rel=nofollow in Main Navigation?

[smargenau]

I'm thinking of adding the nofollow attribute to my sites main navigation since it is really there for usability... I'm hoping this will "juice" the pages linked to from inside my content?

The goal being to better distribute page rank to the pages linked from inside my content... Which I am hoping will boost the relevancy for both the linking page, and the linked page.

- Does anyone know if nofollow effects "content silos?"
- Is this relevant credible: How to Optimize Content Themes on a Large Site using Content Silos

[crankydave]

Nope. "Sculpting" doesn't work that way any more. The PR from a nofollow link is removed from the equation and then distributed between all pages after the calculation .

Dave

[seomagician]

I second that. Can't sculpt using nofollow anymore.

[smargenau]

Thought so. I told my guy this...he didn't beleive me after reading some "article", so i made him post it here to get blasted! Rooks!

[seomagician]

Every article should have a mandatory date stamp so newbs in the business will know if they are reading something that is 2 years old and no longer working. Then again, there are plenty of re-hashed, "new", articles and advise that are landmines for those that are new to the business, etc. Best advise in this biz is to test anything you hear to prove it to yourself.

[smargenau]

well said. it is the cage of content "re-spam"

[SemAdvance]

rel=nofollow indicates a lack of trust.

Is this the message you want to send to the search engine about your site's pages?

I know I never used it on mine or any of my clients sites.

Just because Google or its puppet MC say its a good idea to do something.....does not mean it is.....we all see now that Google back pedaled on this issue and others.

Peace!

[claybutler]

Wouldn't matter if it worked anyway. It's just a dumb idea. Why would you no follow your own site navigation? Just so you could theoretically push the PR of one or two pages one point? PR has little to do with the SERP's anyway. I've seen high PR pages perform poorly and low PR pages perform greatly. I've seen SERP's results get worse as PR got higher. I've seen the reverse as well. It's just too much of a crap shoot to waste time tinkering with these peripheral things when that time could be spent on doing stuff that works 100% of the time. Great content, quality inbound links, clean navigation, clear calls to action and on target messaging/branding.

The rest is just fluff.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by seomagician

Every article should have a mandatory date stamp so newbs in the business will know if they are reading something that is 2 years old and no longer working. Then again, there are plenty of re-hashed, "new", articles and advise that are landmines for those that are new to the business, etc. Best advise in this biz is to test anything you hear to prove it to yourself.

The cited article is relatively recent - May 26, 2009.

[Canonical]

This was Cutts' June 15th, 2009 post that made public that Google "supposedly" changed nofollow over a year ago so that PR sculpting was impossible. Pay special attention to the paragraph just before the Q&A:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

[claybutler]

Yes. He meant that it drained a point away from the available pool of points but it didn't pass the point on because of the nofollow. They just disappeared. So a page with mostly nofollows will kill the PR juice potential of the few follow links.

If that is true, then doing a lot of nofollows with your site's navigation with have a negative effect overall.

[ncseo]

the question to still think about is

Is PR the only thing passed by a link?

I also have seen PR2 pages outrank a higher PR, but their are other factors in play that are unnoticed like authority of the links


For example

domainA.com was created 2008, and it has a PR7

domainB.com was created 1999, and it also has a PR7

domainB.com will probably have more authority "juice" than domainA.com

So Matt Cutts did say the PR juice is lost but how about the 'authority juice'?

If there is any authority being passed then PR sculpting now turns into Authority Sculpting.

Either way....I dont believe nofollowing navigational buttons will have detrimental effect on your rankings. Maybe today they will help a little....but just a little

Here's an article I wrote that was featured on SEOMoz about PR/Link juice sculpting

SEOmoz | Are You Leaking Juice?

[Canonical]

Personally, I think nofollowing links in your main nav is a terrible idea. The main navigation typically appears on every page on the site. Search engines use this to determine which pages on your site are most important, which pages should be indexed first, how you would like them to crawl your site, etc.

By nofollowing them you're telling the search engines not to crawl the link. AND you're wasting PR/link juice that you could be recirculating around your site.

If a link appears in the global navigation, it "should" be worth following. If you're considering nofollowing a link in your global navigation then IMO you've made a bad selection of things to link to in the navigation.

[crankydave]

ncseo... that article is outdated given information we have now.

Given the information we currently have, nofollowing internal links *can* be detrimental to a site especially when it comes to indexing. There's no reason to throw any 'juice' away internally and that's what the nofollow will do.

Dave

[Clint1]

Originally Posted by Canonical

Personally, I think nofollowing links in your main nav is a terrible idea. The main navigation typically appears on every page on the site. Search engines use this to determine which pages on your site are most important, which pages should be indexed first, how you would like them to crawl your site, etc.

