I have never really understood how to use nofollow links until last night. I guess I must have been very slow to pick up this technique of preserving your Google Pagerank.

On Wikipedia’s entry on nofollow links:

Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, SEOs realized that a nofollow used for an internal link should just work as well as nofollow used for external links. It makes sense, for example, to use nofollow for internal links to pages that are not relevant for search engines and only for visitors who are already on the website. This includes pages, such as “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Terms of Use” or “Privacy Policy”. Matt Cutts, one of the initial designers of the nofollow attribute, encouraged this use of the attribute.

At the bottom of this snippet, there is a reference to an interview with Matt Cutts, in which he endorses the use of the nofollow link. Evisibility has a great blog post about nofollow tags with nice illustrations to explain the “Google Juice” theory.

Dan Thies has a free SEO book that explains the basics and advanced uses of the nofollow tag.

What I did for my own blog was to add the nofollow tag on these links:

• About Me
• Contact Me
• Copyright
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• RSS Feed

I also made some minor changes to my blog by removing the “month chunks” plugin, which had a lot of links to my older blog archives. It would be interesting to see the effects of this minor change on the traffic of my blog and other sites.

Tagged As: nofollow, seo

Categories: Blog Updates, Search Engine Optimization | You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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