For some time now I've added the rel="nofollow" attribute within links to unimportant pages on my websites e.g. Privacy, Terms, Basket, Forgot Password, etc. I also apply a noindex META tag to these pages, as I don't see why they need to be indexed in the search results. I never extend rel="nofollow" to pages beyond these, as I'm aware of advice against PageRank sculpting as a suspicious SEO technique.

 

I'd like to open a discussion on this, and to see what people's opinions are on the use of rel="nofollow" for these unimportant internal pages. Some sources and SEO tools have implied that you shouldn't apply the rel="nofollow" attribute when linking to any internal links, even if they are unimportant to the search engines understanding of a website.

 

I'm open to having my approach to this challenged. What do you all think on this subject?

As per my view if you would like to disable search engine crawler for your perticular pages then you can disable it using robots.txt. You can get more information by following a link : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/13-reasons-why-nofollow-tags-suck/4410/

As per my view if you would like to disable search engine crawler for your perticular pages then you can disable it using robots.txt. You can get more information by following a link : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/13-reasons-why-nofollow-tags-suck/4410/

 

That article was written way back in 2007. Google have an article on the rel="nofollow" attribute which was last updated 27th May 2013 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569 Could some of the advice provided in your referenced article perhaps be irrelevant/out of date now?

Okay so this is always an interesting topic, simply because it's not something that a lot of people talk about.

 

The first question I have to ask; why do you think it's beneficial to add nofollow to internal links?

 

I know of plenty of people that swear by it, but for me it's something that I just don't bother with. But I have to ask, if you're blocking just 5/6 pages, then thats a drop in the ocean for e-commerce site that has thousands and thousands of pages. I also go with the idea that if a page doesn't add value to a website, then I don't add it.

 

People do this because they want to contain the link juice to pages that just matter. But thats generally because people think link juice leaks through to other pages and the more pages a website has, the more it seeps. Which in turn lowers the original power of the link.

 

But it doesn't work like that. It's not an osmosis process at all.

 

The page the original link is pointing will get all the link juice (because that's the content that earned that link). Yes, internal pages will benefit from having their links on pages with high page authority but it won't diminish the effect of the original website.

 

But I think people should start concentrating on overall domain and page authority.

 

Personally, I always believe that if you don't want a page to rank then don't have it there. I want all my clients websites to be fully accessible.

 

Love to hear your thoughts

Hi Jason. Thanks for your thoughts on the subject. My approach to the pages I specified (Privacy, Terms, My Basket, etc.) is that these pages are important to visitors (and therefore need to be accessible and linked), however the pages themselves are very weak/irrelevant in terms of keywords and content and therefore I don't see the need for search engines to crawl and pay attention to them. And I don't see why I'd want Google to assign PageRank to a Terms & Conditions page. My thinking here ties in closely with Google/Matt Cutts' advice on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569 about Crawl prioritization.

 

I know whether I add rel="nofollow" to these pages or not isn't going to be groundbreaking in terms of SEO either way - it's just one of those little things that I'm keen to actually know for sure whether it might help to provider search engines with a better understanding of a website.