What should I know before I use "nofollow" internal link?

Hi all,

I plan to boost my index page by using nofollow links internally, is it allowed by major search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN? What is the good and bad of using nofollow internal links? Please advise, thank you.

P.S. I notice that this forum and some big web sites(like Youtube) are using the same internal "nofollow" links.

 

As far as i know all the major search engines follow those links but google won't count them as a vote, so the inner page which is marked with nofollow won't have any PageRank.

 

If you have a page with nofollow but index, your site will get indexed but all the outbound links won't.

So if I buy a link on your nofollow-index page, you still get indexed, I don't.

 

I don't think it's a good idea to use nofollow internal links.
It's just not natural and seems wrong to me.

 

I share the same feeling when I first know about nofollow links, but when I noticed that many big web sites are using it internally, I change my mind

 

So...you really wanna buy a link from me?

 

Bad idea, dont no follow all your internal links. You want PR flow through your site, your internal pages count as links and it helps build authority through your domain.

By all means no follow "some" of your junk pages to conserve crawl budget like admin log in pages etc but dont do all your pages.

 

You are right, I'll only use nofollow links on some pages like "about us", "contact us", thank you.

 

I still don't understand why you should put nofollow on internal links.
The more pages you have - the better. What you are doing, is limiting your website to search engines. For what exactly ?

 

For focusing link equity on important pages.

I wouldn't recommend that you put nofollow on big number of links - you can put nofollow on forum (duplicated pages etc.)

 

Sweety how you got this idea?

NOFOLLOW mean NOT FOLLOW THIS LINK.

It means you will be telling SE to not follow this link so it will add no value at all to your site in any meaning.

 

Yes No-Follow on a hyperlink means don't follow, and it can be helpful to do this for links to pages that have no value.

An example is a vBulletin callendar, instead of wasting crawl budget and link equity getting 1,000s of "nothing" pages spidered and indexed it's better to stop it being crawled.

 

Incorrect. Google WILL NOT follow or count it as a "vote." Yahoo follows but doesnt count it as a "vote." Ask follows and counts.

I would recommend NOT using nofollows and instead building links to your index page with the anchor text of your choice.

 

I wrote that Google follow those links, but doesn't count as vote. If you don't belive that those links are followed just log in to your webmester tool account and check your backlinks

 

Their acknowledged, but not followed. Google does't read anything on that page or even visit a nofollow link. It's like a banner on a door to a store. It reads it, but doesn't open the door and it doesn't look at the products inside.

Here is a great read on no follow:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-google-yahoo-askcom-treat-the-no-follow-link-attribute/4801/

 

Drig, thank you for the excellent resource! Rep added

 

I think major search engine will not read the no follow link.

 

Thanks for sharing a link, very informative.

 

i think using nofollow for your internal pages is not a good seo way and nofollow is a tag for ONLY google

 

You must have been using drugs when the idea to use nofollow tag for internal linking. Everyone tends to increase rankings for inner pages and not for homepage only and you want to shade them totally?

Sharing some link juice with the inner pages from your homepage it will NOT harm your homepage rankings, instead it will increase the inner page rankings too.

Homepage gives vote to page1 and page2 than page1 and 2 give votes back to homepage, how can this harm your homepage rankings..i can't figure.