122 replies to this topic

[Bethers]

Thank you, Jill.

I'll stop using the term black hat - but will continue to believe as I do about it's uses.

[qwerty]

All I can tell you is that I still haven't put nofollow on any links -- internal or external, on one of my sites or a client's. Since I refuse to link to a site unless I consider it worthwhile, I have no reason to tell the search engines that I don't trust it.

Besides, I still don't like the idea of doing the search engines' job for them.

[Xanthis]

Every page on my site has a printer friendly version. I was considering using the nofollow attribute on links to the printer friendly pages not for PageRank reasons, but to avoid a duplicate content penalty.

As an example, if a page on the site was www.examplesite.com/products/, the printer friendly version would be www.examplesite.com/products/?printver=yes. Since the only difference is the parameters in the query string, I can't use the robots.txt exclusion.

Another set of pages I was considering nofollow for was an online perpetual calendar. I want the SEs to index the calendar for this current month and the three months prior and following, but I would then put the nofollow on months earlier or later than that. Otherwise the spider could in theory crawl from January 1 AD to December 9999 AD by following the Previous and Next links.

Any thoughts on this? Thanks!

[Jill]

but I would then put the nofollow on months earlier or later than that.

No, that's silly. You want to use the noindex tag for that. Nofollow won't do what you want, it just tells the engines you don't trust those pages.

[Xanthis]

Okay, NOINDEX it is! I was just trying to save the crawlers some time and me a bit-o-bandwidth.

Thanks for the quick response.

[Akuta]

I guess the gamble you are taking is this- does "nofollow" give me "an edge in SEO" or does "nofollow" say "I don't trust the pages I link to"?

My bet is on the latter, but feel free to test that theory and see how it works for you!

Google clearly says on their blog that it doesn't have a negative effect or anything of the sort, but I also think the PR bleeding thing is fishy ;p

If any of you know other top SEs who follow this rule, please list, too. I can't find anything on Yahoo about them listening to it.

[iamzippy]

Hi All! Newbie on deck...

Fascinating thread. NOFOLLOW surely is a curate's egg of a thing. So many ways to perceive it.

I don't go with the idea that NOFOLLOW expresses distrust or no-confidence. As it's been pointed out, we just don't host links to dodgy locations if we're sensible. And there's plenty of evidence that it deters comment spam. Note I say 'deters' and not 'prevents'.

As for using NOFOLLOW on internal links within a site (subject of the original post that kicked off this thread) I wonder how many correspondents have a different view nowadays?

How about this situation? I own a domain. I therefore own and control all the URLs under that domain. I've taken the trouble to design a logical URL structure that's extensible, but put together in a way that's pretty well future-proof. In other words the URLs are an abstraction, unrelated to physical disk folders and files.

I'm putting a site together for this domain. This is a data-driven site that presents pages generated from an external RSS feed whose content changes all the time. Dynamic pages list items from the feed in blocks of ten, and each listed item contains one or more links that will lead to the actual item hosted on the originating site. Yes, it's an eBay or similar affiliate site.

The item-links on my pages point to URLs in my domain. I don't want to generate a unique URL for every item listed (these destinations are oh-so temporary), so I re-use aliases in the range #1 - #10 within the URLs as identifiers. This strategy masks the affiliate nature of the page, obviating problems of bypassing and hijacking. Clicking a link sends the visitor back to the main script on my server, which 301-Redirects to the actual product on the merchant's site. This takes them exactly where they expect to go (I make it plainly obvious that these items are on an external merchant's site).

Given the 'conveyor-belt' nature of the merchant's inventory, item X on any page will likely be different every other page-view. I'm re-using a pool of aliases, so I can't really be putting a 301 on each of them, although I must 301 each request that gets back to my server. But by putting NOFOLLOW on my aliased internal links, I'm merely saying 'this takes you somewhere beyond my control', which it does, even if it initially points inside my domain.

Aside from anything else, my role is to send traffic, not page rank.

Any thoughts? Will NOFOLLOW on internal links bring about my unceremonious doom?

[Randy]

Welcome zippy !

Will NOFOLLOW on internal links bring about my unceremonious doom?

Doom? Probably not. I've not seen any evidence of that sort of thing. However you can never predict when an engine or all of the engines change how they perceive something.

But on the other hand it would be so much easier to simply exclude your jump file via robots.txt. That's a method that has always worked and carries no risk whatsoever.

[iamzippy]

Hi - and thanks for that supportive response, Randy.

I decided to go with unique URLs on the item links using an encode of the catalogue number. An URL is forever whether it's a throwaway or not, right?

So I have options. Neuter with NOFOLLOW and/or block with robots.txt. I can play around with that.

Thanks again. If there's anything to tell, I'll get back.

Jeff

[ScottSalwolke]

I was wondering if anyone is now an advocate of the nofollow tag and its relation to PageRank. I read Dan Thies's Fast Start book and he is a big advocate of it. Yet, reading this thread seems it has little benefit. Yet, most of the comments are from a couple of years ago.

[Jill]

We have another thread that is recent on this topic somewhere. Most likely in the PageRank Forum.

[ScottSalwolke]

We have another thread that is recent on this topic somewhere. Most likely in the [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showforum=57]PageRank Forum[/url].

It must be in Internal Linking. The search results showed nothing in the Page Rank Forum. I'll keep searching.

[Randy]

You're looking for this thread I believe.

[ScottSalwolke]

This is what I was looking for. Thanks.

[kceleb9]

Good post - thanks for the useful information.

Does anyone know how big of an effect this can have?