Stop Hoarding SEO Authority: Nofollow Links Don’t Work the Way You Think

There is a 15-year-old SEO myth that refuses to die. The myth is that you can save or hoard your SEO authority by controlling your links. Decades after Google tried to debunk this, unaware, SEOs and marketers are still making decisions based on this myth. They're not linking out. They're overusing the no follow attribute. They're trying to channel authority through their site using no follows. And this doesn't work. So, on this episode of the show, I'm going to walk you through what really happens when you add no follow links and why this whole idea of saving authority is the wrong way to do search engine optimization. I literally got an email about this the other day. I have to make this episode. So, this is from Google's former head of web spam, Matt Cuts, been sharing a lot of his stuff on the show lately. He wrote this in 2009. It is still applicable today. He wrote this blog post called PageRank Sculpting. There's a lot in here. I cherrypicked my favorite passages so that you're only getting the best stuff about why using the no follow attribute. And if you don't know what that is, don't worry. You'll understand it in a moment to keep your SEO authority and redirect it to your most important pages. Why that doesn't work, why you can't do that. And still a lot of SEOs waste time on this. A lot of marketers waste time on this. So this is again from Matt Cuts and he says probably the most popular way to envision page rank is as a flow that happens between documents across outlinks. Page rank is Google's term for basically the SEO authority that you get from getting back links. Google used to show the page rank of websites. They don't anymore and now you have to use tools like MA domain authority or HF's domain rating. With that said, the concept of page rank is still wildly applicable today. If you understand page rank well, you will understand a lot of aspects of search engine optimization. Well, the rules of page rank that is. So again, a way to visualize page rank is a flow that happens between documents across the links that are going out from those documents. There's an image that's shared. The lower left document has nine points of page rank. It has three outgoing links. The resulting page rank flows along each outgoing link and is consequently 9 divided by three. Three points of page rank. And think about a point of page rank as like a point of SEO authority that you have. So the idea was that you could make pages have more SEO authority so that it would be easier for them to rank for more searches on Google. You would want as many points of page rank as you could get. Matt Cuts continues. He says, "Imagine if it were a loop. If it were a loop, no page rank would ever escape. And as incoming page rank continued to flow into the loop, eventually the page rank in that loop would reach infinity. Infinite page rank isn't that helpful. So Larry and Sergey introduced a decay factor. You could think of it as 10 to 15% of the page rank on any given page disappearing before the page rank flows along the outlinks. This means basically each page that is linked to gets less SEO authority. It gets less page rank. And this is where this myth about sculpting page rank now is addressed. And so Matt Cut says, now let's talk about the re no follow attribute. No follow is a method introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines to annotate a link and tell search engines, I cannot or don't want to vouch for this link. In Google, no follow links don't pass page rank and they don't pass anchor text. Anchor text is the text that's over a hyperlink. It describes what you're linking to. But no follow links, they don't pass SEO authority and they don't pass anchor text. They don't pass page rank. So, what happens when you have a page with 10 page rank points and 10 outgoing links and five of those links are no followed? Let's leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally the five links without no follow would have flowed two points of page rank each. But Google changed how the page rank flows so that the five links without no follow would flow one point of page rank each. So basically you have this page it has 10 page rank points and 10 outgoing links. Again page rank SEO authority 10 SEO authority points 10 outgoing links. Half of the links are normal and then half of the links they don't pass page rank because they are no followed. they have the no follow attribute. Now before this change that Google made, you could concentrate page rank on each outlink on each link going out from your page by no following the other outlinks. After the change, the leftover page rank that you would get from using no no follow on some of your outlinks, the leftover page rank would just evaporate. And it still does and it just evaporates. Instead of the remaining do follow links getting two page rank each, they only get one. that extra SEO authority went and it it it evaporates. No follow went from a a way to redirect page rank to a way that just discards it. And this removed this major SEO tactic which is page rank sculpting. And so Matt Cus is going to share what to care about instead because again even now in 2026 people still think that you can do page rank sculpting with no follows. And I'm also going to address in a second does this mean that you shouldn't link out at all? I'm going to address that in a moment. So, there's a Q&A section. Lots of different questions are asked. I picked only the best ones. Somebody asked, "Does this mean that page rank sculpting, trying to change how page rank flows within your site using no follow is a bad idea?" And Matt Cut says, "I wouldn't recommend it. It isn't the most effective way to utilize your page rank. In general, I would let page rank flow freely within your site. The notion of page rank sculpting has