News Source: http://seo-theory.com
Published: Feb 03, 2008 - 07:46 pm
Story Found By: theGypsy 1937 Days ago
Category: SEO
SNIP - Let’s look at Rand Fishkin’s recent premature declaration that his implementation of Rel=Nofollow on many internal links magically increased the number of search referrals to SEOmoz. Although Rand inserted a few ifs, ands, buts, and ors into his blog post, he was pretty much convinced that SEOmoz had finally proven that using Rel=Nofollow on your internal links is the latest way to ensure search engine success.
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*** To date I have yet to see him (Matt Cutts) tell people to run out and nofollow their “About Us”, “Contact Us”, and other important pages on their sites. ***Err. I think he at least hinted about it, sometime late last year. I remember it, as I was surprised and didn’t totally agree with it. It will be somewhere in this SERP I expect: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22matt+cutts%22+%22about+us%22+%22contact+us%22
Eric Enge: What we’ve been doing is working with clients and telling them to take pages like their about us page, and their contact us page, and link to them from the home page normally, without a NoFollow attribute, and then link to them using NoFollow from every other page. It’s just a way of lowering the amount of link juice they get. These types of pages are usually the highest PageRank pages on the site, and they are not doing anything for you in terms of search traffic. Matt Cutts: Absolutely. (follow g1smd’s link for context)
See, this is why I disagreed with that premise.Just before that, I had tracked down a company whose name I could not remember, and which didn’t rank highly for the first few keywords I had thought of. I found them from a search using the area code of their telephone number, and a guess at what I half remembered as a road name. That search brought up their "About Us" page in the first few results. I recently helped a business that has moved to new premises.Their site still mentions their old address and old telephone number just in case peopleuse that to find them.
I wonder where they ranked for "seattle seo" before nofollowing their "contact" page across the board?
Oct. 2007 http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015004.html"That’s a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn’t going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn’t benefit users or convert any new visitors?"And other examples.Note: I understand the example but the right way to do it is to open up that sign-in to Google using the free preview feature.Anyway...On a fresh site I see no harm doing this. Link to your Category A from the homepage but nofollow it from your subpages so those little kids can bundle some of the PR they get.I would be seriously hard pressed to tell the owner of a 100+ pages site to let me spend his money on 1) analysing and calculating his complete (assumed) internal PR distribution, 2) let me flowchart an alternative to that, and finally 3) let me or someone else spend time to put all that in place.By the way, we know we already had this kind of stuff, right? Robots protocol? If it was the Next Big Thing it had been it yesterday :)But yes, you can do some fun stuff with it.
"By the way, we know we already had this kind of stuff, right? Robots protocol?"Ruud, robots.txt disallow doesn’t block PageRank; in other words, robots.txt is pretty close to useless. Nofollow is a totally different animal."I wonder where they ranked for "seattle seo" before nofollowing their "contact" page across the board?"Nowhere. You see any contact us pages ranking on the first page?http://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+seo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-aContact us page is optimized for [contact us]. If you want to rank high for [seattle seo] you don’t do it with a contact us page, unless you want to crowd the title unnecesarily like "Seattle SEO - Contact Us"
Contact us page is optimized for [contact us].If you do it properly, not only for [contact us], but also for terms like [phone number company name] or [address company name]. In SEOmoz’ case, the contact info is quite easily found on the home page, but on some websites it can be quite difficult to find the contact page if you’re looking for SEOmoz phone number and find this page in stead of this one...
"If you do it properly, not only for [contact us], but also for terms like [phone number company name] or [address company name]."Well lets dig up a few more SEO blogs:[aaron wall phone number][jill whalen phone number][bill slawski phone number[Michael Martinez phone number]<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wiep.net+phone+number&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=9OK&filter=0">[site:wiep.net phone number]</a>So it’s not just SEOmoz’ problem. Jill’s page is perhaps a good example of how an SEO should optimize for "contact us" related terms like [phone number] - the tele clinic page is a pretty good landing page for that term.SEOmoz’ problem is not that the contact us page isn’t listed in Google. Its problem is that it mentions the term [phone number] on 155 pages. On the missionary position page, the term is repeated a gazillion times.
