I was checking out the blog of Dan Theis last night and read a pretty interesting post on some events from SMX Advanced in Seattle. I always think a good conspiracy theory makes for a good read and Dan Theis is someone to listen to. You can check out the video he made for the post on his blog SEOFastStart.
To sum it up slightly (and this may be wrong), Dan talks on a number of comments from Matt Cutts during the event, which alluded to internal pagerank just “evaporating” when using the nofollow tag to sculpt pagerank throughout your site. Dan gives a better explanation of it, using great little maths diagrams, this however is what I took from it. Where does that pagerank go ?. Well, this is the best part, he says it may be going towards random Youtube videos (well he has a source who says this).
Now considering we all like to think of Google has some type of dark overload this is one great theory. There are a heap more videos showing in the SERPs these days. Could this be the reason why or is it just people are becoming more accustom to building links to their video pages ?
If this is true then where does the PR go when Youtube themselves using nofollow on internal links ?
Hmm maybe this in turn gets passed onto a new Google property !!!