When to use nofollow on internal links
Matt Cutts opened up a whole new world of possibilities when he told Rand from SEOmoz that it’s acceptable for a site owner to use nofollow on internal links to control the flow of PageRank within a site.
There’s a whole can of worms that has been opened up by internal use of nofollow being considered white hat. Matt muddied the waters a bit in this comment, but still indicates internal use of nofollow is a white hat tool webmasters can use by saying “It’s available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.”
So far the best information I’ve seen about this is the Third Level Push (modified Siloing) For Deeper Index Penetration. That’s an excellent post, tool, and process, but it’s not the whole story. It’s also a little hard to get your head around.
Update: Social & Search also just posted another excellent article on the topic of pagerank sculpting.
On most sites, especially smaller ones, I don’t think PageRank sculpting is generally required. It may actually cause more harm that good. On larger sites, especially where SEO is not a primary concern, PageRank Sculpting could make a huge difference in how linkjuice flows through your site.
Here’s one example.
PR Sculpting using internal nofollow tags may be helpful for a site with extensive multiple layers of site navigation as part of the template for a site. (Think your entire sitemap on every page.)
The one example I’m thinking of right now has over 80 links in css based drops downs in the top navigation bar. Granted, there are over a thousand pages on the site, so it still only links to a small fraction of the overall pages.
If your site only has a handful of site wide navigation links, link sculpting isn’t for you. However, if you have multiple levels of CSS based dropdowns leading deep into your site, including to areas not very valuable in terms of search traffic, you may be a good candidate for internal use of nofollow.
Having a large quantity of deep links from every page on your site can only help, right? Well, maybe not. By linking to a large number of pages from your site template, you end up spreading your link juice very thin over your entire site, like peanut butter on bread. While that may be what’s best, sometimes that does more harm than good.
Instead of spreading your link juice thinly over a large portion of your site, you may be better off strategically directing a larger portion of your PageRank to certain pages by properly implementing nofollow on some internal links. We’ll get into that in future posts.
Is your site navigation like peanut butter on bread? Is it helping or hurting the PageRank flow within your sites? This is like a sharp knife…sometimes it’s the best tool for the job, but if you’re not careful…it could hurt or kill your site.
“… if you have multiple levels of CSS based dropdowns leading deep into your site, you may be a good candidate for internal use of nofollow.”
BZZT!
Sorry but that dog won’t hunt. In calculating PageRank, it would all even out in the end. Those deep links are necessary for CRAWLING and — if the site owner understands how anchor text works — they are good for PASSING ANCHOR.
Matt Cutts never endorsed the use of NOFOLLOW for sculpting PageRank the way Rand misinterpreted on his blog. Matt did say that Google won’t punish sites for using it, but given that people have not thought this whole business through, there will be plenty of self-inflicted punishment for anyone who really tries to follow this bad advice.
If you want to “sculpt PageRank”, you don’t need to use REL=’nofollow’. Just DON’T LINK to pages you don’t want the search engines to find and index, that you don’t want to pass internal anchor text to, and that you feel are not providing value to your visitors.
If I were going to “sculpt PageRank”, I would only do it on a blog where lots of duplicate content pages are created through multiple post archive pages.
That’s really the only type of site where it’s safe to play the Russian Roulette game of “sculpting PageRank”.
Comment by Michael Martinez — October 3, 2007 @ 11:59 am
If done appropriately, it’s not that the deeper pages that are nofollow’ed will not be crawled. Those pages just need to be linked to from other links/pages. It’s important to use the appropriate tools and process to actually examine and validate the results of different nofollow implementations.
When actually executing this, which I’ll get into in a future post (work in progress), you need to be very careful not to create black holes that suck pages out of the index as you describe…unless of course you don’t care that certain pages are not crawled or end up supplemental.
Based on trial and error, I can attest that sometimes the changes you make while doing this DO NOT have the end result you expected, so testing is crucial.
In the case of the site I am using as my example, the 80 pages in the site map style navigation all get a little bit of pagerank passed to them, while the other 920 or so pages linked to by the 80 pages in the top nav hardly get any. It’s those 920 pages that this can potentially help…if done very carefully and surgically.
“Just DON’T LINK to pages you don’t want the search engines to find and index, that you don’t want to pass internal anchor text to, and that you feel are not providing value to your visitors.”
In some situations where you don’t have full editorial and design control over a site, you can’t just remove links that have negative effects on the organic SERPs. You need to take the lemons you are handed and make the closest thing as possible to lemon-aid.
-Pete
Comment by peterdaly — October 3, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
Hi,
I’d be interested to hear a follow up on this. I’m re-looking at one of my sites. My concern is having a good accessible nav structure (semantic css dropdowns tick that box) but not have too many boiler plate links per page (from a google guidelines perspective of 100 links per page). Am I simply thinking too hard about this problem?
HoHum
Comment by HoHum — May 12, 2008 @ 3:13 am