A recent statement by Matt Cutts at SMX advanced has caused confusion and anger among webmasters regarding the use of nofollow tags for pagerank sculpting.
It was previously believed that the use of a nofollow tag on links would prevent the pagerank flow from going to these link and instead preserving it for more important pages on your site. Well it seems this is no longer the case.
To further confuse the issue, it seems that Google is now indexing links found in Javascript which it previously could not find.
What does this mean in terms of SEO? well in a nutshell lots of wasted Link Juice flowing down a black hole! Danny Sullivan explained it the idea of link juice flow perfectly:
“Consider it like this. Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).”
If this issue is not officially clarified by Google and soon, webmasters could unfairly face penalty consequences as a result of losing rankings in the search results and worst yet, the possibility of getting completely banned as a result of their advertising links found in Javascript tags across the net.
Update
Matt Cutts from Google has officially shed some light on this topic:
On PageRank Sculpting
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http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting
Thanks Matt!
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