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Whether to use the nofollow attribute to channel internal PageRank
SEO News Source: http://www.spiderwritingseo.co.uk
Story Found By: billmarshall 1720 Days ago
Category: SEO
An article on whether it’s wise, practical or ethical to use the nofollow attribute on the internal links and navigation of a website. Also considers the use of nofollow on blogs.
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from jimbeetle 1720 Days ago #
Votes: 0

"If you show a user a link then you are telling them that it’s worth following it. If you use a nofollow attribute on it then you are telling the search spiders that it isn’t worth following." Just have to highlight those two sentences.

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from Halfdeck 1720 Days ago #
Votes: 0

"Firstly I don’t believe enough people actually understand PageRank enough to start trying to fiddle with it." Valid point. "Thirdly we have the problems that would be caused to the usability of sites. Many websites use Google’s own search system to provide site-search facilities, and studies show that many users will use the search boxes to navigate a site. If you close off some of your pages with nofollow" Internal nofollow is not meant to remove "About Us" pages from the SERPs. The goal is to take some PageRank from an About Us page and re-rout it to either a supplemental results page you want back into the main index or some other page that means more to you than an About Us page. In other words, using internal nofollow, as long as they’re not sitewide, will not prevent your About Us page from showing up in a site: search. "Google have always said that you should show users and search engines the same things." No SEO professional should blindly follow what Google says verbatim, especially when doing so doesn’t hurt your site. Users cannot see META noindex and they also usually don’t bother to check robots.txt but those directives influence how Googlebot indexes your website. So how do you effectively argue that robots.txt disallow is a bad thing because users can’t see it? And why are you so concerned with what Google says? I’d be more concerned with the questions: - Does internal nofollow work? - Does it get more of my clients’ pages indexed?

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from AndyBeard 1720 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Valid points but take a look at your own site for a second. I landed on a page that had hardly any internal navigation in the sidebar. If you added internal navigation to the sidebar, it might enhance user experience, but would affect internal linking structure. Why do you think it is bad SEO to do the reverse but still provide navigational links for visitors that they might find useful. In fact on the site linked to there is a severe lack of internal linkage

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from jimbeetle 1720 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Halfdeck, I certainly agree as to the correct way to redirect PR from the overhead pages. There have been some good posts by folks such as Dan Thies on ways to do this, though I consider them mostly to be "what if" scenarios. The one thing I’m sure you know by being involved in some of these internal nofollow threads is that many of the folks jumping to implement it are going to wind up shooting themselves in the foot -- and refuse to listen when more experienced people are telling them not to practice their quick draw with a loaded weapon.

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from Halfdeck 1720 Days ago #
Votes: 0

"many of the folks jumping to implement it are going to wind up shooting themselves in the foot" Agreed jimbeetle. One point Michael Martinez pointed out is that an aggressive use of nofollow can harm your site’s ranking since you’re blocking not only PageRank but also anchor text. But if you do manage to get more pages in the main index, then you should see an improvement in your product pages’ rankings, though you might see a dip in your second-tier rankings. Also keep in mind that PageRank shifts is completely reversible; that’s why I didn’t hesitate to rewire my site. It’s a little bit like playing around with a rubik’s cube. Like Dan said, I’d make changes carefully, one step at a time, with a close eye on the ranking of pages you’re blocking PageRank to.

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from g1smd 1716 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I would use a robots no index tag to get pages out of the index or robots.txt to stop them being spidered (but they may still sometimes appear as URL-only entries). They will still probably be assigned some PR I guess. I think that using "nofollow" on internal links is a bad move. You’re playing with fire. The goal posts keep moving. First off, we were told that "nofollow" was originally for blogs to signal that they didn’t vouch for external links posted in their comments. Later on, there came the notion that it is also to be used on sites that have paid links. Use the nofollow attribute to show that those links were paid for and you are not wanting to manipulate PR by having those links on the site. Now we are told to manipulate the PR within a site by using them. It doesn’t add up. I would not do that.

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