Following up on my post from yesterday, I’m going to recommend that website and blog owners take a more proactive role in orchestrating the flow of PageRank throughout the site.
The best way to do this is to add the NoFollow attribute to any site-wide links that you don’t expect users to “search for” in a search engine. Examples include pages such as “About” , “Contact” , “Advertise” etc.
Why Is It Important
Without the nofollow attribute, these sitewide pages look uber-important to the search engines, when in fact, they are of less importance to your users than your meatier content.
With the nofollow attribute, you intentionally “strengthen” the pages on your site that you consider “centrally important” and weaken the pages on your site that you consider “peripherally important.” Your are, in effect, magnifying your best content.
What You Should Do
In general, my recommendation is to add the rel="nofollow" attribute inside your
In it’s current state, each instance of this link on your site (every page) passes PageRank to the target URL and increases its perceived significance in relation to the other pages on your site. To fix this problem, you could try this code:
The above code will completely stop the flow of any internal pagerank to the “Advertise” page. But perhaps you don’t want to stop the flow completely. To solve this problem, you could simply create a SiteMap page which provides a single PageRank passing link into the Advertise page. That way, the URL will still receive a little bit of internal PageRank.
Did you like this tip? Do you want to put it into action?
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4 thoughts on “Quality Indicator Tip: NoFollow Your Less Important Sitewide Links”
Great tip, Ryan. This works especially well with new blogs. New blogs can start off on the right foot by nofollowing peripheral pages. Too many blogs forget about this and they get PR4s on their contact form page. It’s much better to stop the PR flow to those type of pages and let it go to pages that you want indexed.
Well, a ninja wears black clothes and operates in the dark. The definite performancing.com SEO ninja wears sunglasses 7/24 to hide all future steps.
I am not monitoring the incoming SE traffic for my performancing.com blog but some checks show that all articles rank high the next day and immediately high on Google blog search.
Markus… you should write up an “Ultimate SEO Ninja Guide for Perf”
You can even add more ranking value to the link without passing any link love from the linked page
rel=”” can contain multiple relations! The last element in the http string will be ranked higher because it is a tag. It is not the anchor text but the last element!
Taken from my personal SEO ninja knowledge
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