nofollow or not … a short interview with Matt Cutts

Just recently Jen Lopez from SEOmoz met up with Matt Cutts at SES for a short but nevertheless very interesting interview.
Interesting to hear what he has to say about PR, whether to let the PR flow around on your site or to block certain pages and how to use the nofollow tag.

Is Pagerank really important?

To make it short: Yes and No!

Yes, because it determines a few aspects of the quality of your links.
No, because it doesn’t tell anything about your ranking for the keywords that will give you the most traffic…

For example, one of my very new sites, www.naturfotokalender.de, has a Pagerank of 0, not surprisingly…

But the ranking at the time of writing this for one of the main keyphrases (“Fotokalender Gimp”) is number one on the german google SERP…

But what is Pagerank, actually? If you have the google toolbar, then you will notice the Pagerank bar and will see that it shows a green bar. More green, higher pagerank, more important site. If it only was this easy…

Ian Rogers has written a comprehensive post on what pagerank really is and how it is calculated and so on:

Ian Rogers article on PageRank

Do I really need to know this?

In my opinion, not really. What you need to know is: If I get links from sites with high pagerank (or pagerank at all, e.g. a minimum of 1) then that is good. Is it good because it help you rank higher? Not exactly – it helps you rank faster, if, and only if, the links have the right anchor text. It helps you rank faster because sites with higher pagerank are spidered more often. That means your link will be found soon by google and can be taken into account. If you have a link on a Pagerank 0 site (grey Pagerank bar) then it takes maybe a month or longer until the site is spidered again (if at all) and it will take ages before this paricular link can contribute to your ranking.

So if you got a blog list from the blog search on seo-traffic-guide.de, look for the dofollow blogs with higher pagerank first…

I know that Pagerank is a controversial topic and I am fully aware that this was only a simplified way of looking at pagerank, so feel free to comment and tell me what you think about PR!