NoFollow on Internal Links

[crankydave]

There has been at least a few threads discussing the use of NoFollow on internal links. Matt Cutts was asked about this directly...

Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love?
A) Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.)

SEOmoz | Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories

Dave

[incrediblehelp]

A brief history of the nofollow:

1. Use to stop comment spamming on blogs.
2. Use on paid links as these are not ethical in Google's eyes.
3. Now we should use it to regulate page rank on website??

I just dont understand nofollow as Google looks at it. Why have a link on your website only to nofollow it?

Oh boy it is getting deeper.

[wige]

There is an important point to that that many people seem to overlook. Nofollow literally means do not follow - if you use the nofollow tag on every link to certain pages so that PR is not "wasted" on those less important pages, they could very easily be dropped from the index if they have no external links.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

A brief history of the nofollow:

1. Use to stop comment spamming on blogs.
2. Use on paid links as these are not ethical in Google's eyes.
3. Now we should use it to regulate page rank on website??

I just dont understand nofollow as Google looks at it. Why have a link on your website only to nofollow it?

Oh boy it is getting deeper.

Links to shopping carts sitewide strictly for the benefit of the visitor once they're on the site. There's absolutely no reason to pass any value by those links. NoFollow makes perfect sense whereas removing the links does not.

We regulate page rank all the time through the use of our navigation. NoFollow allows us to create links to benefit the visitor without having to dilute what we created in the first place.

Matt confirms what I have believed all along. Namely, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with using "NoFollow" on internal links AND that those links are ignored leaving more PR to be passed on be the remaining links.

Dave

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by crankydave

Links to shopping carts sitewide strictly for the benefit of the visitor once they're on the site. There's absolutely no reason to pass any value by those links. NoFollow makes perfect sense whereas removing the links does not.

These links shouldnt be ranked and indexed in the first place. Google should figure this out. Dont let Google fool you into thinking nofollow IS NOW someway of hording PR from page to page. It was initially developed for the reasons listed above.

Originally Posted by crankydave

We regulate page rank all the time through the use of our navigation. NoFollow allows us to create links to benefit the visitor without having to dilute what we created in the first place.

"regulate page rank"? um, Google does this not you.

Originally Posted by crankydave

Matt confirms what I have believed all along. Namely, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with using "NoFollow" on internal links AND that those links are ignored leaving more PR to be passed on be the remaining links.

I do believe outbound linking is a part of the Google algo, but to waste all your time nofollowing certain links doesnt make much sense to me. I feel Google should be able to weight and figure out the relevancy of my outbound links themselves.

I think comment says it best:

SEOmoz | Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories

[crankydave]

Jaan...

You posted "regulate page rank"...

3. Now we should use it to regulate page rank on website??

I just repeated what you said.

In many instances, I'd rather tell Google what I'd prefer rather than leaving it up to them.

We can "NoFollow" entire pages. Being able to do it with individual links is a plus in my mind.

Dave

[wige]

Google seems now to be suggesting that is exactly what they want, for webmasters to tell them what pages are the most important, and not just through links. If you check the sitemaps documentation on the webmaster site, there is a blurb about using the priority tag to indicate the relative importance of a page - although Google does stress this won't affect your position in the SERPs, it might have an effect on crawl rate in much the same way IBLs do, and could have other effects such as determining keyword relevance (page one is optimized for foo, page two is optimized for widget, but you tell Google page two is relatively more important than page one, so Google thinks you care more about widgets than foos).

Just another internal factor to add to the balancing act and list of fun things to speculate about?

[crankydave]

LOL! wige... Yes it is.

I see it as just another *tool* to be able to "tell" Google how to better be able to interpret your site. Not a "be all - end all" solution and certainly not something to rush out and do anticipating automatic and immediate gratification.

Dave

[privatefleet]

I think this a great idea and should be a valuable tool.

Eg my Privacy Policy page is a PR4 which is, in my opinion, an absolute waste. Regulations demand that it be there but no one would want it returned in a search, including me.

If a nofollow tag 'bounces' the PR benefit back around some of my other pages that would be more useful to the searcher and to me, that's great.

[GoogleRankings]

Originally Posted by crankydave

Matt confirms what I have believed all along. Namely, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with using "NoFollow" on internal links AND that those links are ignored leaving more PR to be passed on be the remaining links.

Dave

That is the general idea when nofollowing interal pages. I don't nofollow pages I want in the index. But using the nofollow for pages you don't want indexed can be very beneficial.

Matt is an okay guy but lets face it when he says something it is usually for Googles benefit like his 500 posts on reporting paid links(neighborhood watch program) - He is a biased party...

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by GoogleRankings

That is the general idea when nofollowing interal pages. I don't nofollow pages I want in the index. But using the nofollow for pages you don't want indexed can be very beneficial.

Did I get the right?

[GoogleRankings]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Did I get the right?

Yes no nofollowing inner pages which do not need to rank you can rank better with the other pages... alot of sites have pages which do not need to rank and which are wasting value.
Also many sites using scripts have duplicate pages which should be disallowed in robots and then 301ed to the new pages. Believe me, I have seen it on many sites. Read seomoz and seobook, they have explained also.

[crankydave]

Another consideration, at least for now, is that Google does use PR within a site to determine which pages are included in the RI when all of them don't go.

In the above example, "Privacy Policy", there's really no reason to have it included in the RI above a content page and every reason to link to it sitewide for the benefit of the visitor on the site.

As wige pointed out, Google appears to be wanting webmasters to better tell them which pages they feel are important. It really doesn't matter why the NoFollow was initially developed. How many things can you think of that were developed for one reason but turned being beneficial for something totally different?

You can simply add this to list of things that Google would like to be told.

Dave

[mjtaylor]

I am all for telling Google what to do with PR!



I agree; it doesn't matter where nofollow came from but it does matter where it's going.

I wish Google would stop reporting PR. All the concern would dissipate and we would evaluate pages more on content and internal link structure.

Of course, that is not going to happen soon ... without the PR report, many would stop using Google's toolbar and Google would lose a valuable source of information about searchers.

Cheers, MJ

[kgun]

Time to revitalize this thread, since there is so much talk about nofollow on links.