I would love to see Cutts confess the truth that link "sculpting" is the real problem running rampant. Bottom line is SERPs are still based on the idea that he who has the most links, wins.
with all do respect, you cannot use quotes on someone when they did not say that exactly. You should not have quoted Matt when he did not say those EXACT words.
Ok point taken. the only place I actually used quotes was on the the one place I cant change them, the DP thread title. apologies to anyone offended by the quotes and the implication that this: does not mean that nofollow used to re-distribute PR through the remaining links and hence this would have worked, but that now it won't work the same anymore. and apologies Matt for misquoting you, Ill PM a MOD and see if I can get them to remove the quotation marks from the thread title.
Using the nofollow tag on your own site is rather inane. The nofollow tag tells Google "to not trust the link" Therefore if you used it on your own site, you would in essence be telling Google your site was not trustworthy. Sort of like shooting yourself in the foot and it is why it never worked to sculpt PR...whatever the hell that is lol....so Matt is telling the truth (very rare) somewhat.... but he should come clean and admit it never worked......
We've used No Follow for years on external links and some internal links, but hadn't really dived into officially sculpting our site. About eight weeks ago we finally did it. Used a silo approach through our product categories. Expected some things to improve, and others to drop. Noticed some things drop a bit. But the things that should have improved didn't improve at all. We were already discussing rolling back these changes. So if you ask me, Google had already made this change weeks, if not months, ago. Now I'm having to rethink our upcoming navigation updates.
we've been experimenting with it on our own site fairly successfully for a year or so, but the SERPs have been so mobile on all nearly the sites we monitor whether nofollow is used or not, in the last few months its just about impossible to know what the many many causes of movement could be. I would have to say we havent seen sites using nofollow drop more or differently to similar sites that havent used it.
HA! Unfortunately Google drives a ton of traffic to our site. And if they say bend over, all we can ask is how far!
It's Reverse Psychology. By Mr Cutty saying it does not work anymore (by order of the big GoogleMan) they hope that everyone will give up trying to manipulate the flow of PR. What next? Link popularity is dead? : - /
My website was hit pretty hard about a month ago. As I look back, I think I recognize what happened to it, it was exactly this change ... and this is what I did to it to get back. One of my websites used to rank from 7 to 15 for a popular set of keywords. Then it totally bombed, back into the 50's and 60's. My website consisted mainly of a set of pages I did linkbuilding for, along with a much larger set of pages that I no-followed to. My reason for no-following to this large set of pages (guessing 40ish links), is that it lead to an affiliate portion of my website. This portion is pretty much all duplicate content, and as such I had no desire to waste my PR on it (I knew that it would never get more than 5% of its pages indexed and they'd continually drop out of the index because it's duplicate content). When I totally bombed out, considered what had changed (nothing) ... then I guessed that I was getting a penalty for having this navigation menu that was 40ish nofollow links on every page. So what I did ... I created an ajax program that loaded the links via javascript. Within a few days, my previous rankings had been restored. I think google is treating nofollows like deadend links to nowhere. If its really true that google sees 10 links on a page, 5 follow and 5 nofollow, and the 5 follow's only get 50% of the link juice (and the 5 nofollows are considered evaporated and wasted PR), then the simple solution would be to load nofollow links via ajax or javascript in some method that google doesn't even see it. Then your 5 remaining links that google sees will actually receive 100% of the PR.
You can't! It's contradicts google's logic imo. No follow has never worked, and is about to be phased out.