Nofollow links, Matt Cutts, Google, content, evolution, Adfero and a long rant by me.

Apologies for a disjointed title but it sums up very well what this post is about. Whilst this post may sound like a shameless plug for one of Adfero’s products, DirectNews, it is not. Yes, it is more proof that in online marketing content is king (which Adfero has known for many years) but I’m going to talk about how this relates to evolution because, well it has been bothering me for years and i think even OM can learn from mother nature!

Ever since learning about search engines, SEO agencies and how they work, I am constantly reminded about my undergrad developmental biology course. The course was based around the constant battle between predator (or parasite) and prey and how it drives the evolution of both species (through selection pressures to eat and not be eaten). For example, amphibians were the first land-inhabiting creatures who evolved from sea creatures and flourished because they could escape the predators of the sea. This process is called a co-evolutionary arms race, with each species evolving to better catch prey and in turn the prey evolving to evade the predator.

Effectively it has always seemed that Google wants to direct users to relevant information available on the web. Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible” (whilst picking up some advertising cash along the way). Information is expensive as it is difficult to find and report and more costly to create (especially legally if you get it wrong). This means many organisations who want to rank highly try to fiddle Google. Google then works out how this is happening and changes its algorithm to pick up on these cheats. Can you now start to see the basis for a co-evolutionary arms race?

Following a recent appearance at SMX advance in the US, Matt Cutts (Google associate in Search Quality) brought up this issue of nofollow links and how they affect page ranks. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and the title of the post is PageRank sculpting.

Over the years SEO agencies have been trying to sculpt page rank through their site. The basic premise behind this stems from the idea that the page rank “carried over” in the page rank flow is the page rank value of the page/number of outgoing links. At basic face value it then seems to increase page rank flow to another page of “your choosing”; you limit the amount of outbound links from that page to boost the flow of page rank to the desired page. This does not always fit with user experiences so people have created nofollow links that allow a user to navigate, but not the Google spiders.

Matt has now revealed in his blog that this changed (or evolved) some time ago to recognise nofollow links and still counts them in the above equation.

He poses and answers the following question: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?

A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

Now in biology, evolution is blind. If a predator could predict the evolution of its prey and change to take advantage of it then it would be a very happy predator (for a few generations, but that’s another rant). But here in this online co-evolutionary arms race, the prey i.e. Google is actually telling the agencies how to get their traffic - with content.

So why aren’t the agencies jumping all over this?