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So, for all those SEO Experts who have been making sense of the post on Matt Cutt’s blog and infering the impact on the day to day SEO practices, I will like to try and simplify the ‘page rank sculpting’ by offering a simple example.

We all know that a good SEO professional always takes care of the quality content on this website and his blog. There is a free flow of the page rank to internal pages of the blog or site as well. Given the fact that there is a tendency amongst people to spam the blogs using comments, I am a big supporter of ‘nofollow’. All comments on my blog are ‘nofollow’. Inspite of that, I get on an average 5-10 blog comments that send me kudos for writing such good content

So, coming back to the page rank changes. What Google seems to have done is that instead of dividing the page rank of a page based on total number of ‘dofollow’ links on that page, it is now calculating the average page rank passed to different links based on averages on sum of ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ links. I know it is a bit difficult to understand this on content. But is becomes simple if you take an example.

Assume your site has a page rank of 3 and there are 3 links on the page. Of these, 2 are ‘dofollow’ and 1 is ‘nofollow’. In earlier instance, the 2 ‘dofollow’ links would have got 1.5 page rank points. In other words, while doing averaging out of  PR, Google would simply ignore the ‘nofollow’ link. In the changed instance, each site accounts for the page rank point. So all 3 sites get averaged out and are entitled to 1 PR point. Since, 1 link is a ‘nofollow’ that PR point does not pass out and instead you or your site retains it. In other words, the link-juice being passed out of a high PR site will go down for the ‘dofollow ‘ links because of the modified averaging of PR points by Google.

What does this mean? To me, it does not mean much because I would like to continue posting content rather than anything else. If people come to the blog, that is fine and if they do not then also it does not hurt. However, for guys who are into selling PR links, this means the value of the PR points will go down. So, you will need all the more links. And, this in turn implies that getting caught with paid links becomes more a reality.

It also means, that Google expects webmasters to either keep the PR or share it with those ‘dofollow’ blogs or sites; there is no place for ‘nofollow’ links to get the PR via these links. Will this mean that sites that have already got PR on account of earlier algo will keep the PR or will their PR be downgraded? I am not sure, because I am not Google or Matt Cutts. So, go and ask Matt the question…and keep posting good content on your blogs.