always been a second or third order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first order things to pay attention to are number one making great content that will attract links in the first place and two choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawable for humans and search engines alike. For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people and bots can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt that page rank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front and center on your website versus burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products. There may be a minuscule number of pages such as links to a shopping cart or a login page that I might add no follow on just because those pages are different for every user and they aren't that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn't recommend page rank sculpting. So again, what do you focus on? What do you focus on instead? Make sure that your SEO authority can flow clearly from your pages that are getting the most links, like a homepage. A lot of homepages, they tend to get the most backlinks. Not always. You might have a linkable asset on your website that's going to get a lot of backlinks, but think about what you are linking to from pages like that. Also, something that a lot of people don't know, if you have a page that is ranking and that is getting clicks, that has some authority of its own. and think about what you how how you are internal linking from there as well. I have an article about this on my website. It's a great article. It's called how to rank for competitive keywords without backlinks. And basically, you take pages that are ranking and you internal link them to pages on your site that you want to have ranking. But think about again the pages on your website that are getting the most SEO authority that are getting page rank, especially back links. And then what is being linked to from those pages and how and actually Matt Cut says a solid information architecture, intuitive navigation, user and search engine friendly URLs and so on is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via no followed links. Somebody asked about closing comments in an attempt to hoard your page rank. And literally Matt Cut says, "I wouldn't recommend closing comments in an attempt to hoard your page rank." In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites. So basically, some people also try to conserve page rank by just basically never linking out at all. That's wrong, too. Literally, Matt Cut says parts of our system encourage links to good sites. And I show evidence of this on episode 986 of the show. Google recommends outbound links. Most SEOs ignore this. they recommend it in their documentation and studies show that if you are linking out versus not linking out, you actually have some pages do better. So just completely not linking out at all to try to conserve your SEO authority. That's not the right strategy either. My recommendation is don't even think about linking out. If you're mentioning something and you vouch for that thing and you think people should check out that thing, link out to it and don't use no follow. And this is how Matt Cuts uses internal links on his personal website. He says, "I pretty much let page rank flow freely throughout my site, and I'd recommend that you do the same. I don't add no follow on my category or archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a no follow is on the link to my feed because it's not super helpful to have RSS/Adom feeds in the web search results. Even that's not strictly necessary because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages. And Google does a way better job now in 2026 of separating what is useful and what is not or what is most likely gamed and what is not. But basically a better use of resources than trying to think about page rank sculpting is having strong information architecture. I I have a great podcast on this episode 933, the URL structure that makes or breaks your SEO. And I share a good way to do internal linking on your site when you want to direct your page rank to valuable SEO pages. And in compact keywords, my SEO course, I have a section dedicated to information architecture and what exactly you should do. Matt Cut says, focus on doing straightforward SEO. That's way better than focusing on page rank sculpting. You want to learn what straightforward SEO is? That's what my course is about. My course is about how to do search engine optimization specifically that gets customers, users, warm leads calling you up and it's a very straightforward, no frrills way that is getting people insane results and people share the results that they get on the testimonials on the compact keywords landing page. There's a 2-hour section on link building in compact keywords. Again, as I've said many times on this show, the best backlinks are links that also pass referral traffic or links where if you appear in something, it makes you look more credible. You get quoted in the Verge and now you can have the Verge logo on your website. You can share that you were quoted on the Verge in your LinkedIn. I share how to find keywords that have high purchase intent. How to make sure Google and AI can understand and index your website. What exactly a conversion-based SEO landing page should look like. So much is in compact keywords and if you haven't checked it out or you haven't gotten it, you're going to love it. That is at compactkeywords.com. And that's everything that I have got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1, 102, 1,02 days in a row doing this podcast. And you know what? I still love doing it and I love you so much for watching and for listening to this. So, thank you. Thank you. If you watch us on YouTube, again, once again, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow.