SEO Blog

This is a question that many SEO forums have debated. Folks on one side of the argument believe that placing a nofollow tag in the outgoing links of their web pages will prevent “PageRank leakage”. In other words, they believe that they can link to any website regardless of its quality (or lack thereof) and Google won’t count it as an outgoing link from their web page.

Okay, it’s time to bust the myth. Matt Cutts of Google recently explained that while Google may not pass the PageRank from your web page link to a page that has a nofollow tag in it, the PageRank that would have been passed to the link is still deducted from your web page.

There are so many myths and rumors running rampant on SEO forums these days that people don’t know what to believe. That is mainly why I started this SEO blog – to debunk a few of them and offer some credible and proven advice instead.

Here’s an innovative idea – instead of worrying about passing good PageRank to bad sites, why not just link to good sites that are relevant to your website? Then you don’t have to worry about trying to spare your site from the mysterious “PageRank leakage” bandit. Google wants you to link to other websites, and they won’t penalize you for it – provided the websites are of good quality and relevant to your web page. The web is built with links, and the nofollow tag was not invented to save PageRank from being passed – it was built to help you keep pages of your website from being indexed by the search engines.