I good SEO person would make sure he/she has anchor text to internal pages. A couple of questions: 1) Should you have nofollow links to the index page from internal pages or should it be the other way around? OR should you just omit the nofollow link to allow the bots travel freely. I read a while back that you should have a nofollow from the internal pages back to the index because you will bleed some of that link juice of the internal pages (something I disagree with). 2) From the index page, except for the navigational links, you shouldn't really link to internal pages (again, I disagree with this theory). They say it will bleed the index page of link juice. What say you?
Absolutely not... You should follow all of your internal links IMO. Did you know that Matt Cutts at Google announced on June 15th that Google does not support PR Sculpting anymore (and secretly hasn't for over a year now)... that rel="nofollow" on outbound links no longer causes more PR to be passed out on the remaining "followed" links? See the paragraph just before the first Q&A where he states: This means if you nofollow a link to an internal page, you are basically wasting the PR that would have been sent to that page so you may as well let if flow to the page. There is really no reason to ever NOFOLLOW an internal link again. If you follow those links, at least the PR can flow to that page and then back out to other parts of your site instead of going into a blackhole which is what happens now if you nofollow the link. You should still NOFOLLOW external links to sites you don't trust to avoid penalties should they violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines, but other than that there is really no use for the rel="nofollow" link level attribute anymore. But if you trust the external site, you might as well follow their link. You are going to "bleed" PR whether the link is followed or not now. PS: NOFOLLOW has never prevented a page from being indexed, so it should never have been used for that. If you want to prevent a page from being indexed either 1) include a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> element in the <head> of the page or 2) use robots.txt to disallow search engines from indexing the page. There is nothing wrong w/ linking to other pages on your site from your home page. It is true that the more outbound links that you have on your page, the less PR each link will be passed... But there is no "rule" that says ONLY have your main navigation as outbound links on your home page. That would be a pretty crappy user experience IMO. What if you want to highlight some page 3 levels deep in your site that has some killer new tool or new product that is VERY hot that if you can get it in front of consumers, would convert them into a sale? You wouldn't be able to following this rule... People would have to know to click 3 levels deep (and which 3 links to click) in order to find it. Your home page should link to the most important pages on your site regardless of whether they are part of the top/global navigation or not IMO. And yes, you want to give some thought to which links you add to your home page. Making something that is going to lead to high conversions easy for users to find by highlighting and linking to it from the home page outweighs any SEO benefit you might gain from being stingy w/ your PR on your home page. If the user comes to your home page but doesn't know you have a killer page 3 levels deep about a very popular topic they might be looking for, then they are going to leave anyway and not convert.
It would depend on the website, every website should be considered on a individual basis. When webmasters talk about "juice" some are referring to PageRank, other may consider juice to be search engine position. Search engine position is more important than Google PageRank, so depending on the site nofollow links may or may not be a good idea. I agree with you... Whomever stated that theory must not be a SEO expert. I have personally had a lot of success, on many websites, with using internal anchor text to link to other pages within websites. Most of my websites are on the first page or 1st place at Google. Knowing how to use optimized links is very important part of SEO!
You should definately not have any "nofollow" tags on your internal anchor links. It comes down to the end user. What I mean by that is if it would be helpful to link to another topic or section of your site from that particular text/topic, etc then link to it. If it provides no real value then don't do it. People over analyze what they should and shouldn't do on sites when it comes to SEO and at the end of the day it just depends on giving your customers or users what you think is the most helpful to them and the rest will take care of itself.
Thx Canonical as usual - and the other's replies as well. I read and re-read Matt's article, and to tell you the truth, since I was a follower of Dan T. and he believed in PR sculpting - so did I - now this takes on a whole different meaning to me.
No following links was originally intended to control user generated content, which was often spam. As soon as Google began twisting its use for their own benefit (e.g. wanting us to "nofollow" paid links) we quit using the tag entirely. No ill effects whatsoever. If there are areas of your site that you don't want crawled or indexed (i.e. TOS, Privacy, etc.) then use your robots.txt
Interesting... If most of you are right, then I agree with Google, we should always dofollow internal links.