A few words about NOFOLLOW

The current post over at search engine master DaveN’s blog has a few words about the NOFOLLOW tag, which are actually more questions than opinions or answers. The great NOFOLLOW initiative, begun about 2 and a half years ago by the big three, has left us all with little more than great questions in general, in addition to a little tag that we can put in our website’s link structure if we want. We’re not sure if it works, we’re not sure exactly how it works. Since the SEO industry is in general behind a great cloud of uncertainty that separates the royals (the googlers) from the peasants (the rest of us), as usual, the original statement of intent from Google was not specific enough to sufficiently describe how the tool is really used. In my opinion, the addition of the NOFOLLOW attribute (sorry if I called it a tag earlier), has added much more uncertainty than functionality to an industry of SEO consultants who are already dealing with considerable uncertainty because of the sheer nature of SEO.

Here are a few issues that we don’t really know:

1. If you use a NOFOLLOW link, we know that the link does not contribute to the recipient’s PR. BUT does the link actually count against the recipient? In other words, is a NOFOLLOW vote actually lowering PR of the recipient?

2. Does NOFOLLOW have any affect on the referrer? If I were ranking a page, and I saw that it had a bunch of links to bad pages (signified by the presence of NOFOLLOW), I would not want to rank the referring page highly. Who wants to see a page with a bunch of links for which it has no confidence?

3. What if NOFOLLOW is used within the link structure of the same website? Can a website drive PR to certain pages by using NOFOLLOW in links to less profitable content?

We actually used #3 at my company, before my tenure here, and I convinced everyone that this was not a good idea, since we don’t have definitive answers to #1 or #2. I felt that we were issuing votes of “no confidence” to ourselves by following this strategy, thereby hurting ourselves in the eyes of Google. In addition to this, I didn’t see the same strategy at work anywhere else on the web, which further eroded my confidence in it.

Personally, I wish that NOFOLLOW had never been devised, or that it had been devised completely differently. The device has added, in my opinion, just one more list of questions for which the SEO crowd doesn’t really have answers.