Are no follows leaking link juice?
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Recently, in a discussion on resources pages EGOL informed me that just because I had no followed the links on my my resource page, I was still leaking link juice. He mentioned that this was a recent change in Google policy.
This was quite a surprise. I have done a couple of searches on this recent change but have not found any information. Am I simply the last one on the planet to learn this and this change is widely known and understood? If so, does that mean honest resource pages (I have two such pages) that are there to help visitors are negatively impacting the site - at least in terms of SEO? If they are leaking link juice is it comparable to a followed link or a smaller amount that has less impact?
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You've got it right. The example is a bit simplistic as not all links on a page are going to pass the same amount of link juice, but otherwise it sounds like you get it.
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Okay, so I think I get it. The page has a fixed amount of juice divided equally among the links. Even if I nofollow some outbound links this does not preserve more link juice for the resources page or other dofollow outbound links. The juice essentially evaporates with the nofollows? Do I have it right and is this widely agreed upon among SEOs?
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Nofollows burn link juice. If you nofollow a link, it won't pass link juice to that page, but as a result it doesn't pass more link juice to other pages linked to from that page.
Here's an example. Suppose on your resources page, you have 6 units of link juice to pass to other pages. You have 3 outbound links with no nofollows. Each page receives 2 units of link juice. Now suppose you nofollow one of the links. The page that links to now gets no link juice as you'd expect. However, the other two pages linked to still only receive 2 units of link juice. If the 6 units total were divided between the two links, then each would receive 3, but that's not how nofollow works now.
Without a really good reason, I wouldn't nofollow internal links, and use nofollows for situations like keeping link spam down in user generated content.
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Well as far as I know nofollow does not pass any PR juice. And please check this post -
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
In general, we don't follow them. **This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. **
I hope you have got your answer.
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