28 replies to this topic

[chaz7979]

Is there any benefit in using no follow links internally? For instance not linking out to your privacy policy from every page of your footer, or maybe a contact form or something like that. You know...stuff you wont ever rank well for anyway. Wouldn't it make sense to not waste your juice?

[chrishirst]

read the pinned thread immediately above where you are currently.

[Jeff K]

I wouldn't bleed page rank to you contact us, privacy policy or any other no money pages. There is no reason to have your contact us and privacy policy pulling PR and getting ranked in the engines. rel = no follow

Jeff

[Randy]

Oh surely we're not going to have another inane discussion about hoarding/bleeding PageRank again are we?

It's soooooooooo 1990's. And been done to death.

[Jeff K]

Randy, if you are suggesting the Chief Science Officer Leslie Rohde & StomperNET were teaching 1990's info at their 2006 & 2007 conferences, I disagree.

Lets not go down that road. You are a moderator so I guess you have earned your respect :notworthy: To each its own.

[Randy]

If that's what they're teaching, it's what I'm saying Jeff.

For business purposes there is no such thing as either leaking/bleeding or hoarding PageRank. To suggest that you should actively tell the search engines NOT to trust pages within your own domain is silly. And not exactly the message you want to send the engines if you're trying to build a Trusted resource.

If anyone thinks Google etal cannot detect such things with the link relationship tools they have at their disposal, they're deluding themselves. It's one of the absolutely easiest things to see after all. Then it's just a matter of whether the engines decide it reaches a level where they feel compelled to do something about the obvious intent or not.

To each his or her own. However I'm not about to send mixed messages by telling the engines that I want them to trust my site, but don't them to trust certain pages of my own site by using NoFollow. That's what nofollow is telling them, that you cannot vouch for a page being linked to, don't trust it and don't think they should either.

If I don't want the engines to include a page from my site in their index I'll simply exclude it via robots.txt. Or password protect it so that it doesn't stand a chance of ever being spidered.

Edited by Randy, 02 June 2007 - 08:32 AM.

[chaz7979]

SE fight SE fight...are you ready....are you ready....lets get it on.

Now seriously though....does anyone have proof that it is either good or bad?

[Randy]

No, no fight. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Even those who are trying to needlessly reinvent the wheel.

Now seriously though....does anyone have proof that it is either good or bad?

Since none of us work for Algo Team at Google or the rest, nobody can have 100% proof Chaz. That's always the bottom line in this biz.

That said, reps from the various engines have made public statements about nofollow that point out they they're all implementing it a little bit differently. Some say they're still following the links but not passing value, others say they don't follow at all. About the only thing they agree on with nofollow is the advice they've given to webmasters to use NoFollow if you cannot vouch for and/or do not trust a link --usually because you, as the webmaster, are not the one who put the link there in the first place.

Common sense tells us you're going to be sending some major mixed messages if you start telling the engines that you don't trust some of your own pages. There are other fully accepted methods to keep those pages from being indexed without any risk. They've been used for years and should still be used now.

[-=seth=-]

I read the thread chrishirst recommends but i'm still extremely confused about best way to exclude search engines from certain pages or even if its a good idea to attempt to, i can see the theory that having nofollow may in some cases look like an arrow pointing to dodgy pages, but wouldnt robot.txt files or noindex in the meta tags have the same effect

i've used robots.txt before on websites, (i had duplicate content from another site and didnt want the 2 sites to compete against each other) however when i used google's webmaster tools, google listed all the pages despite in the robots.txt i had just listed a folder to exclude, googles way of keeping you honest i guess

[Randy]

robots.txt has been an accepted way to keep certain pages out of the search engines index forever Seth. So there's no risk at all and they do not try to figure out the motivation for a webmaster wanting to exclude this or that page. There are obviously a myriad of possible reasons, which many times will not be easily evident to them.

The nofollow recommendation sends a different signal. Instead of saying I don't want Page X included in your index it says I don't trust Page X even though there's a link to it. One deals with indexing, the other with passing PR/Link Popularity.

As an aside, and part of the reason I find the bleeding/hoarding PR concept so funny is that when taken to its unnatural extreme a webmaster would NoFollow every link to every page of their site save the home page in an attempt to focus all PageRank to the most important and most visited page on practically every site. Completely destroying any chance of PR flowing naturally to what should be your most important pages. And setting off all sorts of alarms when the search engines look at the linking relationships between the pages of your site.

It's just a silly concept IMO.

[Michael Martinez]

There is no search engine optimization benefit to be gained by blocking search engines from unique, important content like privacy policies, "About us" pages, and more. Such a strategy does indeed smack of backwards SEO theory as Randy pointed out.

