You may recall back at SMX Seattle earlier this year, Google’s Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He touched upon the topic of Google being able to read javascript after giving out advice for so long to use javascript as a way to keep Google from reading paid links.

Yesterday, Digg announced that it was changing the way it handles some links with regards to the nofollow attribute. The point of the changes is to cut down on Digg spam. Digg is now adding rel="nofollow" to any external link that they aren’t sure they can "vouch for." This means:

    – External links from comments
    – External links from user profiles

Digg announced today that it has tweaked its policy on the nofollow attribute on external links.

 "We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community," says Digg’s John Quinn. "These changes reduce the incentive to post spammy content (or link spam) to Digg, while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content."

Bing’s webmaster forum has a number of posts where people are complaining that Bing will not index their content. Some people, however, are having the opposite problem. Content that they do not want indexed by Bing is being indexed by Bing, despite the webmaster’s efforts to keep it out of the search engine.

Linkscape, the link data analysis tool from SEOmoz, has rolled out an update to its index. The company has shared some data and statistics from it, and that includes some interesting stats on nofollow use.

First, if you are unfamiliar with Linkscape, watch this WebProNews interview with SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin from when it was first announced. This will give you an idea of what Linkscape is all about.

Matt Cutts says his pinging of Twitter cofounder Evan Williams about nofollowing Twitter bio links was more of a heads-up than an imperative straight from the Googleplex.

Amazingly enough, the nofollow attribute doesn’t spur a berserker rage in every webmaster. Quite a few can live with such links pointing to their sites.

Got a couple of links on one page to another page? Google only has love for the first one, no matter what you do with it.

According to WPN, Google is announcing a Help Center for the NoFollow attribute. You can find it here: What is nofollow and why was it created?

Matt Cutts told Mike McDonald of WebProNews about something new from Google: the search advertising company opened a little help center on the topic of nofollows and links.

Pick a number between 6 and 950 and you’ll likely find evidence, or at least the antecedent number, for a Google ranking penalty. Webmasters and SEOers are in general agreement Google penalizes, and have dubbed them according to their numeric reprimand: -6, -30, -60, -950, and so on. Google inadvertently in cases has acknowledged such penalties exist, but has yet to present any hard and fast rules.

Here’s an interesting question put forth by webmasters: What’s a link in StumbleUpon worth? Well, it’s nofollowed, which means not much in terms of link juice. But there may be an indirect value.

Part of that, of course, is branding. It’s good to be found in as many places as possible. But another value, as noted at SearchEngineRoundtable, is the chance that somebody stumbles upon your site and blogs about it. If so, you’ve just earned another endorsement and possibly a good link.