Comments on: Why Listening To Matt Cutts Is A Bad Idea

By: Sandy

Sandy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:34:20 +0000

Classic article. I rarely pay attention to nofollow anyways .. i still think their is the benefit of getting a clickthrough and even though PR is not passed it still counts as an inbound link. Build for your user and not for Google.

By: NSL

NSL — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:14:23 +0000

Thank you for the great article. I don’t believe this G Matt Cut. He misleads the people. He advices something but google does sth totally different to it.

By: Thom

Thom — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:35:03 +0000

Donna,
I like what you have to say. I like how you wrote this article for you user, and I especially like the fact that you are willing to say what others won’t. Now with all that being said, I have three web sites, all of which are small. One of them I have is strictly for information to consumers, anti-corporation. Two of my three site were running a PR of 5, until a few days ago. I got dinged. I might not use the best advertising platform, but I also don’t make more than 100 dollars a month about ($7.00 from google adsense). I find it frustrating that even when I did play by the google rules, I was less successful than I am now. I continue to grow my sites as best as possible, but no matter the approach, I get punished by google. Not looking for sympathy, or help hence the reason I didn’t put any url in my name. Just voicing my 2 opinion.

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:27:47 +0000

Thank you for the explanation.

My lesson is to focus on building great sites that people like and support alternate methods for arriving at the content. The more methods the better.

If there is one lesson we can learn for this we suffer when there is lack of diversity in the competitive landscape.

By: nomalab

nomalab — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:14:06 +0000

@LowLevel: not sure when / where / if Matt Cutts has “specifically told us that nofollowing our own internal links would be a good way to sculpt our link juice”, but in his SEOMoz comment on August 29, 2007 he said it *could* be used for sculpting:

I think saying people “should be” using nofollow is a bit strong. More like people can use it for internal links if they’re power-user-y enough to want to sculpt PageRank flow within their site at the link level. But I’d say that most regular webmasters don’t need to worry about link-level PageRank flow within their site. I think saying “power users and webmasters should be employing on their sites” overstates it a little. It’s available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru#jtc33536

By: zanakin

zanakin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:52:41 +0000

Think about that:

1) Wikipedia is a Knol (Google) competitor.
2) Wikipedia success is only based on amazing SEO (sorry Google) performance.
3) Wikipedia always uses nofollow for external links, this technique has created a “SEO black hole”.

Conclusion: the new nofollow rules will reduce the Wikipedia strength and should let more space for other knowledge website, so Knol.

By: IBL Builder

IBL Builder — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:11:39 +0000

It is beginning to feel a it out of control with Google moving the goalposts all the time. And for their “official” policies to basically be hidden away in blogs from their employees etc, is just a bit mad really?

By: LowLevel

LowLevel — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:06:34 +0000

Hi.

Just trying to understand how much of this is just hysteria…

I searched a lot, but I wasn’t able to find the post where Matt Cutts “specifically told us that nofollowing our own internal links would be a good way to sculpt our link juice”.

Can you tell me where I can find his ORIGINAL statement, please?

Thanks!

By: DazzlinDonna

DazzlinDonna — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:25:04 +0000

People who might think I’m screaming about the changes need some clarification. I’m not screaming about anything actually. What I am doing is reminding everyone that jumping to the various suggestions made by the search engines, are very likely doing things the search engines want because the search engines have a larger agenda. In the end, no one but the search engines get what they want; not the webmaster or the seo, and not the users. And btw, I have no ill will towards Matt. He’s a good guy, doing his job. But his job may not mesh with your job. For the record, I don’t use PR Sculpting, so it doesn’t affect me. I have, however, recommended that peoople choose the javascript link method over the nofollow method when one was linking to one’s own separate site but didn’t want to pass juice to it (long story…that’s what the webmaster wanted). I recommended the js method because I didn’t want the webmaster to “taint” the link with nofollow. I didn’t want him to imply to Google that the link was paid or untrustworthy, when clearly it wasn’t. Now of course, I have to undo that recommendation, since link juice will flow through the JS link. So that change did affect me, in a roundabout way.

By: adele

adele — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:43:29 +0000

great article thanks.
I love your blog – i’ve been a keen follower of it after meeting Judith

go girls!