More about Nofollow tag

Few days ago I was contacted by a webmaster that wanted to exchange index page link with one my site. I made a detailed analysis of his site, the thing I always do to be sure that it’s a good trade, and I discover that he has more then hundred links, about 130 if I remember well, on the index page, where my link should be inserted. One of the rule that I respect when I trade links is to not make exchange with pages with mode then 100 links (I consider together external and internal links), because this is against Google policy.

I responded to the webmaster that I’m not interested and I explained the reason. He let me know that for more then 60 links on the his page have nofollow tag, so he support the thesis that he has only about 70 links. I thought about and I concluded that nofollow tag shouldn’t influence the page rank vale passed to the linked page, because the concept is, as we can see from page rank formula, that the total number of links represent the probability that one of them would be clicked by a surfer that visits the site. So nofollow tag, that isn’t visible for a normal surfer (you must open the html source to see it), doesn’t increase the probability that other links, without it, be chosen by visitor.

I sent an e-mail to the webmaster, and I said him that I’m not interested due to my opinion that nofollow tag doesn’t change the real page rank values passed. I’m not really sure that my opinion is really right, but I put it in my know-how notes. Of course, the webmaster didn’t share my thought, but at the end of the story, we didn’t make a trade.

I want to conclude this article with ask a question that this days I make to me: where will be the next Google update of Tool Bar PR, and if Google will respect the regularity of this as it did the past year. However, Google updated at the end of January, but that update wasn’t visible on the Tool Bar.