SEOmoz’ problem is not that the contact us page isn’t listed in Google. Its problem is that it mentions the term [phone number] on 155 pages.Part of the problem is also that the contact page has less followed internal links pointing to it than some of the other pages containing [phone number], resulting in the possibility that Google thinks that an other page might be more important.BTW, I didn’t mean [SEO blogger phone number], but [SEO company phone number]. [phone high rankings][phone key relevance][phone 1st query][phone Tribal IM](Aaron Wall’s ClientSide SEM doesn’t have a phone number listed...)
It seems like there should be a fairly easy way to test the "no follow" hypothesis using a test site or two, and coming to definitive conclusion that’s not based on aggregate traffic trends.Wish I had the time...I’m sure somebody around here does.
I believe that the internal nofollow is DEFINITELY amongst the most effective SEO tools available. I’ve tested using 10k page sites, and the results (while not 100% conclusive) did show a pretty decent bump where they should be.
weip & halfdeck: those links lead to Google search page only..fyi (don’t know why. I even signed out and retried) but point still taken.
Agreed, I am putting more and more emphasis on no-following redudant pages that don’t need PR to boost SERPs. The key is making it happen from the start, and not when you already have hundreds or thousands of pages.
I totally read the first line of the description wrong.
It’s very easy to prove and we’ve done it on our private testing platforms. Here’s what to do:Step 1: Register a new domain (preferrably one with a domain name that has no results in Google - like yorkfabuzapeloh or such)Step 2: Link to that domain’s homepage from some social media profiles or pages you control (but make sure they’re very obscure and hard to find so no one else discovers and links to it - this is pretty easy to do)Step 3: Create 6 pages on the site, the homepage (A) with two links to pages (B) and (C), pages (D) and (E) - both linked to by page (B) - and page (F) linked to from page (C). It’s important to make sure that (B) is the first link on the homepage (A) and (C) is the second link.Step 4: Target a nonsense keyword on pages (D) and (F), which are linked to by pages (B) and (C) respectively. Step 5: Wait until Google has indexed all the pages (usually only a couple days if you link to them from a few sources), then run a search for the nonsense keyword you targeted on (D) and (F). Page (F) will rank first, because there’s more link juice pointing to it than to (D), as (D) is only getting half the link weight provided by page (B) while (D) is getting all of (C)’s link weight.Step 6: Add a nofollow to the link from page (B) to page (E), which we haven’t done anything with until now. Wait until Google respiders, then check the results again. (D) should now be ranking in front of (F), because it’s receiving the same link weight as (F) but the original link from the homepage (A) to (B) is higher up on the page, which gives it a tiny bit more weight.We’ve replicated this experiment as have several others, and certainly any global link weighting system similar to the original PageRank formula would lead you to this conclusion as well.So - I’ve got no problem with MM saying that SEOmoz’s new traffic from old archived pages has nothing to do with our recent use of nofollows, but that certainly doesn’t mean it won’t work great for sculpting internal link flow.
Rand, the fact that internal rel=nofollow alters link flow needs no proof. I also believe that nofollow is a great way to sculpt link flow without harming user-experience.What your post didn’t address in full, however, is the causal connection between internal nofollow and seomoz’ traffic increase. Theoretically, I buy it. But there are other factors that can account for the rise in traffic, like Danny pointed out.
And that’s why the post says "my opinion" not "this is fact." I put a lot of caveats in there, and I think it’s a little bit sensationalist for MM to capitalize on that, but hopefully people will read it for what it is - an opinion, based on experience and nothing more. Certainly if you don’t want to use this tactic or don’t believe in its value, there’s no obligation to do so just because I wrote that I think it works for us.BTW - I wrote this in the post, but we DO use this tactic on every client we work with, and I’ve only ever seen positive results.
@randfish - thanks for sharing your testing methods and results. That seems easy enough to replicate.I was already sold on this technique even prior to your post, but it’s good to know that there was some semblence of scientific method applied to it!
"it’s a little bit sensationalist for MM to capitalize on that, "Jeez Rand, MM can be a bit off the handle at times, but seems less prone to grandeur than many of us. I would be more inclined to think he didn’t fully grasp the caveats than really taking aim. As you already stated, it wasn’t exactly a scientific undertaking and for me that is enough. Do I think the results are a strong signal? No.... Do I believe in the potential for ’sculpting’ with this method, yes, in theory. It is not unlike using internal link structuring to place emphasis towards a given page. For me the jury is still out as far as any definitive statements or inclusion into the everyday playbook is concerned at this point....
nofollow tags is probably the worst invention Google has created so far.