I have just read an article that says no follows now leak link juice?

[mblsolutions]

I have just been reading a really interesting article about link juice.

The way I read the piece the author was saying that there has been a change in the way link juice is blocked with 'no follows.'

The author seemed to say that there has been a change and now even if you add a 'no follow' onto a page that the page will still send link juice to that page. I may have read this wrong.

I just wanted to check if anyone else had heard this at all?

Many thanks

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Oliver,

No Follow links do not leak link juice but there is a new concept in SEO called co-citation. Basically Google and other search engines are using mentions (semantics) http://moz.com/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday to determine how to rank your website. I suspect this is Google's effort to try and reduce spam and the linkbuilding business. The more mentions you get the better your website will rank and especially if the website has authority

Thanks

Carla

[Adam_Cochran]

While there has been extensive debate to the value of 'nofollow' it's best not to get caught up in the nitty-gritty of it all. Here's the mantra I follow when dealing with links:

1. Ask yourself does your reader REALLY need this link. When in doubt, go without! Conserve your link juice as much as possible but put the user first.

2. Is this the right place for the link - remember links placed higher on a page and in mainstream content react differently that footer or sidelinks.

3. Is this an authority site? If yes I won't nofollow it, I encourage Google to know I'm linking to high-end authority. Otherwise, I'll nofollow the site.

Last but not least consider that either nofollow plugs a page leak or it doesn't, but it certainly doesn't penalize you - so wouldn't you rather be safe than sorry and use it anyways?

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Oliver,

In the research I have done on this subject, between 2005 and 2009 the NoFollow directive was used to preserve link juice and keep it from passing through to the particular link. This would allow you to reallocate that link juice to other, more important links on your page. It was mainly developed to discourage comment posters from spamming sites with misc. links; however, web masters soon figured that you could "link sculpt" your site... more or less hoarding your link juice and only pushing it through to your really important pages... making them rank higher.

In 2009 things changes. Matt Cutts commented on the subject saying, "So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each." - more or less stating that link juice is discarded and not reallocated.

Matt Cutts also says, "Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank." - So while the PageRank flows through the link, it is discarded, and is not passed to the linked to page.

"The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results." - Matt Cutts

I don't know if the subject of the article you were reading was about sculpting your site, but depending on who you talk to, there are many other tactics that can give you a higher ROI.

I hope this helps answer your question.

Mike

[Maximise]

I agree with Mike, this is the article I was going to point you towards.

So in summary: You can stop yourself from passing page rank to another site by adding a nofollow but you cannot save yourself from losing link juice by adding nofollow. This has been the case for several years already (If you go on what Google is saying).