...and if they are doing that I think they have usability issues that need fixed before tabling in nofollow.Originally Posted by Dubbya
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...and if they are doing that I think they have usability issues that need fixed before tabling in nofollow.
Recently Adam Lasnik in an interview suggested use of internal site nofollow other than for “PageRank sculpting”:
Video: Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google | Online Marketing Blog
In an interview with Matt Cutts conducted by Eric Enge, Matt said:
“What we’ve been doing is working with clients and telling them to take pages like their about us page, and their contact us page, and link to them from the home page normally, without a NoFollow attribute, and then link to them using NoFollow from every other page. It’s just a way of lowering the amount of link juice they get. These types of pages are usually the highest PageRank pages on the site, and they are not doing anything for you in terms of search traffic.” Matt Cutts Interviewed by Eric Enge on September 24, 2007
Another guy at PubCon had a private discussion with Matt Cutts. End result of conversation was a major change to his site adding nofollow to many pages that aren't really relevant to ranking for anything.
rel="nofollow" for internal links
Contradiction? Confusing? Or did I miss something?
Also Michael Martinez wrote an excellent article about the abuse/wrong implementation of the nofollow attribute and more: Why Rand Fishkin’s nofollow post was wrong - SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog (Very worth reading)
About excluding pages like "Privacy Policy", "TOS", e.t.c just to avoid a PageRank dilution, I do not think that it is a good practice in terms of a site's credibility. I am not sure if that factor might be at some point considered by search engines, but still I would not disallow those pages as they are equally important like all other pages. If they were not, why should I have them there anyway? Or should I add a stamp to those pages that they are not useful, trustworthy or even not safe for web? ME NOT!
Don't miss this thread at Webmaster World too: Using No-Follow on Internal Links Cause a Drop in Rankings?
I must admit that until some time ago I was using on my site the nofollow attribute for external affiliate links only, but I have replaced them after all with 302 redirects! Nofollow? Not for me.
GREAT THREAD BY THE WAY!
PEACE!
Since I use this tool PageRankBot - Supplemental Results Detector (SEO Tool) I tend to believe that it is not so difficult.
But again. I do not suggest using the nofollow attribute.
Oh and by the way did someone read this already? You'd Be Wise To "NoFollow" This Dubious SEO Advice This is what I am explaining my customers already since a while now.
PEACE!
I believe I was the first in SEO community to suspect "nofollow" and it's benefits, back in this wmw thread (10:37 pm and later replies).
Since then the word was spread all around.
I also have a site with thousands of links where I have employed this technique and yes, my traffic improved for more than 30% based on this alone. However I am not sure about PR benefits as later I made a lot of other changes.
Now I am seriously curious. Can you please explain how could the nofollow attribute help you to increase your traffic?
Peace!
We cannot explain Google behavior for sure, we can only speculate.
* So, my initial reasoning was that Google introduced something like PR "leaking" to outgoing links. I thought of a percentage of PR, say 10%-20% leaking outside.
* The second suspicion was that too many links on page trigger some negative filter. Earlier, Google stated recommendation about 100 links max per page. I haven't counted mine but it was probably outside the limits.
* And finally, nofollow on particular internal links. Many of the links were to different landmarks on a single page, using named anchors. My theory was that several named anchors could cause multiple indexing of the same page, hence duplicate content issue. Add several different internal anchor text for the same page in a row and you get possible spam issue.
Whether it was a single or multiple issue, adding rel="nofollow" to selected links helped that particular site a lot.
Well then let me tell you my version:
We were using on our site the "nofollow" attribute for external (affiliate) sites until 5-6 weeks ago.
Then we got rid of the "nofollow" attribute, since we came up with an alternative and legitimate solution (302 Redirects), and if you believe it or not, our traffic is almost doubled.
So what about that? Eliminating the "nofollow" attribute and doubled traffic?
If you or someone else has doubts about our increased traffic, just PM me and I will send you the link to our AWStats.
By the way, how about showing off that site which is successful using the "nofollow" attribute? I am still very curious.
Peace.
I have no reason to doubt your statement. It is well known that missing or no valid links or bad internal links distribution could hurt a site.
I am sorry, there was a lot of work involved in it and the optimizing process is not yet finished. I expect it fully optimized at the end of this year.By the way, how about showing off that site which is successful using the "nofollow" attribute? I am still very curious.
As I optimize gradually, waiting for two to three months after major change, it is easy to follow, with fair credibility, what works and what not.
It should suffice to say that, in this particular case, adding 'nofollow' to all internal named anchors as well as to some outgoing links produced an increase from 350-400 in January to 500-550 uniques per day in April 2007 and it is not a seasonal behavior. In previous years the traffic was constant in that period.
Today the site averages 900-1,000 unique visitors a day and the goal is 1,500 before December 2008, without ANY content change, which I will start optimizing hopefully in 2009.
For those who cannot follow: What I mean with named anchors is this:
<a href="page-x.html">Anchor text</a><BR>
<a href="page-x.html#2" rel="nofollow">Anchor text b</a><B>
<a href="page-x.html#3" rel="nofollow">Anchor text c</a>
... etc., so effectively linking only one particular url per page.
To be honest, I do not see any effectiveness with that because:
Google will not see the linked page as duplicated if you do not use the nofollow attributes.
Or they will them count them as only 1 internal link, or if they will divide the PR juice though 3, the linked page will get PR of one.
Originally the "nofollow" attribute was implemented for links to non-trustworthy, irrelevant sites.
Don't you think there is a conflict when 3 links are leading to the same page and the one link says that the site is ok, and the other two links say it is not? Don't you see the contradiction there?
Using different link text on more links of a page linking to one page is an accessiblity quidelines requirement. So it is not wrong in any case.
I would suggest you to take advantage of that.
Peace.
Just a quick point I'd like to make John.
While it is true that nofollow initially was for links to sites you could not, or did not, want to "vouch" for, that has since evolved.
More simply it's "do not consider this link" with no real definition as to "why" you don't want it followed attached.
As I have said, for my own reasons, I've chosen not to use it for internal links at this point. But I don't believe that anyone who does choose to use it for their own reasons, is somehow attaching a "negative" stigma to the target page.
Dave
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