As a webmaster I am always trying to keep up to date on the ways to keep my websites, and the websites of my clients as high on the search engine ladder as possible. So I was quite surprised when I came across a test ran by one of my favorite blog sites (www.seomoz.org) that proved that links with the “Nofollow” attribute may indeed carry more weight than Google leads us to believe.

What they did in a very clever nutshell…

They tested 5 popular methods of PageRank sculpting which included:

Rel=‘nofollow’ - The standard mechanism for nofollowing a link. <a href=’http://www.example.com’ rel=‘nofollow’>example</a>

Link Consolidation – Consolidating low priority pages. You can read more about link consolidation here.

Iframe - Include a standard link in an iframe that is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots so engines can’t follow it.

Javascript – An external Javascript file (blocked from robots) that inserts links into divs when the page renders.

Control Case – Null test with standard links.

They then built 5 websites similar in structure, but unique in content of course.  Each website utilized the methods of PageRank sculpting listed above. They then duplicated this 8 times over, and let it run for 2 months. Any takers as to what the actual results were?

Find out below. The results of their experiment may have you scratching your head…lol

TEST RESULTS

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, link strategies, pagerank