How do Google handle NoFollow Links?

Google originally created the nofollow attribute some years ago to help fight spam mainly used by automated blog commenters that would infest 90% of the public blogs on the web. A few weeks ago Google announced that now the PageRank value of a web page will be drained even by nofollow links. Now a web page will only be able to flow a certain % amount of link juice from non nofollow links based on how many links the page contains.

No matter if 9 out of 10 links carry the nofollow property or if 10 out of 10 links don’t the value of the PageRank for the web page will not be affected. This clearly indicates that Google now actually will pay attention – at least a little – to nofollow links also. If they don’t then where is all that PageRank value disappearing?

The new way of handling things would mean that alot of popular blogs that gets tons of comments for every new entry they post would be penalized for having alot of links to their commenters websites. I don’t see any change in the actual rankings so far but you should stay alert as of what to do next. If we here at WMWeblog.com hear that alot of webmasters report a big loss of their organic Google visitors we will write a blog post about it here asap!