To nofollow or not to nofollow?
That is the question…
First of all, what is a nofollow tag? I think the best way to wrap your mind around it is by using pictures. Think of all of the link/SEO juice your website has being held in a bucket. Creating links pokes holes in that bucket and passes the juice to sub-pages within your site and to external sites. Nofollow tags essentially plugs those holes. So while search engines can continue to follow those links and index them, they do not pass link juice to them. This visual should help:
(Picture credit: eVisibility)
To nofollow
So, nofollows are a way to control the way link juice flows through your site. In other words, think of those pages which don’t necessarily need to rank well on SERPs. By controlling the flow of link juice, you can concentrate it on the important pages – and hopefully increase PageRank by doing so.
Pages typically nofollowed are those like:
- Privacy Policy
- Contact
- Search
- Shipping information/Shopping Cart pages
- Affiliates
Not to nofollow
Like every positive, there are also negatives for nofollow tags. However, you’ll see this article is somewhat dated and talks mainly about nofollowing blog comment links (a default setting for most blogs these days, in an effort to control blog spam).
Also, SEO experts argue why should you link to someone if you’re just going to nofollow that link? I would say that links are meant to bring added value to the user’s experience, and while the link may be helpful, you don’t want to pass along link juice.
In the end, maybe nofollows are a passing fad, then again maybe not. Although in SEO, experimentation is often the best way to find out what works.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Nicki, great post and we are glad that you liked our buckets.
I think that they are a great and simple visual that helps explain the nofollow strategy. We also agree that testing and experimentation are key when developing new SEO strategies. We have seen the nofollow work very well before. But you need to make sure that you do not overdue it, like with anything, use in moderation. We typically only use it on the homepage and you need to make sure that you leave a funnel open for the spiders to get to all of your pages.
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:15 pm
[...] said what? First off, what’s all this about? Nicki Hicks does a good job explaining nofollow on your internal links. Her conclusion: In the end, maybe nofollows are a passing fad, then again [...]
February 27th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
[...] I check for indexed pages for a new site there first. I check PageRank before WebRank. I use nofollows and robots.txt, not [...]
March 11th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Well… I do understand that you want to keep some internal pages not getting spidered (isn’t it better to use Javascript?)…
and from a SEO perspective I understand that you don’t want to leak PageRank…
but from the perspective of what is ‘just’… I think you do want to give the credits to the author of the page you are linking to, right?
March 11th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Joost,
You’re absolutely right. For example, I did not nofollow the folks over at eVisibility for the picture they designed.
However, I do think there’s a delicate balance between linking to credit authors and linking to Google Maps..Google really doesn’t need that link love!
May 17th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Very good explanation, thank you.
Can I edit html at my page and change some dofollow to nofollow?
If yes, what I have to do?
Also, is there some proportion between incoming links and outging links? What proportion is the best?
May 18th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Yes, you can change them to nofollow links in the HTML by adding rel=”nofollow” before the href link location, as in Google Maps.
I don’t think there’s any one good proportion as far as incoming/outgoing links. The more incoming links, the better; and you wouldn’t want to have an overwhelming number of outgoing links on the page – ask yourself what are the best/most helpful for your readers.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
[...] When you add a nofollow tag to a link, you stop PageRank from flowing. This result remains unchanged; but now, you’re not adding any benefit to the other (dofollow) links on the page. They still pass the same percentage of PageRank, as if all the links were dofollow: [...]
January 25th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
[...] Forums. Every time you submit a forum post, you can attach a signature (not unlike an email signature) with links back to your website. Depending on the rules of the forum, you might also be able to include links within your post (although they are probably nofollowed). [...]