Mikkel’s argument reminds me of the what Mao used in China during a period in 1957. He came out with the slogan, “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”. Sounded good to the intellectuals and they came out in droves critisizing the government. Most historians think it was a deliberate attempt to discover the true dissidents and crack down on them. Oops, did I just compare Google to an evil communist regime?

1) google has way too much power
we have an entire industry fretting that google will suddenly change their mind on certain principles and this change of heart could have non-trivial impact on businesses. on a whim and unannounced google can (and has) made “adjustments” to page rank calculations that cause significant drops in natural search traffic across many sites. what if this were traditional marketing and you had spent months researching your target audience and you found once specific print magazine you could run promotions in and reach that audience effectively. month go by, business is picking up nicely each month. now think about the impact to your business if the FCC suddenly decided that magazine could no longer accept promotions. “but this scenario would never happen,” you say? then why is it okay for google?

2) the link-based page rank system is deeply flawed.
so often the debate about whether a given technique is white hat or not revolves around links and page rank. there are simply too many ways to influence, fair or foul, the link-counting algorithm. once the basic on-page SEO is taken care of (in relatively short order, usually), the links are all you have left to try to boost natural search. and really when you think about it, even if everybody played by the rules, does popularity = relevancy? i tend to think not.

Most industries are not going to benefit from using nofollow in this manner, but in highly competitive markets everyone will be using and in order to gain that small competitive edge. That means you’re going to have to use it as well.

You have to push the envelope in competitive industries or you get left behind. Is the chance of getting plowed in a cleanup higher? Of course it is but without tactics like that you’ll never rank in the first place.

John, I agree about some of the whoring that goes around. A healthy debate is good for all. Many times both parties are correct and incorrect.

Remember the whole essence of the nofollow is to help GOOGLE not your website perform better. It created to first help curb comment spam, then morphed into a paid link condom and now to help Google figure out what pages are more important than others. Of course the latter point I am very skeptical on.

Either way I am not going to turn this thread into a why PR Sculpting doesn’t work or exist thread.

The fact is that search engines change their mind (and they have every right to do so!) and they often react differently than what they officially say. Thats the fact of SEO risk evaluation.

So our job as SEOs is not to just listen to what the engines say or write but to understand where things can potentially go or what they might do and not tell us. And with the NO FOLLOW there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it could very well lead to penalities sometimes soon. Do you want to take the risk? Do you have to? Is there a different option that produce just as good results with a lower risk?

I do believe that beyond the basics all SEO is a matter of managing the risk - if you feel the benefit outways any risk then do that, if you feel there is a no risk way of doing it then why wouldnt you choose that.

I am not a big conference goer - just dont like the majority of it. I like to meet the people I wanna meet face to face but I could do without the rest of the noise tbh and having the word ‘idiot’ in your name just lets you get on with what you need and want to do….

I understand Mikkels concern about Google but in this case I don’t believe that using rel=nofollow to block off things like security certificate links (that Google doesn’t want anyway) or ad links with a bunch of tracking codes makes sense for both the Page Rank of the page being optimized, as well as the quality of Google’s index.

@catfish:  Matt Cutts is not Google, but Matt does understand Google. I would therefore interpret Matt’s statement to mean NOT that an allowable technique is White Hat, but that if carefully inspected, that technique is not likely to be suspected of being dishonest on its own merit. Reality however suggests that not every issue will be granted careful review every time, not every bit of evidence will be evaluated solely on its own merit, and Matt Cutts’ benevolent sense of fairness and justice will not always represent the majority opinion of Google’s quality control teams. Repeat after me: there is no white hat SEO…there is no white hat SEO..there is no white hat SEO.