Back in March I added a video on my test video blog regarding the overuse of the ‘nofollow’ tag by social media sites. Just to recap, the ‘nofollow’ tag is a way to link to another site without passing Pagerank. If the ‘nofollow’ tag is used on a link then Google doesn’t use that link in it’s link graph.
There are basically two uses of the ‘nofollow’ tag, firstly to stop sending Pagerank to pages you don’t want Google to value, such as login pages and privacy (although this has now slightly changed, see below) and secondly to stop Pagerank being passed to sites you don’t vouch for. If you want a better understanding check out this post on Search Engine Journal.
The first point (using nofollow on internal pages) was somewhat overused as SEO practitioners used this to ’sculpt’ Pagerank (PR) within their site. If they had a page with PR5 and it has 10 links on the page they could use ‘nofollow’ on 9 of them and squeeze as much PR to the remaining link.
However, Google decided to stop this practice and now the PR is still divided by the number of links on the page, even if some are nofollow’d, a better explanation of this can be found here by Matt Cutts (Google).
Back in March my argument was that Social Media sites should not use the ‘nofollow’ tag on links to your blog from your profile page, it’s your profile page and you can vouch for the blog. Some sites weren’t using ‘nofollow’, best known would be LinkedIn, but some did, including Twitter and Youtube.
This meant that my Youtube profile had a link to my video blog that was nofollow’d. This for me isn’t a fair use of the tag, thousands of people link to their social media profiles, passing pagerank to those sites and get nothing back in return, my Twitter page is PR5.
Now Youtube have removed the nofollow tag, links to your website from your profile page now pass Pagerank. This brings a whole new perspective to how you utilise your Youtube channel. For instance I’m subscribed to my friends channel at Youtube, his profile page is PR3, because I’m subscribed my profile is linked from his, in turn my profile is linked to my video blog. Pagerank starts to get passed on because the links mentioned are all followed.
Youtube Removes Nofollow
This means that Youtube has stopped being a passive part of link building/SEO and moved into a direct contributor to your link profile. The down side could be if this gets abused.
For me it’s really pleasing to see a Google web property leading the way, my question is of course when will Twitter follow?
