The Page Rank Train Wreck

Google giveth and Google taketh away. If you’re involved in SEO, either as a practitioner, or as a site owner, you already know that your page rank can change at what almost seems like a whim.

But more often than not, a fall from top-ranking “grace” has more to do with the rules you broke than with Google changing the rules in mid-stream.

Sometimes Google will inadvertently open a door of opportunity and in will flow an endless stream of people ready to use that opportunity for other than what it was intended. Not quite “black hat” tactics, in all instances, but dangerously close. I call it “grey hat.” The “nofollow” debacle is a good example.

The wizards at Google originally implemented the nofollow tag to protect webmasters from link freeloaders who would post comment SPAM on blogs and discussion forums with links to whatever scam-of-the-day they were promoting.

As a result of these links being posted, it would appear to the Google that you were “recommending” these other sites and the spiders would scurry off to the linked site to digest the content there. You’d end up bleeding some page rank to the SPAMMER and the SPAMMER would inch up higher in the SERPS as a result of freeloading off your hard work.

Another reason for implementing the tag was to tell Google “nothing here for you to see, move on please” when it encountered links to certain parts of your web site that you didn’t want to be indexed and that Google would derive no value out of indexing anyway. A link to your login page, or your Terms and Conditions are good examples.

Of course, you could always use robots.txt to keep honest search engine spiders completely out of any chosen directory, but nofollow provided the option to control indexing flow on a link-by-link basis.

And thus there was stage set for the great train wreck to come

Once that door was opened, a cadre of SEO people started to poke around to see if these was some unintended benefit that could be derived. And sure enough, the practice of Page Sculpting was born.

Here’s a synopsis of how page sculpting works (or doesn’t work as it now turns out).

You start with the pages on your site that have the highest page ranking; usually the home page at least. Then you engineer your site’s link structure so these highest-ranking pages share “juice” with other high ranking pages on your site, and low ranking or insignificant pages don’t steal any of the glory.

In order to do this, SEO folks started using the rel=”nofollow” tags to short circuit the flow of page rank to logon pages, privacy policies, terms and conditions, and the like. The result was an increase in page rank to the other pages.

Clear? Maybe not. Here’s an example:

Suppose you have 10 interior pages linked from your home page. Without the nofollow tag, your page rank is split among all 10 pages, 1 “vote”, so to speak, for each link. But after applying the nofollow tag to 5 of the insignificant pages, you are left with 10 points divided between 5 pages, or 2 votes per page.

It seemed like a dream come true to many folks, but I, and a small group of others who shared the same train wreck premonition, warned against this practice. I guess we were all too familiar with the Law of Unintended Consequences and smelled disaster on the horizon.

Help, Runaway Train!

That Law of Unintended Consequences kicked in when Google looked around one day and saw that people were abusing the nofollow tag in ways it was not intended (page sculpting).

Not being an organization that reacts kindly to being taken advantage of, Google changed the way nofollow tags work. And while they still steal the thunder from spammers, they are ignored when it comes to computing page rank.

In other words, your page rank is divided by the number of internal links on your page, nofollow tags or not, and the Universe reverts to the way Google intended before the “grey hats” had their way.

So what?

So now all of those carefully crafted nofollow links are actually watering down you page rank.

Here’ the best thing to do if you ended up being a passenger on that ill-fated train…

Practice Page Rank Feng Shui. Remove the disingenuous nofollow tags, and let page rank flow naturally through your site the way it was intended to so you can put your white hat back on and take your rightful place among SEO professionals..

Look folks; there are plenty of ways to make SEO work for you without straying into the grey hat zone. Stop looking for the easy way out and focus on the proven aspects of SEO like keywords and providing meaningful content to site visitors.

You’ll not only keep people coming back for more, you’ll earn the rankings you deserve and sleep better at night knowing you won’t wake up the next day to find all your hard work has been wiped out.