I believe what some people are pointing out, and saying, is that why not do this for pages that are not important. There's no point in having "Ordering info" or "About us" or "Contact us" types of links crawled and diluting the PR on every page when one's links to important product pages on said pages can get "a higher importance" value......

By nofollowing them you're telling the search engines not to crawl the link. AND you're wasting PR/link juice that you could be recirculating around your site.

.....it's not "wasted" because (at least as I currently understand it), the PR will go to your more important pages that could benefit the most from it, instead of being diluted to unimportant pages. (But FAIK that could have changed recently, and from what Clay said it appears that may be the case).

If the links on a page do not get more PR credit when some links on the page are nofollow, then I agree, it becomes pointless to use nofollow.

(God I hate this PR crap. When is G going to do something sensible for a change and just trash it).

[ncseo]

Nofollowing links internally is something small to consider for a site.

Nofollow is also used to tell the bot NOT to use the anchor text associated with the link.

For example, ...Read More is usually nofollowed because you dont want to associate the page with the anchor text as Read More.

Also, in the article I write to nofollow contact us/disclaimer and other pages that should not be indexed.

Just because it was written in April doesn't make it outdated. I'm wondering 'what information' on the article you thought was 'outdated'?

Either way nofollowing can be used for anchor text and crawling.
I don't want bots crawling my disclaimer/contact us page...and hopefully it will go by these nofollowed links and continue to the next link. I wouldn't want bots wasting time going around my site to the worthless pages

Link Consolidation was the suggestion given to consolidate your worthless pages into 1 page...and thus creating 1 internal link instead of multiple links

Originally Posted by crankydave

ncseo... that article is outdated given information we have now.

Given the information we currently have, nofollowing internal links *can* be detrimental to a site especially when it comes to indexing. There's no reason to throw any 'juice' away internally and that's what the nofollow will do.

Dave

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by Clint1

If the links on a page do not get more PR credit when some links on the page are nofollow, then I agree, it becomes pointless to use nofollow.

Based on current information, this is exactly what happens.

Originally Posted by Clint1

(God I hate this PR crap. When is G going to do something sensible for a change and just trash it).

Woe are the 'foolbar' watchers when their precious green pixels go away.

Dave

[Canonical]

Originally Posted by ncseo

Nofollowing links internally is something small to consider for a site.

Nofollow is also used to tell the bot NOT to use the anchor text associated with the link.

For example, ...Read More is usually nofollowed because you dont want to associate the page with the anchor text as Read More.

Also, in the article I write to nofollow contact us/disclaimer and other pages that should not be indexed.

Just because it was written in April doesn't make it outdated. I'm wondering 'what information' on the article you thought was 'outdated'?

Either way nofollowing can be used for anchor text and crawling.
I don't want bots crawling my disclaimer/contact us page...and hopefully it will go by these nofollowed links and continue to the next link. I wouldn't want bots wasting time going around my site to the worthless pages

Link Consolidation was the suggestion given to consolidate your worthless pages into 1 page...and thus creating 1 internal link instead of multiple links

There are better ways to keep contact us/disclainer type pages from being indexed. Using nofollow does not prevent them from being indexed. It only keeps them from being indexed because of that particular link. But all it takes is for someone on another site to link to the page with a followed link and BAM! it can pop up in Google's index. Even using a robots.txt disallow: directive won't completely prevent a page from being shown in the SERPs. If you want to prevent a page from ever appearing in the SERPs, use <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.

I guess we can agree to disagree on many of your points about nofollow...

I don't really see the point of blocking a "Read more" link with nofollow. I understand that using "read more" as the link text is TERRIBLE from an SEO perspective, but only because you're wasting that link text... you're telling Google that the page being linked to is ALSO about "read more"... and you could have used your targeted keyword phrase instead and actually helped the page rank for its targeted keyword phrase. But having a few followed links w/ "read more" as the link text doesn't in any way diminish the value of the other inbound links that have good link text.

If I have 100 links all pointing to URL X and 95 of them use the targeted keyword phrase (or some slight variation) but 5 use "read more"... I won't rank any worse for that targeted keyword phrase than if I had just 95 links and all of them used the targeted keyword phrase (or some slight variation) which would be the case if I nofollowed the 5. I'm still going to rank equally as good if not better had I left the 5 "read more" links as followed because I still have 95 links with my targeted keyword phrase... And my URL gains a little bit more PR from 5 more inbound links that it can then pass on to it's outbounds.

I don't really see the point of nofollow anymore for internal links personally. It never really did much anyway from a PR sculpting perspective unless you were nofollowing a high percentage of links on each page.

