3 replies to this topic

[shimlad]

Ok, so you probably all remember when the link rel = no follow tag was introduced several years ago and some SEO's decided it would be a good idea to use the tag on there own internal pages that they didn't want to pass link juice too e.g. about us, terms and conditions etc.

At first this worked in such a way that the PR that would have been passed to these pages was instead channelled to other pages within the website. However a while later Google changed how this worked so if you used the rel = no follow tag it simply zapped the pr that would have been passed into space dust.

Fast forward to present day and i have a site that sorts accommodation listings by many different ways, for example walker friendly, cyclist friendley (there is like 20 different ways to sort). Now it turns out the vast majority of these long tail keyword searches bring in little or no traffic and it has actually ended up confusing google because it doesn't know which page to index and it has also spread the pr to thinly which means none of the pages rank.

I have now used a robots.txt file to restrict 15 of the sort categories out and leave the 5 key ones and the good news is Google is now returning these 5 correctly and they are ranking higher in the search results.

My question is... similar to how the rel = no follow use to work does using the robot.txt file used to restrict these other categories, zap the pr into space dust that would have been passed on these links or does it bounce back and channel onto my main accommodation sorts that i haven't restricted with the robots.txt file.

thanks guys.

[chrishirst]

At first this worked in such a way that the PR that would have been passed to these pages was instead channelled to other pages within the website. However a while later Google changed how this worked so if you used the rel = no follow tag it simply zapped the pr that would have been passed into space dust.

Actually it never did work as it was assumed to work, five links on a page only ever passed 1/5 rPR along each link, I cannot recall anyone from the SEs suggesting that the other links would "take up the slack"

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results

From -> http://googleblog.bl...mment-spam.html in 2005

It was simply assumed by the usual suspects.

MC 2010 ->

[shimlad]

Ok, great thank you. That has cleared up the rel = no follow to some degree, although its kind of over looked my actual question.

[Jill]

I think only Google would have an answer to that.

Either way, what you're doing is good and obviously working for you.