Over the last few weeks there has been a big reaction in the SEM community regarding the changes in treatment (or maybe more the fact that it only the announcement of the changes) of the Nofollow tag from Google.

This post from Matt Cutts kind of starting everything off and there has been quite a lot of discussion on the blogsphere since then, as well as in Matts Comments.

In summary Matt revealed that Google changed it policy and handling of the Nofollow tag over a year ago but never bothered to update webmaster.

What does this mean, well essentially many Webmasters believed they were controlling PR by Nofollowing selected links in their site, they were “sculpturing” PR by making sure it didn’t go out to bad pages or worthless internal pages. It turns out that they weren’t.

Understandably some webmaster were upset, some SEM companies were too, after all people have been preaching the PR Sculpting angle as “guaranteed rankings” for months.  SEM’s who work with reliable strategies were probably more concerned about the wider issue of sites, specifically blogs now “leaking” PR. Cutts’ did address this issue but many bloggers have hit this one themselves.

Both SEOMoz and HuoMah had posts about potential tactics and both raise interesting ideas but in my own opinion it shouldn’t be something you’re worried about.

Yes, maybe PR will leak from the site a little, yes maybe Google should have let people know soon but as many good SEO’s acknowledge, Google owes us nothing; they are a company and can keep whatever secrets about their internal process they like.

So what action do you actually need to take? My advice is nothing; the critical thing to remember is that it has been like this for a year already, unless you PR score has been consistently falling across that time I wouldn’t even think twice about changing your site.

Futureproofing is a different matter, some great ideas include collapsing unimportant apges into one (i.e. Contact, Ts & Cs and About), managing navigation and footer links as efficiently as possible and making sure you have external PR flowing into some of the deeper pages of your site.

The matter is very much still in the air so keep your eyes peeled for another update soon!