Sphinn - Five Situations Where You SHOULD Use NoFollow for Linking

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Five Situations Where You SHOULD Use NoFollow for Linking

Went Hot: February 12, 2008 - 10:05 am
Posted By: bhartzer 241 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginejournal.com)
Category: Link Building

Your search marketing efforts build the incoming links and link juice which help lend authority and ranking to your site. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with sharing that property with the right people, and letting the ‘wrong people’ go thirsty.

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from planetc1 241 days ago #

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I like the last suggestion of using NoFollow when linking to the same page many times from one page. Anyone else recommending that?

from tobyism 241 days ago #

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I have been using that idea for a few months now, not in a way that is empirical enough to show any definitive answers (if there are such things in seo) either way, but it makes sense to me.

from mariaseo 241 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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Nice article. I will add one more case when you could use nofollow: when you are forced to use an anchor text that does not add any value to the link such as "Home".

from everett 241 days ago #

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LOL... I notice Loren didn't put "Use no follow for Journal Sponsors in Right Sidebar or you'll get your page rank stripped away." Good post though.

Mariaseo I'll have to dissagree with that one. A link still passes value even if it uses the word "home" and besides that, it is good to have a varried link text strategy. I sometimes go as far as ASKING for the link to say "click here" if I feel I'm getting too many keyword anchortext links for a page. As for nofollowing a link on your own website that goes to your home page, I don't see why anyone would want to do that. The purpose is to maintain page rank by not wasting in on terms-of-service type pages. Your home page should be the most important page in your site, so linking to it isn't a waste of anything.

from willneu 241 days ago #

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Planetc1: I wouldn't recommend doing that, unless you don't want those pages to rank higher than pages that are only linked to once. Its doubling the weighting the page is passed via that link, im sure there are levels where Google just ignores the excessive links on a single page and/or flags it for spam. But, the more links the less weight every link gets, but if to have more links you are linking to one page twice, that page should get a higher share of the overal "juice" passed from that page.

MariaSEO: That would in theory make sense, however just because link text is not used does not mean its not passing it any juice if you want to make your website rank top for "great cars" then of course the text "Great cars" is probably the best to target. But, why not have a footer link and a homepage link which would increase the weight that, that page would recieve internally. Remember, homepages recieve more links from external sources too, so if you have a competitive keyword they are far more likely to rank top so adding that extra internal juice will help. So in short, i would disagree with your suggestion, unless the juice would be best used elsewhere.

I'm not even sure if that makes sense, but i don't have time to read over it again!

from mariaseo 240 days ago #

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Everett: One of the points in the article was: "Use NoFollow when linking to the same page many times from one page." Usually the homepage could get a lot of links from internal pages (sometimes more than once in one page). Internal links usually have more power than navigation links. So I don't think it is a bad idea to use nofollow on navigation where you have it as "home" if you are able to to point to the homepage from internal pages with a more valuable anchor text. Of course I will take your advice as well since my opinion is based on what I have read, I am not a programmer. I appreciate your opinion