Google’s Matt Cutts recently said the nofollow SEO technique will no longer be as effective.

This week at SMX Advanced, Google’s high-profile head of Webspam and liaison to search marketers worldwide, Matt Cutts, pulled the rug out from under SEOs and Webmasters everywhere when he suggested that a previously sanctioned search optimization technique heavily relied upon by many site optimizers would not be supported in the same way. In short, he stated that the nofollow attribute that is considered helpful in preventing spam and even sculpting a site’s PageRank would no longer be as effective.

Who does this affect?
Because the active use of nofollow is a more advanced SEO effort, this change won’t affect the majority of search optimizers. However, the popular blogging platform WordPress (used by this blog) uses nofollow on links left by commenters, so every WordPress blogger is potentially affected.

Google has long recommended the use of nofollow when linking to content excluded via various exclusion protocols; Webmasters who have followed Google’s guidelines are now up a creek. And finally, advanced SEOs who use nofollow links to sculpt their PageRank will certainly be scrambling to modify their sites.

More on the nofollow attribute, how it’s used and the impact this news will have on PageRank follows here.