What Has Changed

Think of your webpage as a water tower and links as pipes from that water tower to other smaller water towers. Historically, a “nofollow” tag was like capping the one of the pipes so that no water would flow to the terminating water tower. Google has changed this, though. Instead of capping the pipe, they merely divert it into the abyss. The link still impacts your page’s ability to pass on PageRank, but does not benefit the terminating page.

Implications for PageRank Sculpting

These new changes effectively curtail the use of NoFollow to accomplish PageRank sculpting. Applying NoFollow to certain links on your page will not increase the flow to other pages on your site. However, this does not impact the use of other PageRank Sculpting techniques such as:

1. Selective Link Addition like Second Page Poaching which increase the volume of links pointing to important pages on your site
2. Select Link Removal will still allow a greater percentage of PageRank to flow to important pages.
3. Pseudo-Links (using javascript and onClick events create HTML entities that function as links): The use of these types of links in place of NoFollow will allow a greater percentage of PageRank to flow to important pages.