Page Shaping - No Follow Links

[inhouseninja]

It's my understanding that adding a nofollow tag to pages that aren't of significance to users can help with page shaping and directing google to the most important links on my home page.

I have 4 links on my home page that I'm considering adding a nofollow tag to:

Privacy Policy, Legal Policy, Anti-Trust Policy, and Help-Desk

Because these links are in the footer on every page I think they're probably sucking up some useful link juice.  It's doubtful that anyone would actually search for our privacy policy or legal policy to find our site.  I'd rather the juice to spread to other pages of use.

What do you guys recommend?

[AlanMosley]

Mj Taylor is correct to say you can use it to funnel page rank, because it uses page rank link every other link, it just ddoes not pass it the linking page.

You can still use it for other reasons.

[inhouseninja]

What he actually says is that it isn't the best use of time. He claims that there are more important factors to focus on.  But what if you've accomplished the more important factors? He then says that there are pages where it makes sense to use the nofollow. I knew someone would bring up this article. Since the release of this article,  I've disagreed with the assumptions made, based on this article, by most SEOs.

[inhouseninja]

This only helps if you actually believe what Matt Cutts says is always true.  

[mjtaylor]

It's true that you cannot use the NF attribute to funnel PageRank in Google - if you want to read a little more indepth on the topic, this 2009 post by Google's Matt Cutts is fo value: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/.

[AlanMosley]

Once upon a time that was true, but not anymore.

No-follow links still leak the same amount of link juice, it just does not go anywhere, it is wasted.

Just make sure you have a link in those pages pointing back at your home page so that the link juice is returned.