Search Engine Optimization And The NoFollow Debate
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 2 of July , 2008 at 5:10 pm
There is an interesting discussion on the search engine optimization forum at WebProWorld around the topic of NoFollow-DoFollow.
The comments are varied although there are a few common points. The most common being the use of NoFollow for paid links. Little of the conversation actually relates to search engine optimization.
Some of the conversation goes to extreme, however it should be remembered the NoFollow is, generally speaking, a harmless tool. The worst you can do is tell a search engine not to follow a link when perhaps it should have been followed - a poor use of the tag when it comes to search engine optimization strategies.
The robots.txt file was mentioned at couple times, however there are still times when the NoFollow tag should be used. On page links to areas such as your About page should be NoFollowed.
I generally like to NoFollow duplicate links on the same page so that I only have the one link being followed. Does it affect link juice - the jury still seems to be out on that score. However when it comes to search engine optimization, it is easier to keep track of links that are followed or nofollowed when they are in common areas.
Search engine optimization relies on a variety of tools that include tags, robots.txt files and other on page issues. The bottom line is that they generally wont harm your search rankings so judicious use of these tags is in the hands of the users.
Category: SEO
- Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg
Comment by Matt Inertia
Made Friday, 4 of July , 2008 at 3:47 am
Not sure i agree on the adding nofollow to duplicate links idea. Internal site links should use as open an architecture as possible. I have heard of image links being nofollowed when the equivalent text link is next to them but generally if it’s done for the visitor then why nofollow it? Thats shooting yourself in the foot, especially when thats what the search engine wants.
I nofollow internal links to login, shopping carts but that about it. The about us page usually has some content relating to your business and business name?
Comment by Creativecaravan
Made Friday, 4 of July , 2008 at 3:50 am
A good summary of the WebProWorld thread, which, incidentally I started. As you say, the jury is still out on whether doFollowing external links does leak out link juice, which was the original point which I was trying to get to. Would it have a negative effect on a pages PR?
I was prompted into asking this question after reading an interesting blog post which talked about the idea of removing the nofollow attribute from blog posts as a reward to commentators who took the time to leave legitimate comments, thus adding to the on page discussion.
Comment by namecritic
Made Thursday, 10 of July , 2008 at 5:19 pm
On page links to areas such as your About page should be NoFollowed?
Why?
Comment by Allen Taylor
Made Friday, 11 of July , 2008 at 8:13 am
I wouldn’t nofollow any link in a navigation menu, which is usually where you’ll find a link to the About page. I might nofollow in-text links to the About page if it is coming from a high authority page where I want link juice to flow to other pages. I definitely want my About page indexed and if you have one link to it from anywhere then it will get indexed as long as you don’t noindex it in the robots.txt file. Otherwise, I think it depends on how many other links you have on a page from which you are linking and how much authority that page has and where you want that authority transferred. I wouldn’t make it a hard-and-fast rule either way.
Subscribe to our RSS Feed 
