So You No-Follow Privacy Policy Pages etc?

[RichardTaylor]

site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp

Some people have recently suggested my homepage is giving out to much PR.

Do I need to no-follow the "about us", "Customer Service" and "contact us" pages?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Rhys,

Taking a look at your site, your links all seemed natural and within reason. ( I did think the homepage was a little light on content - mostly just navigation and quick links to products. But that's another conversation.

"Best practice" is to consolidate your non-important links into a format that makes sense and is human friendly. Rand wrote a post about footer links awhile ago that still works today:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience

I wrote about this in another Q&A thread a short time back.

Today, you don't hear much about PageRank sculpting. Most SEOs don't bother with it, partly because of it's decreased effectiveness, but also in part because there are more effective ways of controlling the influence of links.

...Link "equity" or PageRank, (or MozRank), is only one small factor in the overall value of a link. Anchor text, position on the page, and a host of other factors all influence how much influence any given link can wield. Here's a good introduction on the subject (again from Rand)

If you "no-follow" your important contact pages (about us, etc) Google may have trouble finding and crawling those pages. Because these are both valuable pieces of content and trust signals for your site, this probably isn't the outcome you want.

To summarize: Adding nofollow in your case doesn't make sense. It really only makes sense in a very few cases, and isn't as effective in controlling ranking signals as many people would like to believe.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[Maximise]

Did you read through all the comments? There is a lot of useful information in there. Here is another article by Rand shortly after the update that describes how this will affect websites:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

Here's a simplified example: Say you have a page with 10 links on it, this page is essentially passing on 10 points of Page Rank (PR) to other pages on your site. If you nofollow 3 of the links you are only passing on 7 points to the rest of your site, the remaining 3 points evaporate. If you have 500 pages on your site and you nofollow just 3 links on each page then how much of your PR are you wasting in total?

This is why Matt recommends that you let your PR flow freely through your site. PR sculpting using this strategy used to work before they made this change in 2009.

Of course this is still down to interpretation and how much you believe what Google says, obviously they don't give away too many secrets. This question gets asked in this forum every week and I would say the vast majority of the SEO experts here  advise against this practice.

I hope that helps

[Khem_Raj7]

heya

I read the whole post but couldn't find a single point which says that "This strategy died years ago"

Even matt uses nofollow for RSS/Atom to not pass PageRank and showing RSS/Atom in SERPs

I am really interested in knowing if it has really died. please guys provide some more credible and straight posts/information.

[irvingw]

nofollowing no longer works, and although Google can read some javascript, you can obfuscate the js links and conserve pr from leaking that way

[Maximise]

Todd is right, this won't save your PR from leaking. This strategy died years ago. Have a look at a similar topic here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-internal-links-on-page-any-benefit-to-nofollow

or here Matt Cutts describes how 'Page Rank Sculpting' no longer works:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

[EvolveCreative]

Sorry Khem I do not agree.

The nofollow attribute doesn't stop a page from being pulled in a search engine. It also doesn't stop the flow of PR (Sure that's what Google says it does, but it definitely does not work that way). The only time you should be using a nofollow is for links you either:

1. Don't trust

2.links that lead to pages that search engines cannot understand

in regard to number 2, if you have a 'sign in' link on your homepage you should put a nofollow on that. Search engines cannot sign in to your website. There is no reason for a search engine to follow that link. All other links - just keep them dofollow. You're not 'sculpting' your PR by using nofollow links.

You should switch your concern away from nofollow and focus on site speed. Your site seems slow to me.