I read that nofollow had been changed months back, but didn’t believe it because it doesn’t make sense!

The whole point of nofollow was to help webmasters link freely to sites they are not recommending, this could be a negative review about a site: a liberal political blog might link to the BNP’s site, but I assume most liberals won’t want the BNP to rank better for political SERPs!

Seems wrong to penalise a site for using nofollow as intended!

Also helpful to stop blog comment spamming, little point in spamming blogs for links if you gain no link benefit. Although the link to Matts page above (your comment) isn’t a SPAM link, because all WordPress installations out the box nofollow comment links, that means I’m loosing link benefit from this page by allowing comments!

Apparently (I don’t believe everything Matt Cutts publishes, he works for Google and will have an agenda) now when we use nofollow it still passes no link benefit to the site linked to, but we loose the link benefit into some black hole!

IF this is how Google treats nofollow time to dig out the old javascript code for linking out to sites/pages you don’t want link benefit wasted on.

With regards my SEO WordPress themes, yes this is going to be an issue. RSS feed links and login links are nofollow. As Matt Cutts says in his article you don’t want RSS feed pages indexed with a lot of links, he might have added Google can handle them, but I’ve had SERPs ruined by RSS feeds being more SEO’d than the content the feed was based on so ideally we don’t want to add any link benefit to them as that can only make the matter worse!

I’ve been thinking about javascripting links to feeds/login pages and even comment links if I can get the code right. It would be easy to only link to login pages from the home page of a WordPress blog, so if I can’t make javascript work for my themes can at least reduce the damage.

Also sucks that I’ve been using nofollow for affiliate links out from various sites, the whole idea is to not give these links benefit as you are linking to them to make money not recommended them to Google etc… Got a load of javascript links to write I guess!

David Law

Does this post by Matt Cutts change things? as he is strongly recommending not to use no follow, except for feeds. Do your templates take this into account? I read your blog as your insights are honest and clear. You have a tell it like it is style with regards to SEO tips.