Using Rel Nofollow
A recent SEOmoz article described your website as a balloon that had been pricked with needles all over and filled with water. What would follow…
A recent SEOmoz article described your website as a balloon that had been pricked with needles all over and filled with water. What would follow is all of the water would leak out of the holes (though it would need to be a sturdy balloon). See each of the holes in the balloon a link on your website, what you want to do is plug up holes and distribute link juice more accurately. Rel Nofollow is something that can help you plug these holes.
How to plug those holes
The easiest way to plug these holes it to do a website crawl using software like Xenu’s Link Sleuth to give yourself a picture of all the external links on your website. Once you’ve done this you can identify which links you’d like to nofollow. Remember that a quick way to lose link juice is for you to have followed links in your comments, so make sure all links appearing in the comments on your blog are nofollowed and a lot of those holes will be plugged up.
Once you’ve identified the holes you want to plug, you can add rel=”nofollow” to the anchors:
<a href="http://example/url-to-somewhere/" title="Example" rel="nofollow">Example</a>
By added “rel=’nofollow’” to the link, you’re telling Google how to treat it.
What about “linksculpting”?
“Linksculpting” or “PageRank Sculpting” is a phrase coined by SEOmoz which allowed SEOs to distribute PageRank through their site using methods like NoFollow, however it is something that even Matt Cutts has said doesn’t work, so don’t bother with it! All that will happen is you’ll get penalised. That’s why we don’t recommend rel=nofollow for internal links. If you want to distribute PageRank through your site, take a look at the alternative to rel=nofollow below.
An alternative to rel nofollow
A tag which is getting more and more momentum in the SEO community is the Meta Robots tag. The Meta Robots tag allows users to let Google know how to treat the page you’re on and all links on that page. There are a few relevant options that can be used for the tag:
- Noindex/index: This means the page you’re on will not get indexed or will get indexed (though doesn’t guarantee the latter).
- Nofollow/Follow: This causes all links on the page to be follow or nofollow. Warning, this actually means all links so there’s a huge opportunity to lose link juice on this page.
The best thing about this tag is that it’s so easy to use at the same time as being incredibly effective. Just put it in your <head> section, along with the other Meta tags:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
The above example could be used on a page you don’t want to appear in the SERPs but you still want to be crawled and distribute link juice.
Written by Jason John Mills