There has been a bit of confusion about whether there is any way around ‘nofollow’ attributes. Even though some of the big open-source or community sites like Wikipedia have long since applied nofollows to all of their outbound links, there are still plenty of hopeful conversations out there. They are usually along the lines of ‘I just found this. Does that mean the link is counted?’ The answer, without an exception, is no.

The flurry of big community sites placing nofollows on all their outbound links has been deeply disturbing to the search engine optimisation community. It’s been a while since Wikipedia blocked all link juice from its pages. Facebook, which was once seen as a great opportunity for inbound links, has been out of the game for a long time as well. The most recent uproar was when Twitter, which initially provided some link juice for its users, put nofollows across the board.

Bothered and bewildered

Information on nofollows is uncharacteristically slow to filter through the SEO community. Usually, changes to the playing board of the internet are detected and defined within a matter of weeks. For some reason, the use of nofollows on important sites sends a wave of confusion through even experienced SEO circles. Not months, but years afterwards, forums are still clogged with ‘What if I did this?’ type questions.

The issue isn’t made any clearer by the fact that the industry is rarely warned before a big site labels all of its outbound links as nofollows. Of course, that’s to be expected. The industry is rarely warned about any major change, but often the websites are willing to talk about it. The emotional reaction to nofollows, however, seems to have discouraged big site representatives from talking too much. The maisma of betrayal surrounding Twitter’s move to nofollow links in the bio section of users’ profiles, for instance, not only was Twitter man Evan Williams reluctant to discuss it, but Matt Cutts, who triggered the move, was on the defensive.

Saving the situation!

This lack of information has been confusing. For example, site owners have noticed that Google still recognises a lot of links coming from sites like Facebook and Twitter. There have been plenty of hopeful posts and even a study or two suggesting that somehow, these links are still counted towards PageRank.

At the moment at least, all of these are pipe dreams. Despite appearances, Google is not suddenly going to realise the unfairness of the situation and override the instructions on big sites. The only way to get link juice remains to get inbound, followable links. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about this.

This issue is mainly an issue because of hope. A big site like Twitter suddenly laying down a nofollow on all of its user outbound links represents a big blow for the search engine optimisation of thousands of sites. SEO experts and site owners can’t help but hope that there is some way around it, a way to salvage the situation. Unfortunately, there is none.

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