Comments on: Sculpting PageRank using rel=”nofollow” for Link Architecture

By: Internal Link Architecture for your website

Internal Link Architecture for your website — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:51:19 +0000

[...] Article(s): Sculpting PageRank using rel=”nofollow” for your internal Link Architecture Share [...]

By: John Illnes

John Illnes — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:05:24 +0000

The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.

i think it helps indexing….

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:28:24 +0000

Matt was very clear about the usage of the nofollow a while ago :

quote : The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity.
There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

Dave

By: Rao S. Thotakura

Rao S. Thotakura — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:29:56 +0000

I agree that low ranked pages should not be served as a result of search operation. I’m wondering if the attribute value “nofollow” a W3C approved link type. If not, how is Google using it to determine what result page is relevant and what is not?

By: Jonathan Dingman

Jonathan Dingman — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:54:56 +0000

Tony,

I’ve actually brought this up to current Google and ex-Google (Xooglers) employees about usage of nofollow on the google.com domain. The basic response was “pagerank flow control” — which goes completely against their guidelines.

The guidelines have been published for quite a while now. But I’m still wondering why they haven’t updated them because nofollow doesn’t do a darn thing for a human. Nofollow does not matter for anyone but robots, which is not how “we’re supposed to design a website”

Just a bit frustrating that Google says one thing, then does another.

Iamshimone,

I wasn’t referring to cloaking nearly as much, but mostly the first part of the statement.

Make pages for users, not for search engines.

That’s the part we should be looking at, I feel.

By: iamshimone

iamshimone — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:36:19 +0000

I agree with Tony. rel=nofollow is not cloaking as both the user and search engine see the same 1 page. Cloaking is when you actually create and deliver 2 separate pages. One for the search engine and one for the user.

What I’m not certain about is the purpose of hiding useless pages from search engines using nofollow. The purpose of a search engine is to return relevant results. I can’t remember the last time (if any) that I ran a search and the results returned sitemap, contact, and help pages.

By: Tony Adam

Tony Adam — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:00:39 +0000

Jonahthan,

Thanks for the feedback!

So, Google does this within their own site. Using the “nofollow” attribute is not considered cloaking, as you are not changing the display of information, rather you are choosing which pages you wish to pass Page Rank value.

Thoughts?

By: Jonathan Dingman

Jonathan Dingman — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:17:46 +0000

Tony,

But hold up a second. That’s going against the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines!

It clearly states that you should “Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

So why should I even consider using nofollow on internal links? That’s solely for robots!

disclaimer: I completely agree with what you’re saying, I’m just slightly bashing Google because they need to update their guidelines

By: Carolina

Carolina — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:58:19 +0000

Great article! The thought was overwhelming at first, but doing a site-wide update of the big ones shouldn’t be too hard (or take too much convincing!).