At first- at fear I’d maybe want to reverse it later- if Google changed their mind- or Baidu took over- etc – I tried to turn it to edit find replace “rel follow”.

Then research brought to light that was a tactic blog spammers were using- and it was ineffective and futile as only in a meta tag can you have follow as an attribute. So – if I did that I would have red flagged my own site even though- once again- I was trying to do the right thing. Hmmmm.

So- I stared at my computer screen (my buddy – his name is “Flat Face”) – and the site I and Flat Face have built heart and soul together for almost a year every day- morning and night- and I did the ultimate find replace- I told Flat Face to pull ALL rel no follow refs.

No turning back – well a lot of work to turn back- nothings final I guess.

I thought of THREE things while I opened the flood gates of well deserved human approved link juice and then instructed Flat Face to FTP over 500 html pages stripped of their no follow tags.

The first thing I I thought about was physics- and how I suck at math – I thought about the flow of electricity – how it doesn’t flow if shut down at any one point. Anywhere. Just shuts down. I suck at math – but even I understand that. (Link Juice)

I thought about how hard it was for me- when I had my first website ever – out in deep space- and no-one would link to me bc I was a PR N/A and then finally someone did! And the whole web opened up for me – I was a part of it.

Most importantly- I remembered- being three years old- in the early 80s – sitting at my princess desk- with my Vic 20 or maybe it was a commodore 64 – logged in on “COMPUSERVE” – this is pre- internet. I remember the point- everything is supposed to be interconnected – like a WEB.

Like a WORLD WIDE WEB. Doesn’t anybody remember that? It’s supposed to be CONNECTED.

So – Flat Face and I FTP’d over a huge shift rel anchor text/ SEO to our site we have built together for almost a year.

And – I know- you should never be that dramatic. But we did it. And I’m watching my live woopra traffic reports – and its going great. So far. Traffic and rankings are picking up.

It’s almost like my PR sculpted site was artery clogged and now the blood is flowing again?

So Far- I can recommend – open the flood gates, get the electricity flowing- open the world wide web BACK UP!

Ditch the rel=”nofollow” on all hyperlinks you have the time to review yourself. If they are valid- spread the link love.

Remember – www means – world wide web!

Alisa

No matter how hard I worked- or how much unique content our site had- our best intentions – how much we grew- our PR climbed but we had NO traffic from Google?

Yet my other sites that were not PR sculpted with nofollow were thriving with traffic.

I started to suspect the no follow tag after exhausting all other posibilities. I was ABOUT to cross to the dark side until I read your article.

I had read many SEO opinions- but when I read your article- it gave me the guts as a fellow SEO Chic- I opened the flood gates on our site – pulled ALL the no-follows and within 1 DAY- we finally were sub-categorized by Google. I have tried to earn that honor for a year- we finally got sub category links under our domain name. Eight of them! I’m not talking indent! I’m talking eight extra sub category divisions!

The no-follow idea was great for blog comments but for those of us that build websites and intentionally put links in?

If I intentionally put a link in- it’s been human approved, SEO chic approved actually! and the link is there for my visitors. Which is the point- the visitors.

Thanks for your article – you really helped me – to help my visitors – and to help spread the link love as it is meant to be spread (Not hoarded).

You also helped me to trust MY instincts again – as opposed to what I read that was supposed to be dogma. I agree with you – I prefer doing this SERP thing in the dark! Letting my website analytics and visitor traffic reports tell me what to do and what I need to change.

Thanks!
Alisa

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.

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

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.