There’s a new rel-nofollow policy out. Where it used to be that pagerank got distributed around all the followed links on a page, now it gets distributed around all the links on the page and what’s on rel-nofollow links just ‘evaporates’ as Matt Cuts puts it in the interview I linked to above. Matt Cuts is THE google SEO spokesperson, so what he says is generally to be taken seriously.
My first thought on hearing this was that it would have no effect on squidoo. But I looked at my squidoo profile page just now and what I see is: 700 something links (rel nofollowed but still) to all my fans. That’s 700 links where the pagerank evaporates! Not good. I can’t be too worried, because traffic to my squidoo pages is growing so fast right now I can hardly keep up (close to 10000 a week now).
But what I AM concluding from this is simple: don’t rely on your profile for link juice. Make and promote lensographies. Don’t bother promoting your profile page if you can help it. Of course I was already doing that, but with this new interpretation of rel nofollow, it becomes more important than ever.
I can’t think of other squidoo consequences right now. The advice is still to put rel-nofollow on payed links, and I interpret that to include affiliate links (after all – you want to rank, you don’t want amazon to rank above you if you can help it).
Sites using rel-nofollow on external links or internally do need to reconsider. After all – if the pagerank is evaporating instead of benefiting your other pages, what are you doing if for? With squidoo blogs for instance: if there’s rel-nofollow on links to squidoo lenses mentioned, that means that there is:
1) pagerank lost
2) the squidoo community as a whole gets less pagerank, which then doesn’t flow back to the blog we started out with either.
More about SEO for squidoo.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Good post, I’m going to share this on Tagfoot.
Very interesting. I don’t like it though. Every Squidoo lens has a huge amount of nofollow links for bookmarking and so on. I can’t believe they will now leech pagerank too?
Mulberry: thanks
Andrew: I don’t like it either – it’s not so much leeching as evaporating – simply disappearing. But google has the right to calculate lensrank any way they please. And this policy doesn’t just effect squidoo, it negatively effects wikipedia too, and I can’t say I’m sorry about that. SEO’s will have to rethink how to deal with this and in the meantime the advice is probably to either not link out at all, or to link out with followed links as much as possible. As I said – if it’s a choice between pagerank disappearing or it going into the community, going into the community is probably best for everyone.
But you’re right: everybody who favorites a lens ads a no-followed link to a lens. We’ll just have to live with it. Community features have their own advantages after all.
Ultimately they created the importance of links, and any thing they change in their policy about how to deal with them will effect web professionals. Because google is so powerful. But in this case the effect is mostly on those sites where rel nofollow is used – and those are the SEO’d sites google probably worries most about anyhow. After all – they want to reward quality, not marketing or technological know how.
Funny you say to not promote your squidoo bio but to promote your lensography. I made that exact decision shortly after I made my lensography. I just love when I do what someone who is wise recommends!!! I started to put my lensography link in my signature, profile links, and tweets etc. I figured all of my lenses are listed there and then I get my lensography rank up at the same time. I do not know how this is going to affect us at Squidoo in the long run so we will have to wait and see. Excellent article. I too am going to share it on tagfoot and twitter.
Teddi
http://www.squidoo.com/teddi
Hi Teddi – I think in the case of most giant squids it’s best to go a step further: make specialized lensographies. Get everything about a certain topic together in one lensography. Though of course in your case – most of what you do is personal, so having only a personal lensography fits.
Thank goodness we have you, Katinka! Some of this is ‘over my head’ but I’m getting the idea.
Hi Brenda,
Thanks. I just keep up with the SEO news – and this one’s big.
Something else I’ve been doing today: getting rid of the dandyID module on most of my lenses. I had it in my template, so it was on all my new lenses made in the past few months. It was also on most of my lensographies. Now, as far as I’m aware, it’s only still on my where I’m at online lens, where it fits the topic. Everywhere else it’s gone for being a lensrank evaporator.
I think I understand what you are saying Katinka & like Teddi I always link to my Lensography these days and not my bio.
Google made this change to PageRank over a year ago. Squidoo and Wikipedia have been managing just fine, so I don’t see this being a huge problem.
Thanks – but it only JUST hit the news.
Taking rel-nofollow into account has been and is something to only start thinking about when you’ve done everything else right (title tags, keywords in module titles, external links etc.). Still, combined with the disappearance of the related lenses feature – I AM, on my low ranking lenses, getting rid of most keywords – precisely because of pagerank leak. I have no idea yet whether it will help, and even if they do suddenly start ranking, whether it’s because of this. Still, it’s something to think about, when you’ve tried everything else.
I’m sure you’re not saying that it’s a bad idea to make lensographies and promote them? After all – even leaving rel-nofollow aside – those are (if done right) topical links, whereas linking to a profile generally isn’t. Except of course for those who have a different profile for each niche.