Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Michael Martinez: This is not really a question but this story has been making the rounds today. I looked at Dr. Mercola`s Website. Most of his content consists of articles. The articles use "rel=`nofollow`" link attributes on internal navigation. The site is literally pissing away about 98-99% of its PageRank through a process Google calls "evaporation". I`m not surprised he lost most of his Google traffic. Jenny Halasz also pointed out a canonical issue with his AMP pages on Twitter. This isn`t a case of Google weighting its algorithms against a site of questionable value. This is a case of really truly bad, awful SEO.
Mathias Pantalonias: Michael I`ve never looked at the site from a technical standpoint, but ya, pretty butthurt and misguided
Mathias Pantalonias: Michael nofollows on internal links sounds like one helluva misunderstanding
Michael Martinez: Honestly, I wouldn`t be surprised if it turns out he disavowed half his inbound links as well, although I have no way of knowing if he did something like that.
Abhishek Shetty: Michael Martinez I was told to do PR sculpting in one of the SEO groups to rank internal pages. Is there any other way I can rank internal pages other than this method?
Michael Martinez: Abhishek Shetty Well, you CAN`T use PR sculpting to improve ranking for internal pages. All you can do is make better pages and point more internal links at them. But avoid creating a flat site architecture for a site with more than a few pages. That won`t work very well, either.
Stockbridge Truslow: Aside from what Michael points out above, the references that go offsite to valid claims aren`t really done right, and all of the questionable claims (like how great this or that is for you) are self referencing citations (i.e. it`s quoting itself as the expert but doesn`t verify any of the claims most of the articles are actually making with any other site - authoritative or otherwise).
Michael Martinez: And it could be the nofollows only appear on SOME of the pages (in which case, no one would have removed anything yet). I am not checking the entire site.
Chris Boggs: Heh brings back memories of when we had to do some rep management for a J & J brand years ago whose product Mercola claimed "kills" - that guy has been living on FUD fed through Google his whole career - glad it happened to them.
Dan Thies: This is more stupid on a website full of stupidity.
Roger Montti: That article is full of inaccuracies. There is a stunning ignorance and absence of logic in the following passage: "In the past, Google search results were based on crowdsource relevance. An article would ascend in rank based on the number of people who clicked on it.
So, let`s say one of my articles on diabetes was seventh on the page for your search; if more people clicked on that link than, say, an article listed in third or fifth place, my article would move up in rank. In a nutshell, Google search results were, at least in part, based on popularity."
Mathias Pantalonias: Ya, that was PRE-PageRank. I think it was called Bellyrub.
Richard Hearne: Do they use a team of trained monkeys to do all this manual work?
Salman Tariq Mir: tbh they have all the money to do so they will train the monkeys then the monkeys will train AI bots
George G.: this article is bs. the site started tanking in 2017. the site`s seo is wrong on so many lvls, but what struck me is that they compete with themselves for a lot of keywords with subdomains. someone should explain to them how subdomains work and what canibalization is lol.
Dave Elliott: Been arguing with people on one of the science pages who are getting annoyed that Google is "censoring" one of the other pseudo-scientific pages. They feel that Google should rank web pages in a non-biased way....how the hell do you rank an entirely subjective list of anything without being biased as to what you deem "quality content" or which factors you feel more important.
It`s maddening.
Ryan Jones: Mercola is literally fake news. It`s anti vax "science." It`s not censorship, it`s just not rewarding false information.
Comments? "Google is now manually lowering the ranking of undesirable content, largely based on Wikipedia`s assessment of the author or site." 
