Initially I planned to name this post “Google changes in the algorithm to calculate PageRank”. However I decided to give it a more marketable name which will reflect more the “Consequences of the Google changes in the algorithm to calculate PageRank”. When I read in a Matt Cutts’s post blog post how Google changed the PageRank algorithm, it thought there will be some changes out there.

Before the algorithm was changed only the dofollow links were considered when the page rank was computed. Lets assume that a page of PR 6 contains 6 links of which 3 are dofollow and 3 are nofollow. Google would consider only the dofollow links when computing how much PR score will be passed by the dofollow links. That would be the PR / number of dofollow links. In our case it is 6 / 3 = 2. In reality not the entire points will be passed, some 10%-15% will be lost.

The new Google algorithm takes in consideration all the links, nofollow and dofollow when dividing the page rank of the source page. The points passed will be PR / (nofollow links + dofollow links). That would be 6 / 6 = 1(reduced to 85%-90% of course). Still the nofollowed pages will get no PR score nor anchor text relevance to the destination pages.

Obviously this move will produce big movements for most of the pages on the web. If this is the only change in the algorithm most of the pages will lose from their page rank even if they don’t contain nofollow links. After all the PR of a page is built based on incoming links. If the pages containing the back links will lose PR the destination page will lose it as well.

People used to play with nofollow/dofollow links in order to direct the page rank points(the term of link juice is also used here) to certain pages. For example wordpress plugins make the links to categories and tags pages nofollows, many sites are through this method to send the link juice to strong pages. This term is called PageRank sculpting.

Before seeing which are the sites will be most disadvantaged by this move, lets say that page rank is just one of the many factors used by google to decide which are the best results for what you are looking for. A lowered PR does not necessarily means less visitors sent by search engines.

The most affected sites are of course sites containing nofollow links. Right now I’m thinking to the following categories:

• sites based on user generated content – digg, twitter, youtube clones and many many more. Lots of web 2.0 sites contains no follow links and user generated content
• wikipedia – maybe I should put it in the above category, but since for many keywords wikipedia is the first result I wanted to put it separately. Wikipedia pages contains a list of external links at the end.
• forums – many forums shows the links from posts as no follow in order to avoid spam
• blogs – most of the blogs have no follow link comments.

Then it comes the second category of pages, which used to have their PR built by the dofollow links from the sites from the above categories. However the first 3 categories should be excluded, because they have most of the links as nofollow, they don’t really pass page rank points. The only remaining category is represented by the blogs with their in text or in context dofollow links. Since they have lots of comments the pages will lose their PR and consequently will pass less.

Unfortunatelly, Matt does not specify when this change was done. I don’t think the current PRs reflect it, but I assume the next PR change will bring some big changes.

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I’ve created 2-3 pages on squidoo and I’m very pleased by a health check they have there. It displays a few check points where you have to work on your article to improve it. All of the points are just the seo advices written in a language that someone who doesn’t know what seo is can understand.

In reality many people publish content there with the solely purpose to get some link juice to their own websites. I think this is an option but in 99% of the cases is one of the worth option. The first reason is that the page you publish in a website like squidoo will have have bigger chances to outrank your pages you want to promote this way, so first of all visitors will go to squidoo before coming to your site.

Another reason why you should take care when you publish content on other sites is that you’ll not be 100% control to that content. A blog post caught my attention regarding it: Be Careful with HubPages – Dofollow Nofollow Fraud. The author noticed that links in his pages on hubpages gets nofollw when he dosn’t log in in the hubpages account for a long time, and that this fact is not made public by hubpages.

I don’t think sites like hubpages, trying to reach the top of the search engines are purely evil. Everyone want to do it. However they have to do this by generating as much content they can, selecting good content and publishing new content all the time. And not always their goal is your goal.

So, I think you should take care before enriching other sites with your content, and remember that the content you put there might be yours, but the benefits you get from there are controled by them.

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