Google changes PageRank flow: Why you should use an iframe in blog comments

I have just integrated Disqus comments service on my blog. Main reason is Google’s PageRank flow NoFollow change that Matt Cutts recently announced:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed?

Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (Nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page).

Google has now changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

For background information on Google PageRank, internal linking and PageRank flow please read: Optimize Link Juice Flow To Improve Google Rankings.

NoFollow links now take away your PageRank juice

Nofollow links still don’t pass PageRank and still don’t pass anchortext so they don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results. But nofollow links now take away PageRank juice from your blog. By default all the links in comments section in WordPress are nofollow.

This means that your nofollow links in comments of your blog, and in my case I also had links to Twitter usernames of commentators, will be leaking a lot of PageRank value from your non-nofollow links.

And they are leaking your PageRank to no use as they do not help anyone rank. The result is that your blog is losing valuable PageRank value flow and your important internal links get less PageRank juice.

Less links means more rankings

The more links you have on a page, the less PageRank value each link will get. The more links (follow or nofollow) you have in comments, the less PageRank value is passed onto your normal, non-nofollow links in your blog navigation, blog sidebar and your blog content.

In regards to optimizing your blog’s chances of ranking well in search engines, the solution seems to be to keep nofollowing links you do not want to pass your link juice to but more importantly to try to restrict and limit the number of links as they all take away from your pagerank value.

What does Disqus have to do with this?

Disqus uses an external javascript in the comments section, the so-called iframe. The comments actually reside on a different page and Google doesn’t crawl / follow that.

So now it means that I will have a lot less outgoing links in my blog articles to take away my pagerank juice as Google will not follow any of the links from the comments section. Majority of my pagerank will be distributed within the links in my internal blog linking structure which means that I may be able to rank better.

The problem created with the PageRank flow change seems to be solved with this implementation or is it?

Image by Zedzap