June 29, 2010Technical SEO4 CommentsBas van den Beld
There is always a lot of discussion on using nofollow within your site for Pagerank Sculpting purposes. Matt Cutts now talked about it in his video responses. He says: let it flow naturally. He even thinks it doesn’t hurt to have the login page in the search results. I disagree with him on that one. Not for search purposes, but for conversion purposes. Check out what Matt said and tell me what you think.
Why would you want to use nofollow on your own site?
Personally I never use nofollow on internal links, just external.
Matt Cutts makes a very good point, better content is the key
Maybe I should specify a bit more what I disagree on. The part of having login-pages in search results is what I do not agree on. I think search results should be clean and pages like that should not be in the index. But you can also keep them out in a different way than nofollow. For the nofollow part on other pages its a different story.
I used to be a fan of using nofollow to ‘sculpt PageRank’ internally. I went off of that particular kool-aid after Cutts first dropped the nofollow-bomb in SMX Advanced a year or so ago. Like Bas said there are better ways to ensure pages that don’t need to be indexed don’t get indexed – robots.txt comes to mind.
I don’t use nofollow on internal links anymore as well, just because of the leaking of link value. Also, using nofollow to keep pages outside the index is kind of risky, as anyone can put up a followed link to a specific page which would get it into the index. To keep stuff out of the index, but let the links count, just use the robots meta tag using noindex,follow.
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Why would you want to use nofollow on your own site?
Personally I never use nofollow on internal links, just external.
Matt Cutts makes a very good point, better content is the key
Maybe I should specify a bit more what I disagree on. The part of having login-pages in search results is what I do not agree on. I think search results should be clean and pages like that should not be in the index. But you can also keep them out in a different way than nofollow. For the nofollow part on other pages its a different story.
I used to be a fan of using nofollow to ‘sculpt PageRank’ internally. I went off of that particular kool-aid after Cutts first dropped the nofollow-bomb in SMX Advanced a year or so ago. Like Bas said there are better ways to ensure pages that don’t need to be indexed don’t get indexed – robots.txt comes to mind.
I don’t use nofollow on internal links anymore as well, just because of the leaking of link value. Also, using nofollow to keep pages outside the index is kind of risky, as anyone can put up a followed link to a specific page which would get it into the index. To keep stuff out of the index, but let the links count, just use the robots meta tag using noindex,follow.