Forum Moderators: open
A little back ground: a site recently updated their website both design and back end, new ajax functionality, etc...
A few days ago i noticed that 55 of their 88 internal links are now "nofollow"!?!?!?
What is this all about? I was always taught that this is nofollow abuse, over optimization! According to matt cutts its technically not:
[youtube.com...]
I know in the video matt cutts says you can use nofollow on your website as much as you want. I was hoping someone on this forum could guess what they are thinking. They have nofollowed almost all of their money pages!
I believe 1 of 3 things is going on:
1- Disgruntled former SEO has done this(Revenge)
2- Working out some functionality kinks(Maybe temporary)
3- SEO is smoking crack instead of cigars(Stupidity)
[edited by: agerhart at 6:36 am (utc) on June 25, 2009]
[edit reason] removed specifics per TOS [/edit]
My guess is that the person went a little too aggressive with their implementation of the nofollow tag.
I'm not opposed to using it in moderation and in the appropriate places. We've used it on a few sites and the tests we ran showed a positive improvement.
When PageRank had some significance, nofollow made some sense as a remedy for bleeding PR. As PR has deteriorated in useful functionality because of excessive abuse, the nofollow attribute is rediculously over-employed.
Essentially, this type of spider instruction is just another one of Google's obsolete dinosaurs that somehow continues to survive.
i used to have a load of nofollows on my internal links as well, to try and concentrate the page rank on to my directory index pages. but as i understand it now, it has all changed and page rank no longer gets funnelled somewhere else if you nofollow a link. you just lose it.
maybe your competitors aren't aware that the rules have changed.
(i wouldn't like to be a customer of their SEO firm!)
