Sculpting PageRank using Nofollow is Bad? Since when?
“Sculpting Pagerank” is basically using the “nofollow” attribute in a link to tell Google (and whatever other search engines that recognise and honour the nofollow attribute) not to follow a link. Basically, as a webmaster, you can say to Google, “I’m not endorsing or voting for this page so disregard this link”.
Originally “nofollow” was introduced to combat blog spam, but smart webmasters like Leslie Rhode and Michael Campbell had been using javascript combinations before nofollow was invented to create links that search engine’s couldn’t follow.
Why?
Simply to prevent PageRank going to “useless” pages like their “privacy policy” or their “disclaimer” or their “terms of service”. After all, if you’re building a website about “cellphone batteries”, you don’t want your “legaleze” pages ranking well because they have nothing to do with what your website content is about… so if you can distribute Pagerank more effectively to your content pages, you’ll have a better chance of getting them to rank highly in the search engines. (of course, humans can still click on the links to the legaleze pages)
The argument against using “nofollow” for the purpose of managing Pagerank burst out into the open again recently when Adam Audette said, “Don’t waste time worrying about sculpting internal links.”
I’m sorry, but I beg to disagree. It’s very quick and easy to “nofollow” links to your privacy pages, TOS and disclaimer… and if all of your site’s pages point to those “legaleze” pages, by adding nofollow to the links you’ll save a lot of wasted Pagerank. Often, because of the number of links, those pages can be some of the highest ranking pages on a website, which is totally pointless for the webmaster and Google.
What do you think? Do you use “nofollow”?
July 14th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I don’t but that’s basically laziness.
I’ve seen the illustrations of how useful it is. Can you show us a simple way of doing it?
alex
July 14th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Hi Alex,
If a plain link is like this…
*a href=”http://www.y.com”>link text*/a>
… then a nofollow link is like this…
*a href=”http://www.y.com” rel=”nofollow”>link text*/a>
Replace * with <
HTH
Neil.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Yep, I use nofollow. I agree that your internal link structure should be fully optimized. It’s a no brainer, it’s conserves PageRank.
I also use the robots.txt file so that Google will just remove the pages I don’t need indexed, usually these are the same ones that I’ll most likely nofollow anyway.
July 19th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Couldn’t agree more, after being literally fed up with the number of responses the search engine generates to a given keyword, i do use the nofollow, it s very easy to use and if as a sites administrator you can distribute your pagerank effectively to your content pages, than higher trafficking is guranteed.
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Ryanphilips
July 20th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I know that google is just trying to make their search engine more relevant, but completely deindexing some one’s work is completely immoral.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Yes I agree that using nofollow links is a good idea if your serious about your websites pagerank and how you want it to be dispursed.
And implementing it isnt even that hard if you have header and footer includes for your website, that cuts down on like half the links you have to change…
July 29th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Good tip, this shouldn’t take any real time at all.
July 30th, 2008 at 4:29 am
Thanks for the good information. What about when pointing to external links?
August 1st, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Hmm. I’m tempted to conclude that fiddling with things like this is a sign we aren’t working hard enough at creating new content and services for users. Too much time on our hands?
In the end, big picture long term, successful SEO is about serving users. It’s users that will, or won’t, create the viral link buzz that makes or breaks a site.
Do users care about whether the links to my contact form are nofollow or not? Probably not.
August 2nd, 2008 at 10:42 am
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your thoughts.
Yes, manipulating PageRank shouldn’t be something webmasters spend hours and hours each day on… but a few simple tweaks to a template could result in much better organic rankings for the pages you want to rank highly… the ones you spent a long time lovingly creating quality content on.
>Do users care about whether the links to my contact form are nofollow or not? Probably not. <
Exactly. It’s invisible to them, so why not do it?
Why spend a lot of time creating pages of quality content which people link to, only to waste some of the site’s PageRank by having links on those pages to the “about us”, “contact us” and “privacy policy” pages?
Neil.