Any benefit to using nofollow on internal links?

I heard of some people using nofollow on internal links. Is there any possible benefit to this? Why would you ever use nofollow on a link to your own site?

 

Theme Relevance is very important. if you are linking to a page which is not directly related to the theme of the page you are linking from, then you should use nofollow. if you link to the page irrelevant to the theme of the original page that will be called as "theme bleeding" which is a bad thing.

 

The advantage is that those linked pages will not be followed by search engines. The great disadvantage that I found: Google will rate those pages with a grey PR in the toolbar. Even worse: Other pages that point to those pages without nofollow will be marked grey as well. After a while half of my pages (40.000) were marked grey by Google and SERPs for all those pages became insignificant. Therefore: Be careful with internal nofollow!

 

Please explain it a bit more. why it will be so? its logical to not link those pages you dont feel relevant to main theme. why Google will penalize it?

 

Using nofollow on internal links sounds spammy to me.

 

It's not it's intended purpose. If you want to place less importance on certain pages in the hierarchy, block the pages in robots.txt

 

Let's say you've got a section on your site you block by robots.txt, such as the feed page, or a search results page. In addition to the robots.txt exclusion nofollowing links to them stops the bots (the ones that understand nofollow) before they even have a chance. All you are doing is lessoning the work/resources needed to index your site which may have a benefit.

The other benefit MAY be PageRank distribution within the site. Say you have a bunch of links to pages you don't want indexed mixed in with links to pages you do want indexed. By nofollowing the ones you don't want indexed you MAY increase the distribution of PageRank flow to the ones you do. I haven't tested the theory to the extent that a nofollowed link is == to a link not being there. That may have some SEO benefit by identifying the important pages and not dilluting your PageRank distribution with links to pages that you don't want indexed.

 

DP uses it well. I use it on links pointing to pages that I do not want Google to index

 

Or use a robots meta tag.

 

that depents on who you are linking to.

if you are adding nofollow to your links exchange , i'm sure that you will not make any benefir from this

 

This thread is about internal links, not external.

 

Hi, I set nofollow on the links on my domain that are going to subdomains. I want you to get to the forum.joygoround from my main page, but I don't want to cast any voting or look like I'm spamming my own pages to gain rank. I just did this a couple of weeks ago. I've been reading too much no follow information and I am really confused!

 

I have no idea, why Google penalizes this; They don't tell it to you in their official statements. But my experience with it on a large website (400.000 pages) was very clear. Using nofollow on your internal pages creates a penalty in the long run. It works like this: There is no vote from the page that contains the rel=nofollow, but the page that is referenced becomes a No-No page. When other pages refer to this page they get penalized because they refer to this No-No page. This page is treated like bad environment (link farms etc.). In this way you create a bad environment within your own website. Not really useful to do that!

 

Ahh yes the " Link Condom " very useful if your pointing to a dodgy website or something your not sure is that great. I think it should removed from all blogs comments. I believe links should count always , some want to show bling on the bar , link love forever!

As well the theory is debunked PR is passed through the nofollow depending on the authority of said site.

IE. I tested the theory and test blog gained a might PR5 all for the first time between google PR updates. Of course these links were all nofollow however they where on wikipedia so obviously google ignores the nofollow for that site or it least it did before when I tested it hmmm about 1.5 years ago now maybe less.

Well I agree if you abuse it, but I believe if your using properly it carrys no relevance either way however protects you , which I believe it was designed for, that and to make comment spam useless which is so evil it denounces speech.

 

Friends, i find more facts on it at free-seo-news.com/newsletter266.htm and also at forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=1041

 

As a Webmaster You are free to do what ever you want with your site content and internal links building as you are not stuffing keywords of spamming, While the only usage for the nofollow tag is to tell Google Bot (Spider) not to follow this link even if it's internal or external.

 

i think that rel="nofollow" not good to internal pages