Matt Cutts advises removal of nofollow

[djbaxter]

Whiteboard Friday - Matt Cutts on NoFollow
By great scott!
August 13, 2009

As we all know, there was some controversy about Google's shifting views on nofollow earlier this year. So now that some time has passed and Big G has refined their position, what would Matt recommend to sites that have lots of nofollow tags already in place? Watch this exclusive interview to find out.

From Jen Lopez:

This has been a great week at SES San Jose 2009. There were lots of great sessions, informative tweets, fun swag and I've personally met many of our Pro members! My favorite session of the week was "Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic" where Matt Cutts, Greg Boser, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Tiffany Lane and Vanessa Fox (unofficially ) reviewed several websites in front of hundreds of people. The use of the rel=nofollow for PR sculpting came up in the review (imagine that). Matt Cutts recommended to a site owner that he remove all the nofollows from his site, even to non-necessary pages.​

Read full article and watch video interview with Matt Cutts

 

[Liquification]

Interesting piece of information. I was reading the comments below and one of them stated that removing the no follow tag hurt his site. Has anyone tried it yet?

 

[Linda Buquet]

I added the Do Follow plugin to my blog not too long ago and Google still seems to love me
and I am still #1 for affiliate blogs.

 

[djbaxter]

Interesting piece of information. I was reading the comments below and one of them stated that removing the no follow tag hurt his site. Has anyone tried it yet?

I think if you watch the video interview you'll see Matt Cutts basically saying PageRank sculpting never worked as some people thought it did anyway - all it accomplished was preventing some useful site content from being indexed.

There are so many factors involved in search engine ranking that it's next to impossible to isolate just one of them, observe a change in ranking, and definitively conclude that any changes are the result of that one factor.

My guess is that those who felt PR sculpting helped their sites were basing the conclusion on superstitious learning (i.e., spurious correlations), and that the individual claiming that removing nofollow has hurt his site is suffering from the same malady.

 

[SEOHolicc]

Except that the person talking about removing nofollow from his site is Rand Fishkin. He mentions 3 different examples and as an SEO I trust his advice much more than Matt Cutts.

Personally, I'm just gonna wait it out and see how things work out. Of course, I'm not adding nofollow to sites anymore though and instead working on better internal link structures to build link equity.

 

[Jeremy Morgan]

I briefly experimented with nofollow, but now I pretty much ignore it. PR Sculpting may have worked for a time, but it doesn't now. I can't wait to see nofollow die out, just so people will stop arguing about it.

 

[djbaxter]

I resisted using nofollow for a long time. Then something spooked me and I tired adding it to certain categories of links. Then I got ticked off and reverted back to all dofollow just before the story about Google's changed stance broke.

In terms of ranking and traffic, I saw no difference at all in the A-B-A comparisons.

And with all due respect to Rand Fishkin, even he cannot control all of the relevant variables - it's just not possible. Given that, the statements from Google, and my own experience, I have to conclude he's simply wrong on this one. It wouldn't be the first time.

 

[grangonzo]

I use the semiologic dofollow plugin in my wordpress blogs since a long tima ago, and Google don't really care.

I think that having dofollow in my sites only benefit, because i get lots of comments, and Google loves blogs with lots of comments.

Regards.