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

The good news is, Google doesn't care how many no-follow links you have on your website.

The bad news is, you should care, as no-follows may soon bleed PR.

He isn't very clear on how Google handles over-optimization, but seems to hint that keyword stuffing may annoy more than your audience and competitors.

We know manual checks often penalize Made For Adsense (MFA) sites, so the decision not to over-optimize should be a no-brainer anyway.

Here's the video:

I wonder why google is concerned about key word stuffing? The adsense and googlebot both crawl as a loadsharing function. So I wonder how much value high kw density has?

I added nofollow to ine of my blogs and it seems like the blog is ranking a little better.

Well, it seems as if there's no issue here. Just continue to write naturally, with a natural frequency of keywords, write with your readers in mind, and there won't be any problem.

Ha!

keyword stuffing is not a new issue, it has been discouraged fromm the very beginning

As m42 pointed out, the bad news is that no-follows may soon bleed PR.

I read Matt's previous comments on this issue and quite frankly it doesn't make any sense that ANY PageRank should the bled off or passed with a nofollow. The original idea behind the nofollow attribute was supposed to be that the link did not count for anything.

This is potentially a significant issue for WordPress blogs or any sites that have been automaticaly inserting nofollow attributes. I suspect it would increase the amount of spam comments with blogs.

I also wonder if a link that passes some PR would inherit some of a penalty applied to a page it links to. The nofollow attribute was also supposed to prevent the inheritance of penalties, as well.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

As m42 pointed out, the bad news is that no-follows may soon bleed PR.

Matt Cutts addressed this and has flat out stated that PR will not be passed. It looks like it will just evaporate:

PageRank sculpting

Thank goodness I was wrong!

I was a bit surprised to hear Matt come out and specifically state that there were no penalties against overusing nofollow -- I was beginning to think that the opposite was true.

Googlers seem to always use keyword stuffing as the example of on-page spam. It seems like they must have some internal policy against using more modern/useful/interesting examples -- out of fear that they might accidentally give away some valuable intellectual property.

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

Googlers seem to always use keyword stuffing as the example of on-page spam. It seems like they must have some internal policy against using more modern/useful/interesting examples -- out of fear that they might accidentally give away some valuable intellectual property.

Keyword stuffing seems to work when new sites get a fresh content boost.

But keyword stuffing doesn't seem to help an established site.

Originally Posted by m42

Matt Cutts addressed this and has flat out stated that PR will not be passed. It looks like it will just evaporate:

PageRank sculpting

Thank goodness I was wrong!

And that is the way it should be. There should not be any inheritance either way with a nofollow link.

I thought I recently read something he said that appeared to indicate that nofollow links bled a minimal amount of PageRank.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

And that is the way it should be. There should not be any inheritance either way with a nofollow link.

I thought I recently read something he said that appeared to indicate that nofollow links bled a minimal amount of PageRank.

Yes. I've been reading that quite a bit as well. Some SEO's/SEM's even said Google has been allowing no-follows to bleed PR for the past year.

Figured I'd just go to the source.