Nofollow sculpting my take
- 11th Mar 2008
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- Internet Marketing
Have seen several cases now where using “nofollow” on internal links did this
a) Increased ranking on short tail and killed a lot of long tail traffic .. Hmmm not good
b) Didn’t effect ranking’s at all .. Ok so my internal page rank may have lifted a little here
c) Decreased rankings in general .. NOT COOL !
d) Slightly increased traffic over all. Way COOL !
Now the big issue for me is there are a few people that are starting to say this is the silver bullet for SEO, but what I don’t want to say is this is bullshit, there are too many other factors why you could have moved in the serps, the big clean up in the paid links could have and a side effect on your rankings or your competitors…
so the 6 million dollar question, does NOFOLLOWING your internals effect your Ranking in google, I say ranking and not Pagerank. Not even I’m going to say that No-Following all but 3 pages from your homepage won’t increase you pagerank on those internals, But I have seen some ODD STUFF happen so i decided the only real way to do this was
a) set up controlled tests. I so love doing that, but what happens if the test is influenced by external factors like say
howstuffworks.com links to sitea.com which links to me, then howstuffwork.com gets hit with a link selling penalty which in turn effects the link juice from sitea.com to me and I drop a little in the ranking… thats the way this link stuff works you know.
b) just ask Matt Cutts so I did.
Matt’s answer was :
Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect.
My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.
Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.
_____________________________
sheesh a simple YES would have been ok, But I’m totally in agreeance with Matt here. Me I worry about getting to the next level of Pagerank and not loosing what little I have … so link to me.. joke i tend to house keep my site every so often to decide how many pages my site should have indexed, 301 the old crappy stuff in fact I’m hoping to do that before SES New York, i will tell you how that worked out.
DaveN
Addef this is a great article by joost on
PageRank sculpting - Siloing and more
18 Comments | Leave a comment »
That was kind of a different answer from Matt. Are you sure he wrote that? :)
yes I’m pretty sure it was Matt Cutts, and I also sent a second email asking permisson to use his example :)
DaveN
I had interesting and controlled experiment that uses both:
nofollowing of internal pages and meta noindex, follow
Experiment was driven on 2 similar sites with similar number of pages (5k~7k pages) site architecture is:
1. homepage (that gets most of links)
2. different paths to items (search result pages by various parameters that link to items)
3. items
on one site we applied noindex, follow and nofollow links from higher to lower level (ex. from item to serp) and allow up and horizontal linking…
the result:
Call 555-555-555
:-) OK let’s see who wants to see results?
OK you David share with us things, let me share my result its like making from 100 to 150 bucks effect ;-) in traffic and 100 to 200 in money (raising per visitor value).
[…] did a good post about nofollow sculpting, and he got a very good quote from Matt Cutts: Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking […]
As another point of view, I did some on-site work for a client, we were tracking 100 key phrases. We implemented nofollow throughout the site and over the next 4 months, we had an overall net gain of 1,800 places - from pretty much stationary. No link building was done.
That should say 4 weeks ^ not months :$
Dave… thanks for sharing this with all of us, would love to pick your brain a bit more about it in a few days.
See you at SES NYC… and please please please…. don’t mention those things that gets Dave so upset!;)
~Li
Hey .. LI you post was killed be akismet maybe you need to email them :)
DaveN
[…] seen a few posts (Dave Naylor, Joost de Valk) discussing this over the last few days and thought I’d share my view of […]
Great post.
I always had the same out take on it - I have a few sites that rank for weird terms from a contact page - why risk loosing the clicks.
This was a really interesting post, this is something i have been looking into recently. I do think that link sculpting is good practice, pages such as contact us, login and about us are not really in need of being passed link juice. It helps the search engines use less band width and makes a sites internal linking bespoke, which can only be a good thing.
Many thanks claire
[…] quote from Matt at DaveN’s blog is very important here: Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in […]
[…] used his analogy again to help explain it: Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a […]
Great article, first comment here, love ur blog and ur contribution on SEO, :)
[…] or do you go out and get yourself a better job with more cash? - DaveN touched on the subject of nofollow scultping with Matt Cutts recently and Matt offered up a similar analogy. Nofollowing your internals can […]
[…] Nofollow sculpting my take- Have seen several cases now where using “nofollow” on internal links did this a) Increased ranking on short tail and killed a lot of long tail traffic .. Hmmm not good b) Didn’t effect ranking’s at all .. Ok so my internal page rank may … […]
[…] Naylor’s take on PageRank sculpting is that it is good on short tail but bad on long tail and good on slightly higher traffic but bad […]
Considering how easy it is to sculpt PR, I would say as for a “2nd tier” thing todo, it is still very mucl worth the time. Using proper tools it is easy to determine where link juice is flowing and correct it.