More and more sites are using the 'no follow' tag in their external links, in an attempt to show Google that they are not allowing other sites to get a sip of their PR juice to boost their rankings. The problem with this is that every site on the internet needs to get PR juice through links in order to rank in Google, it's the way Google works. Imagine if every single site on the intenet put the 'no follow' tag in all their external links. No sites would have any PR. Wikipedia would be PR 0, Google itself would be PR 0. The 'no follow' tag is a poor choice for dealing with link boosting issues and it is dangerous for the reasons I have just described. Sites that use the 'no follow' tag are being extremely selfish, they expect other sites to link to them and pass the PR juice to them, but they are not prepared to pass it on to the other external sites they link to. The answer is quite simple "Don't Link To Other Sites That You Don't Want To Pass PR". Wasn't PR mean to be a reward from sites that link to yours, to show your site is relevant, wasn't that the whole idea of PR? If the 'no follow' solution continues to grow it will mean that less sites will get indexed, Google will be eroding it's own index. Don't use 'no follow' tags. Don't link to sites that use 'no follow' tags. Help to encourage Google to come up with a better solution to a problem that they have created, otherwise indexing will be eroded and it will be more and more difficult to get indexed and ranked in Google. Leaving the net wide open for the large corporations with the huge advertising budgets to dominate cyberspace. J
Wasn't PR mean to be a reward from sites that link to yours, to show your site is relevant, wasn't that the whole idea of PR? - well, yes, but nofollow exists largely to get a control on webmasters placing links themselves, e.g putting them in other people's blogs and forums, which is hardly a vote for relevance. You're right that it's a clumsy way to control a situation that is of google's own making, and while people mutter about "who can beat Google as a search engine" , the answer is -whoever can come up with an algorithm that uses a new metric to gauge the relevance of results, that doesn't rely on the things that have been used before that can be easily manipulated e.g backlinks and keyword metatags. And if Google really really want a level playing field, they'll put pressure on wikipedia to make all their internal links nofollow, so they stop the ridiculous situation where it's top of serps for 80% of searches p.s. Google isn't the internet.
No that's not true because google can also assign PR to a specific page/website even though it's not based on external link factor. The primary reason why google introduced the nofollow is basically to prevent misuse especially when leaving comments on blogs and also manipulation. What you are projecting the scenario here is basically not accurate.
Not true. You don't need PR to rank. That may have been true 10 years ago. And, if no one had PR, then it would be a level playing field. Although I do agree, 'nofollow' is now way overused. I use it for paid ads on one of my sites, that's it. /*tom*/
I disagree with what you're saying. I don't think that nofollow is overused, its normally only used by sites with the highest PR.
I've never heard of this, can you provide some examples of pages that have high PR without any inlinks to the page??
The reason no follow is there is so people don't spam the high ranked sites just so they can get a back link.If your site is popular enough you won't have to put a link, the owner of the site will talk about your site and will link to your site
seems like sites are now entirely dofollow or nofollow. so even if they should give link juice and quote an interesting article or story, they aren't doing it.
Actually I hope everyone no follows all their links and we can watch Google PageRank disappear and it would be funny to see Googles technology undone by their own paranoid fears. But in all honesty nobody needs google to build a business online. Build a business and never fear a search engines changes!!
I agree with Sem-Advance. I think all this is quite paranoid. Things are going to change a bit (as ever do) but won't be that different. I also think that the smaller sites don't use to use the no-follow tag, at least I have never used it myself and none of my webmaster friends is using it as well.
how do you figure Google would be a zero? it's theirs, they made it, they allocate it, they would stay at 10 as I'm pretty sure they didn't get to 10 by everybody linking to them.
No follow links still pass traffic on, which is just as important as link juice. Better than nothing.
no follow is a great way to stop spamming and it does. If we all just focused on organic growth then our sites would perform a lot better. Personally I don't think no follow is used enough
Hmmm. I would say they did which is why google.co.uk is a PR 8 rather than a PR 10. Not as many people linking to it!
Then putting links from your site to authority site with high pagerank plus they are related much to you (will also help for your browsers as reference) will somewhat points to your site.
Yeah, nofollow tag really is a problem and I wonder how we can get backlinks if all sites starts to use this tag. Anyway, Google dont wants us to use this tag on all the links. They want us to use it with all the paid links, or the links that we dont want google bot to follow.
It shouldn't be that much of a problem. Big sites shouldnt use it. It might not pass PR, but it still passes Trust Rank.
I think that PR already lost a lot of it´s importance before "nofollow" became the new fashion. I do not think that it is a revolution.
No, PR is destroying Google and webmasters who rely too much on the "little green bar". The nofollow tag is simply to prevent passing PR to external links. The sites that use this tag can sell links and not get penalized by Google. Buyers may decrease eliminating those focusing on PR, only leaving advertisers looking for traffic. Google created PR and they have been scrambling to fix the problems it causes, making more work for them. Life was better before PR...when we had to rely on "true PR". Google should just eliminate the little green bar.