nofollow

PageRank sculpting is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and it has been widely used by SEO pros since Google’s Matt Cutts described its use on YouTube, giving the strategy the official green light. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, the same harbinger of Google insider information offered a stunning revelation: Google changed the way it handled link structures intended for sculpting.

Matt Cutts says his pinging of Twitter cofounder Evan Williams about nofollowing Twitter bio links was more of a heads-up than an imperative straight from the Googleplex.

A comprehensive guide to Google's "nofollow" attribute, its significance, impact on SEO, and implementation.

A few weeks ago, there was a lively exchange on Search Engine Land about using the “nofollow” link attribute to sculpt PageRank.

Flickr has recently added nofollow tags to the links present within its Web site observed Jeff Muendel & Brian Brown. This change came to light during a review of a Flickr account. The picture portal has long been considered one of the most attractive social media entities amongst few others for improving inbound links to a given site.

HTML5 appeared as first working draft at the World Wide Web Consortium.

There is no such thing as a free link.  No matter what the person who is selling you it tells you.  And the web will always adapt to make it so.  Even if its hard work. Barry Schwartz posted Get A Free Link From Wired today on an SEO blog, noting that:

There are times when you might want to retro-actively add nofollow to links you have given freely in the past. As an example some time ago I started using the nofollow Wikipedia plugin.