On reading of a friend’s (WordPress.com hosted) blog yesterday and then flicking into one of their WordPress system tags we saw the screen light up in the familiar pink of the nofollow.

..Now it has been a while since we looked at the WP system, but we are fairly sure that it didn’t use to look like this, did it?

Andy beard wrote about wordpress being a big linkfarm back in 2006, and the effective unfair advantage that it’s hosted users receive, in some cases with prepostorously high Pageranks (and therefore enhanced SERPs) of PR6 and PR7 for blogs linked to almost entirely internally in the WordPress.com system, ie hardly any “real” ie external IBLs at all, so it definitely was the case these were live links back then.

Looking at the linkscanner also shows that  blog.wordpress.com blogs are now all showing nofollow on the Tag links.

Please correct us if this is wrong, but otherwise it looks like that game’s now over, and presumably we can expect to see these WordPress SEO‘d blogs losing Pagerank by the bucket load now?

It’s only fair, Google’s blogspot system doesn’t work like that, so it will be interesting to see the effects of their users having to accrue their pagerank fairly like everybody else.

The Great “Pagerank Crunch” of 2008 ..followed by the great WordPress SERP Depression?