Do you "nofollow" your internal navigation links?

Hi,

On the bottom of each page on my sites I have something like this (purely for navigation):

Site Name >> Section #1 >> Subsection #7 >> Page #3

So that people can better under understand where they are.

Now, Matt Cutts recently said we shouldn't "nofollow" our internal links. But I did set some of them "nofollow", especially the ones pointing to shallow content pages (like: "Contact Us", "Terms of Use" etc.) and, some of my sites also have all "nofollow" navigation links, while other sites of mine have all "dofollow" navigation links.

Would you or would you not "nofollow" the navigation links?

 

You shouldn't be adding a nofollow tag on any of the internal links. It will lead to the wastage of the pagerank and link juice. Why do you want to nofollow your navigation links, btw?

 

You don't need to nofollow the internal links. You won't get penalized or anything for doing it, but it isn't good practice. You also might lose some Pagerank, though on most sites it's not a lot of Pagerank that get's lost. If it's an easy fix, I'd remove the nofollows. If it's going to take a lot of effort and time, I probably wouldn't worry about it.

 

Absolutely NOT, this would be go down as a big error in any onpage SEO strategy. The amount of PR passed through each link is STILL divided between all nofollow AND follow links, meaning nofollowing your navigational links would reduce the pagerank passed, as a % of the PR would still be allocated to the nofollowed links, it's just wouldn't be passed through - eg wasted.

WebDev

 

Well said WevDev.......... this is exactly what that i wanted to write here.

 

No I dont, I have added dofollow tag for any links on my primary site. yups I dont even care bout that bc all I need is lots of ppl who will leave any quality comments on my site. so that will increase traffic imo

 

No need to do this type of practice for navigation links. You must insure that your all navigation links should be dofollow, then your site can do better on SERP.

 

Actually I "nofollow" my repetitive keyword links and the ones pointing to my thin content pages. Yes, I "nofollow" these internal links.

Would it be really that bad?

How come it would waste PR? Wouldn't it carve the structure instead?

 

You just don't have to add the nofollow tag to those links. It's important to have DOFOLLOW internal links and only add NOFOLLOW links to those OBL's that you don't really want to pass Link juice!

 

That's what I actually did!

 

My problem is: there are many repeating links and duplicate links and I want to "nofollow" some of those!

 

I only nofollow external links, there should not be an issue with following any internal links.

 

I def. wouldn't use a nofollow on internal links. Internal links are a great way to begin your link building strategy.

 

You want to watch out for the OBL amount on the page, other than that the nofollow aspect for internal linking isn't a big deal.

 

There is no way you should nofollow your internal links.

 

Hey lesterj, i don't find any PR update since 7-8 months, then why we care about that? I'm also using nofollow tag in duplicate internal links.

 

Correct. Here is the original quote from Matt Cutts
Here he says that PageRank sculpting doesn't work anymore, and that you won't be able to boost the search ranking of an individual page by redistributing PR through nofollowed links on your site.

OP, if you want to prevent Google from indexing some pages of your site, create a disallow instruction in the robots.txt file and upload it to your site (if you don't have one yet)

 

Kianu42, I guess the "disavow" is not the right tool. I'd rather use the "noindex".

 

Don't add no follow for your internal links it might hurt to get crawled or promoted better having them dofollow will be an valid for promotions

 

I am using "nofollow" only on shallow content, "terms", "contact us" and repeating internal links. That should not harm.