Search engine optimization tips - indexing and controlling the link juice flow
You’ve earned from my previous articles from the search engine optimization tips series a couple of Seo beginner rules and then how to plan and implement a proper link structure for your site. Now it’s time for a new episode, about indexing and controlling PR juice flow trough your site.
There are lots of pages on a site that should not get into SERPs. Why? For many reasons: duplicate content, uninteresting content, very low chances of ranking well etc. So, what should you do with all these pages? Prevent crawling bots to get to them. By using robots.txt or the noindex meta tag.
You can find more about robots, noindex and nofollow from a previous article.
I want to speak here about using nofollow to influence PR juice distribution on your site. In theory, things are like this: You have a PR X page with Y links on it. Every one of these links passes a PR equal to X/Y. So, the lower your Y will be on a page, the more juice will each of the links pass. And here comes the question. Is it worth using nofollow internally on your site?
From my experience, using nofollow internally has no results. But i still use it nonetheless. Why? Because I’ve read many posts from people claiming they had results with this technique and recommending it. And even a friend of mine claims so too… Perhaps, when we’re talking about a limited number of links on a page there might be some influence, but other from that.. i sincerely doubt it. One more interesting thing: Nofollow internally can be used though to pass the link juice to third tier links, skipping the second level ones.
In the end, i must add that you should not have any fear that using nofollow internally is a Black or even Grey HAT SEO method, as Matt Cuts himself admitted that "webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages". Just don’t expect incredible results. this thingy is just one of the hundreds of factors inside the Google Algorithm.
That being said, stay tuned for the next episode of this Search Engine Optimization saga.
Tags: index, nofollow, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, tips
I started using them internally because I figured it didn’t hurt. I have even gone as far as considering making all the links to my home page no-follow, since my blog is just my name. I’m not sure whether to take it that far though.
I’m not sure i understand. Why would you want to nofollow all the links to your home page?
Every internal page should have a link to the home page. If you want to use nofollows, do it on the link posting to categories, secondary pages, etc.