Recently, I posted an article that discussed in part the importance of keeping up with changes that the Search Engines make. The reason this is important is that whenever the search engines change how they consider your site’s content you have an opportunity. You can either see how you can benefit from these changes and push yourself ahead of your competition in the search engine rankings, or you can ignore the change and possibly be penalized by the search engines for inadvertantly doing things “wrong” — or at the very least, missing an optimization opportunity.

What are the Changes?

So what are the changes that Google made recently? They changed how they consider “no-follow” links on your pages. I know, it sounds technical but I will try to explain it in terms that the non-HTML savvy can understand.

Your basic link looks like the following:
  <a href="web page to link to">anchor text</a>

The “anchor text” is what is displayed on the page and is usually underlined to indicate that it is a link, and “web page to link to” is the web page that your browser will go to when you click on the link. The above is the most basic form of the anchor HTML tag. There’s a lot more to it, but the topic of this discussion focuses on the REL= attribute. Using the values “index”, “noindex”, “follow” and “nofollow”, you can control how the search engines treat the link. So a link might look like this:
  <a href="web page to link to" rel="index follow">anchor text</a>

This type of link would instruct the search engine to follow this link and index the contents of the target page. Using “noindex nofollow” would direct the search engine to not follow the link and not index the contents of the page. Google’s recent changes are directly involved in this area.

In the past, Google would count only the “follow” links toward the number of links found on the page. So if you had ten links on the page, six of which had a rel=”nofollow” attribute, Google would only consider you to have four links. Now, Google counts all of the links on the page, regardless of the “follow” or “nofollow” directives.

Why is this Significant?

At first, you may think that this is not a big deal. But consider that Google evaluates the number of links on a page when calculating the importance of the linked pages. If Google is passing page rank to the linked pages, they are now splitting that rank value among more linked pages. This means that controlling how page rank is distributed is more a matter of cutting back on links. The fewer links on your page, the more rank is distributed to each of the pages that are referenced. Essentially this greatly penalizes pages that have hundreds of links, such as link farms — so that’s a good thing. What it means to you is that if you don’t want to have the rank value you are passing to your linked pages reduced, you will need to cut back on the number of links you have on your page.

You should remember that the number of links on your page also includes the links you have to your own site, not just the other sites you link to. So the links you have on your page for site navigation are also counted. This means that you need to carefully consider how your site navigation is set up. Having links to all of your pages on every page in your site may be a good idea if you want Google to be able to find all of your content, but it is no longer a good idea from an SEO standpoint if you want to carefully control how page rank is distributed among your own pages.

There are now significant trade offs that should be considered when designing your site’s navigation in relationship to high valued or high ranked pages. It is no longer a simple matter of “nofollowing” pages that you are not concerned with passing rank to. The links should be removed if possible, relying on your sitemap to instruct the search engines on how and where to find your site’s content.