Bruce Clay announced something surprising at Pubcon last week, something that pounds the final nail in the so-called “pagerank sculpting” coffin.

In a nutshell, the NOFOLLOW attribute is not link-specific. If you use it on one link from page1 to page2, none of the other links to page2 from page1 will be followed either.

If this is true, then attempts to have Google favor a specific text link with good link text over some other image link will have serious and unintended consequences. Namely, no link juice will flow through either link!

I tested this myself. The results are pretty compelling.

From a TBPR4 site homepage, I created two links to page-two.html and one link to page-three.html. I used NOFOLLOW on one of the two links to page-two.html. After a week, only page-three.html had been indexed.

66.249.67.230 - - [15/Nov/2009:04:16:55 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2940 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [15/Nov/2009:16:55:19 -0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 31 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [16/Nov/2009:11:43:17 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3002 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [16/Nov/2009:13:28:38 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3002 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [17/Nov/2009:02:54:45 -0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 31 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [17/Nov/2009:02:54:45 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3002 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [17/Nov/2009:08:53:30 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3002 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [18/Nov/2009:00:31:05 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3002 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [18/Nov/2009:12:39:40 -0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 31 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [18/Nov/2009:12:39:40 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3024 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [18/Nov/2009:14:16:26 -0800] "GET /page-three.html HTTP/1.1" 404 532 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [18/Nov/2009:20:20:01 -0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 31 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [18/Nov/2009:20:20:01 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3024 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [19/Nov/2009:06:34:14 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3024 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [19/Nov/2009:08:04:43 -0800] "GET /page-three.html HTTP/1.1" 404 532 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [19/Nov/2009:20:43:46 -0800] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 31 "-"
66.249.67.230 - - [19/Nov/2009:23:37:18 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 3024 "-"

In other words, despite putting a followable link on the site homepage to page-two.html, Googlebot never fetched it. Why? Because a second link to the same page used rel="nofollow".

So, if you’ve drunk the Pagerank Sculpting Kool-Aid over the past couple years — the temptation to link to some of the more egregiously bad pieces of such advice is nearly overwhelming — then “now” is a really good time to revisit your site nav and strip out all those nofollows.

A big hat-tip to Bruce Clay for not only investigating, but sharing this tip!