How Come You Dont Nofollow?
I know why some of you don't use rel="nofollow" tags, and I'm hoping you'll hear me out and then maybe help me out if I am missing something here.
The main reason that people don't use these tags from what I understand is that people don't want trouble keeping their pages indexed. Some people also think this is a black-hat activity meant to cheat in the serps.
With regards to indexing, I will point out 2 things...you should probably have at least an XML sitemap if not an HTML for users as well. This won't guarantee indexing, but it will go a long way in helping to keep pages indexed.
I'll also point out that in an interview with Matt Cutts, he states that if you don't want a page indexed, simply not linking to that page will not be sufficient. The reason for this is that if someone is on that page, and they click on a link to leave that page, google will see them on the other side, see where they came from, follow their path backwards, and index that page where they came from. So if your site is getting trafficked well, you shouldn't have any problems with this.
I guess you could say that there is a small amount of risk associated with using nofollow tags. You could certainly make the argument that those pages won't get crawled as often, because there won't be as many ways for the bots to get there (although at this point I'm pretty sure that bots do follow these links still, but this is well argued about in other threads here). But any site with a decent amount of traffic should have no problems keeping their pages indexed in my opinion.
As far as this being a black-hat activity, I read another interview with Matt where he states pretty plainly that it is ok to use nofollow on your internal links with the purpose of channeling pagerank.
In looking at some of the sites that are doing the best in the poker world, it looks like many of them are not using nofollow tags.
So please...am I missing something here? How come some of you with great sites don't use nofollow on links to things like your contact page and other unimportant pages?
Is this something for young guns and crazy kids with nothing to lose?
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