IMO PR sculpting should be left to building a good information architecture... having a good navigation system that points to the most imporant pages on your site... a good interlinking structure... and forget about trying to use nofollow to sculpt. Who cares if 3 links out of 100 on the page go to pages you don't care about ranking or having crawled. If your server can't handle the few more milliseconds it requires them to crawl the 3 extra pages, you probably have bigger problems that need to be addressed... Use a sitemap.xml to set those pages at a super low priority so other pages will get indexed first. And if having a followed link or two with "read more" as the link text in a URL's backlink profile is going to make ANY noticeable difference in the page's ability to rank for its targeted keyword phrase(s), then again... you likely have bigger problems to address.

Nofollow was designed to combat spam and to tell the engines, "I don't trust this site I'm linking to.... I'm not willing to vouch for them." so I doubt VERY seriously any authority at all is passed via a nofollowed link... Even the thought that it might defies the very purpose for which the attribute was invented. I, for one, have gone back to using it for just that... But to each his own.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by ncseo

So Matt Cutts did say the PR juice is lost but how about the 'authority juice'?

If there is any authority being passed then PR sculpting now turns into Authority Sculpting.

nofollow means that one does not vouch for the target; i.e., the source does not lend its authority to the target.

[WhitneySegura]

Here is my NoFollow rule, if there is an external link that is not one of my websites or in any affiliation with me, I most likely will NoFollow it. If the link is within my internal site navigation then I will not be NoFollowing it. Matt Cutt's has already came forward and basically explained all of this in a video. Go and check out all of the Google videos on youtube, they will help you a lot!

[ncseo]

i would agree but a lot of people who do linkbuilding (that i know) have been telling me that they have been seeing increases in the SERPs with nofollow links

I'm a big believer in that it is worthless...but you gotta wonder if that applies to all nofollow links

Originally Posted by deepsand

nofollow means that one does not vouch for the target; i.e., the source does not lend its authority to the target.

[gareth_esutera]

Why would you do that? They are all your pages. Whatever link juice sip through will still be belong to one of your pages.

[WhitneySegura]

Hey man,

most article directories that are currently requiring NoFollow Attributes will remove it after you establish yourself as an authority and perhaps set up a premium account there. I honestly think that you should have no problems at all with article directories, I really don't know where your going...

Try one of these:
Ezine Articles
Hub Pages
Go Articles
A1 Articles
Easy Articles

If you can't get quality there, you won't get it anywhere.

Let me know as to if you are interested in publishing on one of my new article directories, then.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by WhitneySegura

Hey man, ..., I really don't know where your going...

To whom is this addressed?

[subhzash]

Originally Posted by smargenau

I'm thinking of adding the nofollow attribute to my sites main navigation since it is really there for usability... I'm hoping this will "juice" the pages linked to from inside my content?

The goal being to better distribute page rank to the pages linked from inside my content... Which I am hoping will boost the relevancy for both the linking page, and the linked page.

- Does anyone know if nofollow effects "content silos?"
- Is this relevant credible: How to Optimize Content Themes on a Large Site using Content Silos

If your main navigation has external links then you can use rel=nofollow tag as well as add title like this "External site opens in new window". Set that link should open in new window.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by subhzash

If your main navigation has external links then you can use rel=nofollow tag ...

To what end? Such will not route any additional PR to other links on the page.

Originally Posted by subhzash

... as well as add title like this "External site opens in new window".

Where? Why?

Originally Posted by subhzash

Set that link should open in new window.

Always? If so, why? And, using which method?

[subhzash]

Originally Posted by deepsand

To what end? Such will not route any additional PR to other links on the page.

I agree with you on this. My only purpose is to inform crawlers to nofollow.


Where? Why?

I am taking about the href title tag and by placing "External Links - Opens in new window" user will now that as an external site.

Always? If so, why? And, using which method?

As that is external link, that should open in new window.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by subhzash

My only purpose is to inform crawlers to nofollow.

Once again, why?

Originally Posted by subhzash

I am taking about the href title tag and by placing "External Links - Opens in new window"

As the Title attribute is intended to be descriptive of the target, why would you want to subvert it for purposes of describing as action?

Originally Posted by subhzash

As that is external link, that should open in new window.

Again, why should this always be the case?

And, which method(s) should be used under which conditions?

[subhzash]

Originally Posted by deepsand

Once again, why?

To stop the Page rank distribution.

Originally Posted by deepsand

As the Title attribute is intended to be descriptive of the target, why would you want to subvert it for purposes of describing as action?

It is only to inform visitors that, that was external link. No other purpose.

Originally Posted by deepsand

Again, why should this always be the case?

As i said above that was an external link. More ever it was placed in main navigation of the website. To stop the Page Rank flow