How Come You Dont Nofollow?

[PokerproEU]

In theory, the important pages would get more pagerank if you use nofollow on internal pages such as the contact us page. There is no reason to expect that the contact page will rank for any search term, no matter how much link love it gets. This raises some interesting possibilities for using pagerank sculpting and controlling pagerank flow as a tool to send the PR to the most important pages. This sounds great but I haven't seen any results in my limited experience.

[Randy]

Originally Posted by PokerproEU

There is no reason to expect that the contact page will rank for any search term, no matter how much link love it gets.

There is no reason to expect that the contact page WON'T rank for any search term, unless you just don't want it to rank.

[PPP]

Originally Posted by PokerproEU

In theory, the important pages would get more pagerank if you use nofollow on internal pages such as the contact us page.

Neither the article nor Matt Cutts say that. As yet nowhere has Google said that if you nofollow one of ten links on a page that the other nine will pass MORE pagerank.

Originally nofollowing links did not increase the pagerank passed by other links. The pagerank was just discarded. But also originally Google did use nofollow links for discovery, so nofollow policies have changed and could change (which also means using it now may be of no consequence but could be a negative signal in the future).

[PokerproEU]

The nofollowed links are dropped out of the link graph so that would mean the other links receive more pagerank. I don't have any evidence for this though, so that's why I like to experiment Matt does say some things that are close.

"What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good
example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page,
you'll see that the "Sign in" link is nofollow'ed. That's a great use
of the tag: Googlebot isn't going to know how to sign into
expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn't
benefit users or convert any new visitors?"

Why would he say the PageRank is wasted, but when using nofollow the Pagerank is discarded/wasted as well?

[OPB]

We have experimented with using no-follow tags on links to our internal pages. My thoughts are that if I have a page online that is solely there for a visitors benefit than I will use a nofollow. This includes "contact us" pages and pages that I have blocked from being indexed. It may have no impact at all, who knows.

We've used nofollows in other situations as well. We had a bonus code website and we wanted to keep the index page fresh so we got some strategy content and added a section for it on the bottom of the homepage. It was just a paragraph and several links to new strategy articles that we constantly updated. We no-followed the links to the articles. The strategy section had links from elsewhere in the website of course. We didn't see a drop in rankings or anything. If we didn't nofollow the links maybe we would have, who knows. It was a big money page so we weren't going to find out.

I'm currently doing a little test, one that I'm sure will be 100% inconclusive but I am doing it anyway. The scenario is having two links pointing to the same page (a generic template navigation link and a contextual link in the article). Adding the 2nd link in the article is good for usability and thats great. I'm wondering if no-following the navigational link will provide any benefit.

I know, it may sound dumb. Every page can be an experiment though and thats how you learn.

[PPP]

Originally Posted by PokerproEU

The nofollowed links are dropped out of the link graph so that would mean the other links receive more pagerank.

It doesn't mean that at all. In fact, it suggests the opposite. If you have ten links, each link gets 1/10th the PR assigned. "Dropping" the nofollowed one means you lose the 1/10th.

Originally Posted by PokerproEU

Why would he say the PageRank is wasted, but when using nofollow the Pagerank is discarded/wasted as well?

Google originally did the common sense thing, which is as described above, PR was divided equally by each of the ten hrefs on a page. Nofollowing one of the hrefs just meant you wasted PR... if there are 100 PR soldiers to pass, and ten hrefs, then each href gets 10 soldiers. If you nofollowed the href, the ten soldiers didn't get reassigned, they got lost, just like if you linked to a malformed URL.

In these newer pronouncements, never once does anyone from Google say that nofollowing a link increases the PR sent by the other links. They may experiment with the algo, and sometimes redistribute it that way and other times not, but they have never said that is how it works.

[punchtheclock]

So why waste that PageRank

This language seems to be implying that the pagerank does in fact get redirected...not lost.

if there are 100 PR soldiers to pass, and ten hrefs, then each href gets 10 soldiers. If you nofollowed the href, the ten soldiers didn't get reassigned, they got lost, just like if you linked to a malformed URL.

It seems that if this were true, then by following the 10th link, 10 soldiers will just appear?

What if you add 2 links? 20 soldiers appear? how about 100 links? 1000 soldiers?

Your position seems to be making the argument that 100 links will not dilute the pagerank that is passed through each link...that each link will have 10 soldiers, no matter how many links?

Maybe the idea of diluting link juice is only for outgoing links? I thought this was pretty clear that having too many links will dilute the juice for each link...please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this was an important concept in the process of link building....looking for pages without too many outgoing links when you are looking for incoming links?

[punchtheclock]

I just wanted to rephrase the point I was trying to make in that last post.

If something can be diluted, it can also be concentrated.

[PPP]

Originally Posted by punchtheclock

What if you add 2 links? 20 soldiers appear? how about 100 links? 1000 soldiers?

Your position seems to be making the argument that 100 links will not dilute the pagerank that is passed through each link...that each link will have 10 soldiers, no matter how many links?

No. You seem to want to over think this.

If a page has 88 pagerank soldiers to pass, that is how many it has to pass, regardless of what you do.

If you have zero links off a page, then you just waste the 88 soldiers. They die.

If you link to httttttpyet://wwwwww.site.com the soldiers die too because the URL is malformed.

If you have 9 links off the page, each href gets assigned 9/88ths of the soldiers... but there are ways that the 9/88ths doesn't get passed. One is if you make a malformed URL. Another is if you make duplicate URLs (two of the nine links go to the same URL). Another could be because you link to a noindex page, or maybe because you use a nofollow link.

It could be that one of the PR changes Google made at the beginning of the year is to ignore nofollow hrefs instead of doing the raw hraf count of the past, but they have never said that.

Of course pagerank can be concentrated. In the example above, linking to httttttpyet://wwwwww.site.com throws away PR. If you instead link to http://www.your-site-mainpage.com instead, you send more PR to endless places.

I don't know what happens in various situations, or even if it is consistent (though I do think Google experiments with it), but so far Google has never said said that if a page can pass 100 PR soldiers, and you nofollow one of the ten links, that the other nine now pass 11.1111 sldiers each instead of 10.

[punchtheclock]

Originally Posted by PPP

No. You seem to want to over think this.

You are probably right about that. I sort of disliked the way that I worded that quote as I was going back over it.