Liberal Use of ‘Nofollow’

Over the last several months I’ve become more aware of the importance of the rel=nofollow tag, not only for links to 3rd party websites, but for my own internal linking structure as well.

I actually started testing the “method” of liberal use of the nofollow tag for internal links on my freelance writing website last month, and with the limited time that’s passed since then, I think I’m seeing a positive result.

Basically, the premise of this strategy is that you lessen the “link-juice” flowing to non-important pages so that more link-juice flows to your important pages. For instance, “contact us”, “about us” pages, static sitemaps, terms of service, privacy policies and such really hold little value for visitors entering your website from the search engines. While any page that is indexed in search engines has the potential to bring you visitors, the listed page-types really aren’t important, and they’re not the types of pages that you’re trying to get to the top of the SERPs. In essence, these non-important pages are eating up your internal PageRank when you could be passing it to more important pages, pages that’ll grab you targeted visitors from the SERPs.

The Rel=nofollow attribute is not…

designed to keep search engines from crawling certain pages of your website, rather it tells search engines not to pass link-value to the “linked to” website or web page, which contradicts what some people think the rel=nofollow tag is used for. I just thought I’d throw that little bit in.

Now, at this point I am not proclaiming that using the rel=nofollow attribute in your internal link structure for non-important pages will improve your website’s rankings in the search engines, though I’m leaning towards it based on limited testing.

While “normal” websites are pretty easy to update with rel=nofollow tags, wordpress blogs, such as this one, are not. And since I don’t know much of anything about PHP… that’s proving to be a bit problematic with this website…..

This is a working theory on my end, I’ll update more when I start to see whether the ranking benefits are tangible. I would love to hear from you if you’ve either messed around with this personally or you’re trying it out yourself.