Do you use nofollow on internal links on your sites? Good or bad idea? Please discuss. (not referring to blog commenting)
It completely depends; if you want a certain deep article ranking on a certain keyword, it is best to dofollow (assuming you're placing it under the desired anchortext). If you have a sizeable amount of articles, you can actually do some pretty neat PR-dsitributing within your site. I have a PR4-site which has a PR3-links page just because I am allowing PR to overflow from every article to this linkpage. Puts me in a good position for quality link trades. But for example your disclaimer, contact page, guestbook and copyright notice... It's best to nofollow these, as they're just a waste of PR-juice (who's gonna google for them anyways).
Thanks for the advice johnnie. So it's good for PR distribution, your not necessarily saying don't trust this page on your own domain? Interesting about your links page being PR3. I see most typical link pages have no pagerank.
Right on Johnnie. Nofollowing these types of internal pages is considered PR Sculpting and can help direct the PR flow a little better. The downside is that these pages may get dropped from the index. Not a big deal unless you are concerned about having such pages in Google Sitelinks.
Johnnie's suggestions are good; use nofollow on pages that you think are of little importance or to direct the link juice. This currently seems to be a hot topic among SEO experts who describe some remarkable and contradicting results. You may want to read my recent thread on the effect of nofollow on the SEO value of the anchor text, since it contains some references to interesting articles on this topic. I certainly suggest you to read the articles "Anatomy of a Google filter" by Branko Rihtman and "PageRank Sculpting" by Ben Welch-bolen. After you've read Branko's article, you may think twice about applying nofollow on internal links!
This is a great question, I usually however just use the robots.txt file to block any specific web pages I don't want crawled or indexed. This makes it more simple since you don't need to add the attribute to every single hyperlink syntax. Remember, search engine crawlers only spend a specific amount of time crawling your website. Make sure they spend it crawling certain web pages. Below is small list of the type of web pages I would block. - Contact Us - Privacy Policy - Terms and Conditions - Register \ Login
Yes i use either just Nofollow or both Nofollow and Robots.txt depending on the URL. For pages like Wordpress Admin for example i use both, as it stops crawlers and Pagerank from being passed to the pages. On pages like Contact, Disclaimer and so on i'll use just Nofollow because i don't care if these pages are indexed and have Pagerank from external links but i don't warrant them important enough to pass link equity on to from within the site. Also blocking a URL with Robots.txt will not stop Pagerank being passed to the URL, it still does so it's good to use a combination of both if you don't want to waste PR on them. Even though the practice is called "Pagerank Sculpting" i just do it to highlight valuable content as i don't care what Pagerank my pages are. It's also good to use a system like this if you have duplicate content within your site, so your print versions aren't fighting it out with the originals in the SERP's.
I've always struggled with PR sculpting. I'm not a fan of using this technique to channel PR to individual pages, however, it can be used in conjunction with a pyramid structure. By setting up the right structure of internal links you can funnel your PR to different levels (i.e. home page, product genre pages, or product pages). That way, if you find your genre pages get 10x searches, you can push your PR in that direction. Make no mistake, however, that PR accumulated in one location is PR lost in another. This is important to understand. I am a bigger fan of using PR to cut off PR flow to unnecessary pages. Remember, if a page is not revenue producing, you don't want it to be stealing PR (my opinion). Krumpet
yes, if the page you are linking to, is not important, like contact us, privacy policy, disclaimer, resources etc.