17 replies to this topic

[star1]

Ok I have 2 questions:

1. If page rank works by flowing from one page to the next linked page if there are pages that I do not consider important to be indexed or passed rank to should I make these links "no follow" here I am thinking of pages such as my website copyright and disclaimer details. This was an argument that a friend of mine said would benefit my site so just looking for second opinions.

2. A lot of sites have html text based sitemaps underneath the footer sitewide - I can see the logic here that this would enable crawling of the site very easy from all the pages but would this have any negative effects on search engine rankings. I guess this may be ok with sites that only have 20 -30 pages but when they begin to get 100+ pages long this could begin to look odd.

Thanks for any replies in advance

Star

[Jill]

If page rank works by flowing from one page to the next linked page if there are pages that I do not consider important to be indexed or passed rank to should I make these links "no follow"

No.

I guess this may be ok with sites that only have 20 -30 pages but when they begin to get 100+ pages long this could begin to look odd.

Are you saying all the links that would be on a sitemap would instead be in the footer?

That would be silly, imo.

[star1]

Thanks for your reply Jill, yes I have seen many sites that have a "text based footer site map" so that every page has a link to every page i guess - would this have any benefits for ranking and ensuring that all pages are crawled regulalry and if not is there any disadvantage to doing this other than aesthetics of the site?

No.



Are you saying all the links that would be on a sitemap would instead be in the footer?

That would be silly, imo.

[Randy]

Every time I see one of those sites with the huge footer for no reason I just laugh Star. It's one of those things that lets me know immediately that the webmaster has no concept of building a user friendly site, and a site that will actually convert well.

On the nofollow question, I can tell you you're going to get different answers on that one. In fact, Matt Cutts himself would (has!) told you that this is exactly what Google wants you to do. Which is just silly IMO, for several reasons. The first of which being that if I was running a search engine and wanted to know if a site had been SEO'd one of the first signals I'd look for are nofollow's to same site pages.

But beyond that, let's look quickly at it from another angle, using your example of a Copyright page. One that gets linked to from every single page on your site.

Given this example one would expect this copyright page to get the maximum amount of link pop transfer available. It would be just like your home page and all of the other pages in your main navigation block, if we assume a link from the bottom of the page is given the same umph as links in your main nav block. This is the rationale people use for using nofollow to essentially block link pop transfer to this page.

But is this really helpful? Thinking about what the Copyright page contains as content and links, would you really gain anything by blocking link pop transfer?

Normally a Copyright page is going to contain your copyright statement as the content of the page. The links that appear on it would be your main navigation, or put another way links to the most important pages on your site.

So if you block any link pop transfer to this page it won't be able to pass any link pop back to your main pages. If you do allow link pop to transfer to your copyright page it will in turn pass all of it's link popularity back to your most important pages. And because it's linked to by every page on your site, it'll have the maximum link pop to transfer back to your most important pages.

At best, it sounds like a wash to me. At worst it sounds like you may actually be hurting your link pop of your main pages by blocking the transfer to your Copyright page. Either way, I see nothing to be gained by blocking the link pop transfer to your Copyright page. If you do it'll either matter not one iota, or you could actually be hurting yourself.

And slapping a big old sign on your web site to let everyone know it's been SEO'd.

[Jill]

So if you block any link pop transfer to this page it won't be able to pass any link pop back to your main pages. If you do allow link pop to transfer to your copyright page it will in turn pass all of it's link popularity back to your most important pages. And because it's linked to by every page on your site, it'll have the maximum link pop to transfer back to your most important pages.

Exactly. And that's what seems to be lost on the "PageRank sculptors" of the world. Silly, silly, silly, in my opinion.

[Mhoram]

If you have pages that you don't want indexed, doesn't it make more sense to put them in robots.txt anyway? That works for all well-behaved spiders; it only has to be done in one place, instead of in every page that links to the page you're trying to exclude; and it doesn't depend on an attribute value that's fairly non-standard and may have different effects a year from now.

[Randy]

I never got it either Jill. I doubt I ever will since I'm not a fan of circular logic.

My not getting the circular logic is what makes me question the motives of MattC and Google putting it out there and recommending it to webmasters who read Matt's blog. IMHO it seems a little too easy. However when you think it through from their (the Engine's) perspective I can see how it would be a clear signal for them that someone working on the site is fairly well up on SEO subjects. To me it's like waving a huge red flag at all of the search engines, telling them they may want to scrutinize a site a bit more closely.

Nofollow'ing internal linkage simply isn't something I see the average webmaster knowing about. Thus it is a signal of some level of knowledge of SEO.

[nethy]

You'll should keep in mind that this is all relatively new stuff, star1. With Google just recently endorsing 'PR sculpting' - (what Matt Cuts called what you are describing).


With all your talk of [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15499]Seo Myths[/url], it seems a bit risky to be refering to Google's team SEO trackers as if they are a fact.

1- I think that even if there ever where attempts to pick up on SEO-ed sites it getting to the time when the team should be discarded. IMO as time goes by, more and more peoples are aware of SEO, SEO is getting 'cleaner.' Things like footer links, nofollowed links, etc. are being built into CMSs and are becoming a standard part of web design that many are doing without reaaly knowing why, just going with the flow. 'SEO-ed' is not an indicator of anything anymore.

Exactly. And that's what seems to be lost on the "PageRank sculptors" of the world. Silly, silly, silly, in my opinion.

Well, that's an equation that we will need to know the specifics of the PR algo (which we do not) to complete.

2- I believe that in the original PR gets passed on to links on the page as: parameter-from 0-1*PagePR/number of links on the page or something to that effect. That would imply that you are only 'losing' whatever PR is assigned to the copyright page intrinsically - the initial PR that evry page is born with+ any link juice from other sites. Anyway you don't lose either if you still have the page linked normally from somewhere and just nofollow the navigation.

