Yesterday we covered the news that SEOs are wasting PageRank by using the nofollow to sculpt their PageRank. In short, if you had 10 links on a page, and nofollowed 5 of them, the 5 that are followed only get half credit.
So what is the issue with blogs, forum and other user generated content sites? As mentioned in the WebmasterWorld, blogs and other sites that automatically add the nofollow attribute to user generated links, technically should suffer from the way Google handles nofollowed links. Let me explain.
Let's say this blog post has 5 links, 15 comments and then the remaining 20 navigational links in the blog's design. So we have a total of 40 links on a single page, 15 of them are nofollowed since links in the comments automatically get nofollowed. That means 37.5% of the links are wasted, which hurts (well, doesnt help as much) not only the sites I link out to, but also hurts the internal linkage structure of my site.
Why? Well, the links are not worth what they should be, cause of the user generated comments that get nofollowed.
See the issue?
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