Hoarding pagerank is itself nothing more than nonsense, since you cannot hoard pagerank (if you don't like out, the search engines treat your pages as if they link to every other page on the Web). All PageRank is distributed regardless of where you choose to link.

But when you EXCLUDE pages from a search engine index, you sacrifice some of that precious PageRank you're trying to hoard. You only get PageRank for pages that are indexed. You cannot increase your PageRank per page by excluding pages from an index. It's mathematically impossible.

Each indexed page on your site will ADD a little bit of PageRank to your total PageRank (but search engines don't look at "total PageRank" or "sitewide PageRank" -- that's another SEO myth). You can (and should) use your internal linkage to show the search engines where your most important pages are.

And most business sites do benefit from making their privacy policies and "About us" pages easily accessible. The more easily a potential customer can find out who you are and what guarantees and protections you offer them, the sooner they'll start to trust you and conclude they may want to do business with you.

There is absolutely no reason to exclude these types of pages from search engines. You lose far more than you can possibly reasonably hope to gain by doing so.

[chaz7979]

Since none of us work for Algo Team at Google or the rest, nobody can have 100% proof Chaz. That's always the bottom line in this biz.

A point that I constantly try to drive home at SPF but, people call me an idiot when I question something that is thought to be "known" by "industry leaders."

IE. Meta tags hold no weight. Dont get me wrong I dont think they hold a ton of weight but, that is not what people are saying. Instead the say NO WEIGHT. I then ask them how do they not know that they hold .0001% of the weight the algo awards a site? To then just throw out a theory I will say, how do you know that SE's dont read the meta tags and compare the relevance to the actual page content and then give your assign your site more credibility... a kind of this is an honest company kind of thing. Could it be possible? Is it not a decent idea in theory? I think you have to at least consider it yet, people just pile on telling people they are stupid because they believe everything "industry leaders" tell them. I then pose the question...do you think Matt Cutts is telling you the WHOLE story on his blog? Wake up people, companies tell you only what they want you to know.

and now...my rant is over...I feel much better

[Jeff K]

I thought I was posting a comment for something useful... This forum is full of opinions and we all need to leave here and ultimately make our own decisions. Randy, I could do without the little disparaging comments.

Although I have my privacy policy and site map accessible, the last thing I want to do is have them ranking on the search engines. A privacy policy sitting on page #1 of Google looks odd and don't think helps with user acceptance. Also, I know many people with PR 6 & 7 sites using no follow and they are on top of Google. With all of these useful posts, it is time to go back and check in with StomperNET.

Recently I made page #1 on Yahoo for Treadmill - 235K searches a month and I have no follow on my home page. Therefore, there no follow has not been a negative factor (same for MSN). I will have to test with Google after I continue plugging away for relevant backlinks. I am working to get on page #1 of Google.

The opinions on this topic have helped me to be open minded. I realize that paying big bucks for a membership doesn't mean that the content offered is all that is out there.

Chaz, in my opinion, you better use Meta tags. If you only use title and keywords, then the title and keywords better appear in the body copy for your description since engines sometimes will be picking up that content and adding it in the SERP's.

Jeff

[Jill]

Also, I know many people with PR 6 & 7 sites using no follow and they are on top of Google.

Did anyone say tha using nofollow on a site would get it penalized? Pretty sure nobody did or would say that.

People just said it wasn't useful to use unless you have user generated links that you can't always keep on top of.

Although I have my privacy policy and site map accessible, the last thing I want to do is have them ranking on the search engines. A privacy policy sitting on page #1 of Google looks odd and don't think helps with user acceptance.

Then don't optimize them. Why would a privacy policy page rank for something other than "privacy policy company name"? (And if someone was actually searching for that, you'd certainly want that page to show up.)

If you don't want pages indexed by the engines, it's simple enough to exclude them via a robots.txt exclusion file. But, for the most part, there's no reason to just because something is a privacy policy page.

Chaz, in my opinion, you better use Meta tags. If you only use title and keywords, then the title and keywords better appear in the body copy for your description since engines sometimes will be picking up that content and adding it in the SERP's.

Disagree with this. The words in the meta keyword tag (if you even want to bother to use it) definitely do NOT need to appear on the page. The Meta keyword tag is for putting words that DON'T already appear on the page, but for which you believe it is relevant. People have mixed this up for years, but it shows why it doesn't work when you put words that are already on the page in them. (It doesn't help the page to rank higher for words when they're in the meta keyword and on the page.)

[Jeff K]

Thank Jill. I better get back to work.


Jeff