August 14 2009
Why SEOs need to fix their nofollow mistakes
Actually, I wrote about this at great length over at SEO Theory in How To Fix Your Nofollow Screwup. I put the article there because it was so long and offers detailed suggestions on how SEOs and their clients can gracefully exit the Nofollow Hell they have created for themselves.
Let me sum up my major points here:
Some people are leaving their internalized nofollow links in place because they are afraid they will lose search traffic. That might actually happen because the internalized nofollow never fixed the original problem anyway.
Nonetheless, by leaving those internalized nofollow links on sites, people are passing part of their PageRank to other sites in the Google index (perhaps only to sites in the Main Web Index, but I don’t really know). If you or your clients have worked hard to build up PageRank, just giving it away like that devalues the time and effort that went into building it up.
You cannot hoard PageRank but you can shape its flow by deciding what to link to. You cannot shape its flow by using nofollow.
When dealing with sites that are struggling with poor search visibility, the SEO community should fix the underlying problems: bad navigation and architecture. There ARE solutions you can implement without having to redesign an entire site (I discuss some of those solutions in the SEO Theory article).
I think SEOs owe it to their clients at a moral level to help them fix these broken sites, or at least to provide the clients with methods for growing those sites out of the broken state into which they fell (and really without the SEOs’ knowledge — Google surprised everyone when it revealed how it had changed PageRank calculations).
I don’t believe that we as a consulting industry should be held responsible for the consequences of a change in search engine design and practice, but I do believe that we need to do the right thing and accept the challenge of guiding clients’ sites to good search engine visibility.
Simply leaving things where they are because everyone is “happy” with the status quo is not, in my opinion, a competitive philosophy.
Written by Michael Martinez
