Still Use Nofollow Home?

[poolguy]

I was wondering how many of you are still nofollowing the Home button or anything else for that matter?

I thought NoFollow was getting a little outdated, but I still see it lots of places.

Thoughts?

[Capecod]

seomoz may script that nofollow because people always post url's with Q's ? True?

[poolguy]

Right, but have you noticed seomoz has nofollow all over the place?

[john4math]

You shouldn't use nofollow for any links on your site to pages on your site, unless you really don't want that link followed.  Even in that case, you should meta noindex that page, or disallow it in your robots.txt rather than nofollow the link.

You used to be able to do some pagerank sculpting with nofollow, but they changed it a few years ago so that nofollow burns pagerank, rather than sculpt it.  For example, suppose you have page A has 6 link juice "votes" to pass, and links to 3 pages:

• page B
• page C
• page D

If you follow all the links, each page gets 2 votes.  If you nofollowed the link to page D, then page D will get no votes, but page B and C still get only 2 votes each.  So there's no reason to burn those votes to page D, right?

Back in the day in this example, page B and C would each get one of the extra votes that D didn't get (so, 3 votes each), but I guess Google didn't like people over-sculpting their sites to try to push just a few of their pages to #1, and ignoring the rest.