The algo could work some other way that'll hurt the site if you nofollow links, but what I am trying to say is that it's hard to predict the effect (without expirementing, something I haven't yet heard of anyone doing) of nofollows in this way.

In the end, I don't expect that nofollows will have too much effect on a site, so I am not worrying about it.

[star1]

thanks folks, it was just an interesting point of discussion that I have had, personally i have alwats totally disregarded PR and just got on with the job and PR just falls where it does, but will all this recent discussion of penalising high PR sites that sell links and no follow internal links it got me thinking. I have sites that have low PR but rank much higher than competitors sites.

[BBCoach]

Nofollow when placed in a taxonomically designed web site is very powerful, but the how-to or why-to is not a freebie. Read the patents of SEs and the light bulb might burn bright or you can hang your hat with those that haven't experimented or are spouting Cleaver know-how. It has a credible place in the proper hands and context. Study the patents. It's not circular, it's linear logic. Just like a program that marketing folk don't comprehend even tho they think they do. My foggy two cents worth.

[Jill]

thanks folks, it was just an interesting point of discussion that I have had, personally i have alwats totally disregarded PR and just got on with the job and PR just falls where it does, but will all this recent discussion of penalising high PR sites that sell links and no follow internal links it got me thinking. I have sites that have low PR but rank much higher than competitors sites.

star1, it's important to note that when we (or Matt Cutts) is having this discussion, we're not at all talking about toolbar PageRank. We're talking about real PageRank that only Google knows about. It is indeed an important part of Google's algorithm, but it is only a distant cousin to toolbar PR that you see represented by the little green graph.

[nethy]

Nofollow when placed in a taxonomically designed web site is very powerful, but the how-to or why-to is not a freebie. Read the patents of SEs and the light bulb might burn bright or you can hang your hat with those that haven't experimented or are spouting Cleaver know-how. It has a credible place in the proper hands and context. Study the patents. It's not circular, it's linear logic. Just like a program that marketing folk don't comprehend even tho they think they do. My foggy two cents worth.

I dunno BB. On behalf of your cousins at marketing, I seem to be the only one on the same page as you.

[BBCoach]

In the end, I don't expect that nofollows will have too much effect on a site, so I am not worrying about it.

nethy, I dunno if it's what you're reading or what I'm reading, but my position is that nofollow has a very important role when executed properly in the proper environment. Also, the marketing folks I deal with are clueless about why, when, where, and how to use nofollow. I don't think they've even heard of it. God save me if they do!!! I might just go postal on 'em.

[Paul Ferree]

Given this example one would expect this copyright page to get the maximum amount of link pop transfer available. It would be just like your home page and all of the other pages in your main navigation block, if we assume a link from the bottom of the page is given the same umph as links in your main nav block. This is the rationale people use for using nofollow to essentially block link pop transfer to this page.

I think what may be missing here is that if you have a sitewide link that receives pr just like your home page, that you're actually splitting the pr between the 2 when in reality you would do much more good having 1 page (your home page) receive all the juice and then let it trickle down from there accordingly.

For arguments sake...I would rather have my home page alone have a PR4(just for measurments sake, not trying to use toolbar rank to verify anything) than my home page having 2 and my copyright page having 2. This would have a drastic sitewide effect if it is true. Even though it's certainly not that simple.

And I would consider using nofollow & PR flow through mainly as an issue for getting pages in the game (as far as google is concerned when it comes to supplemental results and the main index). The fact that there are "2" indexes that Google uses is enough for me to use nofollow to determine PR flow. Get me out of the supps please!!

And on the issue of a site looking SEO'd because of nofollow. Nofollow is used so much nowadays with blogs and such I don't think it's even an issue...in my opinion, we should have the right to notify search engines what our most popular pages are. Nofollow actually allows us to focus more on usability than SEO, using nofollow, now I can not be so afraid to add a link to my homepage...I can link it and nofollow it and sleep easy knowing it's not jacking with my flow!

I don't want a search engine to hold my policies page on a higher position than a product page. It just makes sense to give webmasters these tools. If a nofollow tag means I get more scrutinized then that just means I need to make sure I'm following the rules...that's all.


Paul

[nethy]

nethy, I dunno if it's what you're reading or what I'm reading, but my position is that nofollow has a very important role when executed properly in the proper environment. Also, the marketing folks I deal with are clueless about why, when, where, and how to use nofollow. I don't think they've even heard of it. God save me if they do!!! I might just go postal on 'em.

I agree. I think its possible to use nofollow and gain. I don't think that the gains will be very big though.

I aslo agree that putting together what Cutts said & the original Google PR patented algo one should expect to be able to 'shape' PR,just like he said, to boost important pages at the expense of less important pages.

What the effect of this kind of 'shaping' would actually be depends on:
- how close the current PR algo is to the original. My gues would be that the part of the formula determinining how much PR gets forwarded & to where, is more complicated then the original (was all outgoing PR originally divided evenly between all on-page links?)

- whether or not other elements of googles ranking sytem will be effected (PR may not be theonly metric used for ranking that uses link popularity).

- how important PR still is to Ranking.

- how compliant Google actually is. Did Mat Cutts actually tell us how they are treating nofollowed links or was he trying to achieve a desired effect in the community. IE if I say X they will do Y. I want them to do Y so I will say X.


Ultimately, we are probably not going to get answers to those. We will have to determine what is 'best practice' either by going with a general sort of SEO ideology (popular but no optimal) or testing and seeing results. The latter is hard to do, particularly because (as I said) I expect the effect to be quite small. If & When I hear of believable results stemming from 'shapping' I might consider adding it to my to do list.


BTW - I am a marketing guy. Couldn't code a site to save my life.