After doing some searhes on our clients keywords over the last couple of days I have noticed that Google seems to be returning some strange results. On initial inspection it does seem like results from the US are getting mixed up with results from the UK. This is having a negative effect on some of our sites but positive effect on others.
I have read numerous blog posts over the last couple of days that tell us that Google have made some changes to the way that back links with the nofollow tag affect Page Rank. Not only have changes been made, but Google have not been forthcoming with any real communication or response to the changes.
- A large number of people queried the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, about the issue. Responses ranged from “no comment” to “the PR team would like me to stay away from that.”
- Another member of Google’s team noted that PageRank Sculpting on unimportant pages like “register,” “login,” “privacy policy,” etc. is OK and shouldn’t hurt your site.
- A great many webmasters and SEOs are still shocked by the announcement because as recently as the last few days, they’ve still been seeing positive effects when employing the tactic.
So why have changes been made?
Im summary Google is getting pretty fed up with Page Rank sculpting (creative distribution of page rank around the pages of your web site). Basically Google wants non-advanced web site owners to stop screwing around with their link graph and stay away from excessively using nofollow in ways that hurt indexing and relevance.
Have you seen changes to your SERP or Page Rank in the last week?
