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Useful reference links. Many thanks, Mike.

Thanks, Mike.

Just to be clear, I still want those non-primary internal pages (maybe not human sitemap and login) to be indexed so a robots.txt approach will not completely solve the problem. I just don't want to potentially squander link juice on secondary pages. Footers tend to have quite a bulk of link so there is a lot of dilution there. I had hoped that by halving my links, I'd be doubling the outbound link equity.

The first reference was useful, but only mentions my sculpting goal in the very last sentence without elaborating. The thing I found most interesting was the first comment from Mark Traphagen:

"Eric Enge clarified with Gary that the PageRank (and any other authority signal not passed by the no-followed link) is NOT redistributed to the other links on the page."

So, if this is true, there's absolutely no equity saving to be had from nofollow'ing internal links to my non-primary pages. But... is it true?! Any experiment results out there?

Finally, with regards to old versions of policies being published, I can't see how that would cause any legal problems. It's the version that is published that is important and, while I can set directives on cache expiry, nobody can be responsible for out-of-date information stored in a third-party cache (unless, of course, it was unlawful at the time of publishing).

I’ve been trying a couple of new site auditor services this week and they have both flagged the fact that I have some nofollow links to internal pages.

I see this subject has popped up from time to time in this community. I also found a 2013 Matt Cutts video on the subject:

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links

At a couple of SEO conferences I’ve attended this year, I was advised that nofollow on internal links can be useful so as not to squander link juice on secondary (but necessary) pages. I suspect many websites have a lot of internal links in their footers and are sharing the love with pages which don’t really need to be boosted. These pages can still be indexed but not given a helping hand to rank by strong pages. This “equity sculpting” (I made that up) seems to make sense to me, but am I missing something?

Examples of these secondary pages include login pages, site maps (human readable), policies – arguably even the general contact page.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Warren

Thanks for your advice on this one too, Linda. I'm pleased that the implementation does not involve a new page for every long-tail keyword. As part of a copy overhaul, I'll carefully craft in all the variants.

Language differences are a challenge... while I can work in "mobile" and "cellular" into copy, spelling differences between US and British English will look a bit odd. e.g. color/colour.

/W

New to Moz and this forum, so be gentle.

I’m in the process of overhauling a generally neglected website and have just finished some research on long tail keywords. My question is, how do I implement these? For example, I’ve got a product “Acme Widget” which has its own page on the site (and ranking well for the product name itself). I have lots of long tail keyword sets which describe key benefits of the products – some of which appear in the product copy, others which don’t (perhaps because the thing that a user may search for is ugly/bad-English in copy). For the sake of argument, let’s say I have the following long tail keywords for my Acme Widgets.

• cheap red widget
• los angleles widget
• strong green widgets florida

What is the best way to implement these? Do I need to simply incorporate the text into my main Acme Widgets page, or do I need to have separate pages which are highly targeted to each long tail keyword? The problem with the former is unnatural/ugly copy. The problem with the latter is that coming up with enough content to justify (and rank) a page on each keyword set would be quite a challenge.

Regards,
Warren

I’ve been trying a couple of new site auditor services this week and they have both flagged the fact that I have some nofollow links to internal pages.

I see this subject has popped up from time to time in this community. I also found a 2013 Matt Cutts video on the subject:

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links

At a couple of SEO conferences I’ve attended this year, I was advised that nofollow on internal links can be useful so as not to squander link juice on secondary (but necessary) pages. I suspect many websites have a lot of internal links in their footers and are sharing the love with pages which don’t really need to be boosted. These pages can still be indexed but not given a helping hand to rank by strong pages. This “equity sculpting” (I made that up) seems to make sense to me, but am I missing something?

Examples of these secondary pages include login pages, site maps (human readable), policies – arguably even the general contact page.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Warren