This may be bad news for many webmasters around the world. Google has recently changed the way page rank flows from one page to another.

Lets take an example. If you have a page rank 8 webpage and link it to 8 other websites, then according to simple pagerank flow rule – all the 8 linked websites will get a page rank of 1 (8/8 = 1).

Suppose you did not want your pagerank to flow to 4 of these websites you could easily do a rel=”nofollow” and phew, the search engines will make sure the page rank would NOT follow to these sites.

So what about the page rank to other 4 sites? Well they would obviously get a page rank of 2 (8/4 = 2).

Now for some strange reason Google has changed this rule.

So whats the new rule?

The new rule is that page rank will flow to the 4 website without nofollow but they will only get a page rank of 1 INSTEAD of 2.

The leftover page rank of 4 (8-4) will get WASTED.

Watch this video here, where Matt Cutts of Google explained this new behavior.

It is not a simple change as you may think. Page rank is a major factor in determining SERPs (search engine results pages), and this change will dramatically affect the way Google ranks the websites.

One major example are the blogs. All the comments are nofollowed. Before if the author linked to one or two websites, they would easily get a fine portion of the page rank of the page. Now this will be divided among ALL the links (including the comments) and then page rank will flow only to the ones without No Follow. Common sense says the page rank of these pages will get reduced.

Do you like this move by Google? Please leave your comments below.