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Matt Cutts On NoFollow & Link Directories
By Jim Kukral | August 30, 2007
Matt Cutts, the Google guy, sometimes lets the world know what Google is thinking. And we’re paying attention. In his latest thoughts, he talks about no follow, seo directories and link farms. Good stuff.
Here’s a summary from SEOmoz.
Want to know more about search?Here are the big takeaway points from my perspective:
* Nofollow is now, officially, a “tool” that power users and webmasters should be employing on their sites as a way to control the flow of link juice and point it in the very best directions. Good architectural SEO has always had some internal link structuring work involved, but nofollow and Matt’s position on it makess it clear that for those of us who are professionals, we should be using it to the best of our abilities.
* For pages with many, many links, sticking close to 100 links per page is probably still a very good idea, though high PR and link juice pages can certainly get more pages spidered. I note that on a page like the Web 2.0 Awards, well over 200 links are being followed and passing link juice (at least from what I can see).
* Directories (and all websites) that link out need to be very, very careful of who they link to, as this is a big way that Google’s algorithmically identifying and discounting paid and other types of links they don’t want to count. For really solid evidence on this, check out SEOmoz’s own recommended list - the page is indexed at Google, but can’t rank for its full title tag, we’re not even ranking for the phrase in quotes. Why? I’m almost sure it’s because of someone on the list that we’re linking out to that Google doesn’t like. I don’t think that’s a hand penalty - I think it’s algorithmic. Full disclosure on this - SEOmoz used to be a directory operator, with a junky piece of crap called SOCEngine. We’ve officially shut it down at this point, even though it’s been barely active for the last 2 years, as it would be totally hypocritical to operate a low quality directory and then proclaim that they’re not worth paying for.
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