NoFollow Links Ruin PR for SEO

Things they are ‘a chang’n–particularly when it comes to using online press releases as an off-page SEO strategy.  Looking at the metrics across the board online press releases just isn’t generating the inbound links it once did.  Could it be because of something called “nofollow links” and “pagerank bleed”?  You bet!

There is a link attribute called nofollow, as in <a href='google.com' rel='nofollow'>, which tells search engine spiders not to follow that link to another site or page.  Visitors can follow these links, but the search engines pretty much ignore them.

Who cares, you ask?

There was a time when organizations could distribute online press releases with links back to their website.  These releases would be picked up by hundreds of highly-ranked, news-related websites all over the web.  Each pickup would create an ‘inbound’ link.  Search engines would then see this and allow a little bit of pagerank to follow that link to the organization’s website.  This passing of pagerank via outbound links is sometimes called, “pagerank bleed.”

So here’s the rub…

Online press release distribution businesses are still telling everyone about the power of online PR for SEO.  At the same time, webmasters are paranoid about pagerank bleed and are setting all outbound links to nofollow.  While webmaster worry, search engines are actually paying more and more attention to rel="nofollow" attributes.

So what ends up happening is online press releases are simply NOT the off-page SEO powerhouses they once were.  I’ll give you an example.

JDM recently distributed a press release through PRweb about our new digital agency model.  According to the web stats, we were picked up by almost 60 news-related websites including: CIO online, About.com, CBS Money Watch, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Yahoo! News, etc.

Out of all those online pickups, only two sources didn’t nofollow all the links in the press release to our website.

Here’s how Google explains the way they treat the rel="nofollow" link attributes.

In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

Well said, Google, but other search engines are following your lead. We reviewed the FAQs for all three major search engines and found that ALL treat nofollow as Google does.

What does this mean for the future of PR as an SEO strategy?

Well, it means the power of online PR for SEO is diminished.  I see this tactic reverting to the communication medium of old.  Keep in mind, however:

• Online press releases do create inbound links (just not as many)
• They do create inbound traffic channels (lots of them)
• They are still PR (and don’t come across as self-serving–like ads)

Perhaps this change will require some expectations being reset.  Maybe it will influence the way news distribution sites advertise (less focus on impact on SEO).  However, the online press release is still here to stay.