One signal that search engines used to rank pages is the quantity and quality of inbound links. This makes Squidoo?an authoritative domain with a platform that allows anyone to share their passions?a big target for people who spend time stuffing irrelevant or useless links into pages as a way of deceiving the search engines. Based on the successful implementations of other authoritative sites, like Wikipedia, Squidoo will now apply ?nofollow? markup to all outbound links. This means that any link shared on a lens will work exactly as it always has for you and for people visiting Squidoo, but search engines will no longer use it as a signal for ranking.
Nofollow will be applied over the course of the next few days as all of our caching systems update.
The good news is that a human visit from an interested person is a thousand times more valuable than a tiny ?follow link.? And Squidoo is going to be delivering more of those than ever before.
Eventually we hope to start giving our best (and most trusted) lensmasters ?follow? privileges on a case-by-case basis.
