Thread: Matt Cutts on too many no-follows and over optimization

I always felt that nofollows are "unnatural" - in other words only those who are trying to pass on PR seem to use them, which is opposite of buying links for PR if you ask me.

Originally Posted by Shawn

I always felt that nofollows are "unnatural" - in other words only those who are trying to pass on PR seem to use them, which is opposite of buying links for PR if you ask me.

That would defeat the purpose, no?

Perhaps more those trying to control where PR gets passed?

Yep... Things have definitely changed in the past year. Although Cutts has always stated that you can rel="nofollow" any way you like on your site without fear of penalty, he has changed his tune on how it affects the flow of PR and indicated about a year ago that Google changed the way rel="nofollow" affects PR flow (note the paragraph before the 1st Q&A in his Jun 15th, 2009 post on his blog about Page Rank Sculpting):

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Keyword issue - Why they are still considering keyword stuffing? They have lowered the importance of keyword long before then why they are considering keywords? I think every webmaster know this fact.

Originally Posted by extreme-seo

Keyword issue - Why they are still considering keyword stuffing? They have lowered the importance of keyword long before then why they are considering keywords? I think every webmaster know this fact.

Keyword stuffing seems to work on fresh content.

Honestly, I think all this dofollow and nofollow crap has degraded search engine marketing from what it was intended to be. Linking is something that is a natural part of the internet. All the extra technicalities just complicates stuff too much.

Originally Posted by extreme-seo

Keyword issue - Why they are still considering keyword stuffing? They have lowered the importance of keyword long before then why they are considering keywords? I think every webmaster know this fact.

Google is still instructing their Quality Raters to look only for these four types of spam:

• Hidden text and hidden links
• Keyword stuffing
• Sneaky redirects
• Cloaking with JavaScript redirects and 100% frame

Google Quality Raters don't even check for link spam.

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

Google is still instructing their Quality Raters to look only for these four types of spam:

• Hidden text and hidden links
• Keyword stuffing
• Sneaky redirects
• Cloaking with JavaScript redirects and 100% frame

Google Quality Raters don't even check for link spam.

Wouldn't this kind of spam have more of an effect on the the adsense bot?

Pro tip - build a page and leave it alone. Do not get into the little bitty small things that you "think" is going to help your site.

Take a look at sites like yahoo, msn, CNN, BBC - they rank well because they have useful content that people link to.

If the people that were so worried about over optimization would take that time and post quality content, they would rank better. Google wants content, so give it to the search bot. It wants to see pages updated on a regular basis with useful and original content. So do it. The more time you spend trying to sculpt page rank in internal pages, that is less time you have to post content.

Originally Posted by texashiker

Take a look at sites like yahoo, msn, CNN, BBC - they rank well because they have useful content that people link to.

I don't know about anyone else, but I almost never see any of those sites in my search results.