Google PageRank.

[rainborick]

Yahoo! and MSN also support rel="nofollow". Just because a link appears in the link reports of Google's Webmaster Tools and Yahoo!'s SiteExplorer does not mean that link is passing PageRank or link popularity. That's been acknowledged by both companies many times. See http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728 for the SearchEngineWatch coverage of the initial announcement by all 3.

[snowbird]

Originally Posted by rainborick

Yahoo! and MSN also support rel="nofollow". Just because a link appears in the link reports of Google's Webmaster Tools and Yahoo!'s SiteExplorer does not mean that link is passing PageRank or link popularity. That's been acknowledged by both companies many times. See http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728 for the SearchEngineWatch coverage of the initial announcement by all 3.

Good post rainborick. I should have been more detailed in my post, but you hit it right on target.

+ rep added

[Nora]

I thought Google supported the nofollow tag.. why would they penalize sites for using it when they're promoting the use of it?
I do think that as people start nofollowing every outgoing site, Google's algorithm will get messed up.

[actinoco]

But in my site I've 14.000 internal links pointing to index.php and it doesn't have 1 external link pointing to. (sorry for english. I'm not too good).

[]'s

[godsofchaos]

Honestly, there is no reason for ever experiencing that. No follow is simply for pr spam protection. For a PP there shouldn't be any such issue anyway as I would expect comments/trackbacks to be turned off. No follow is absolutely clearly defined by all three, and the summary is really simple, do what you do, PR cannot be influenced by commenting or trackbacking to other high Pr articles/posts.

[jmafonseca]

Think of it this way: If you find a way to make money off nofollow then there's a chance it may be used the wrong way.

[angilina]

Why will google penalize for the use of no follow tag ?

[CommonDavid]

I'll make sure to bump this thread if if ever does happen