...videos YouTube passed PageRank value (commonly referred to as link juice) to. SEOs liked the technique as something ssite owners could do to direct more link juice to more important pages, and not waste a pages link authority on navigational links"but not anymore. Or, as Danny Sullivan puts it:

Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in authority to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).

So rather than being able to apportion a pages link juice, now you can only choose whether or not to pass that link juice on"the link juice you dont use evaporates. Danny extends his monetary analogy to explain:

Again " and being really simplistic here " if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 arent going to get $2 each. Theyre still getting $1. Its just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

As Danny also points out, this doesnt mean you have to run out and take off all the PageRank sculpting youve done"it just means that the link juice isnt as strong to the un-nofollowed links as it used to be. If your site is performing well, the nofollows arent going to hurt it.

However, another change on links may have a much greater impact. Google has also started indexing links in JavaScript"which used to be a Google-approved way to keep from passing link juice to paid links.

While theres no immediate penalty for not fixing those paid links immediately, its important to know that if you were using JavaScript as a Google-okay method of displaying paid links, unless youre redirecting through a page thats blocked by robots.txt, youll have to find another way to display your paid links (if you care about following Googles guidelines, anyway).

What do you think"are you going to run out and make changes to your sites? Did you see a marked improvement from PageRank sculpting (or not), and have you seen a change in that recently?

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