Thanks to the SEOmoz Q+A, we get to monitor a lot of the hot button issues that hit the SEO world, and as Jane noted to me during a meeting today, they always seem to come in waves. The latest buzz (and flurry of questions) comes around the practice of PageRank sculpting. We've discussed this topic in some detail previously on SEOmoz (1, 2 and 3) and recently published a guide. However, with renewed interest comes a need for renewed focus.
Does PageRank Sculpting Work?
The simplest answer is yes. It definitely does work - the devil is in the details of how well and to what extent it brings value. However, anyone can set up a simple test to watch PageRank sculpting with nofollow in action. Just follow these simple steps:
- Create a new page in a test environment (either on a new domain or in a new section of an existing site).
- Point enough links to this new page to get it indexed in the three major search engines. There are a variety of methods to do this, but for testing sites, I like Jane's clever tactic of leveraging the social media link sources to get the engines visiting regularly and keeping it in the index.
- Create 10-20 links on the new page pointing to completely unique pages, targeting make-believe terms and phrases for which no search engine shows results (like yootermimitank).
- Wait for the engines to visit and see these new pages. Chances are, they won't index all of those new, nonsense word pages (particularly if you've pointed very small amounts of link juice to your test page). If they do index all of them, just keep adding links to new nonsense pages until they stop getting all of them.
- Start nofollowing those links a few at a time, until all the pages that remain with links pointing to them are in the engines' index. Remarkably, the engines all behave fairly similarly, and seem to have fairly similar thresholds for keeping a page in the index (though Yahoo! appeared to be the most lenient when I performed this test several months back).
- You've now used nofollow to "sculpt" where PageRank/link juice is pointing and through it, influenced which pages the engines keep in their index vs. discard. You're also directly observing the phenomenon of how a page splits its PageRank through the links it points to - fewer links means more juice per page, leading to a higher probability of being crawled and indexed.
(BTW - for another fun test, try this one I wrote about at Sphinn a while back)
This illustration shows the basic principle of link flow and how nofollow impacts it:
Looking at the diagram above (which is overly simplistic, but illustrates the basic concept), if Google, for example, had a threshold of 1.4 link juice units to keep a page indexed or re-crawl every X days, this use of nofollow could be exceptionally valuable. It's also the exact behavior you can observe in the test above - at a certain level of link juice, the engines no longer keep the pages in their index and by using nofollow, we can flow more juice to the pages we care about.
At the most basic level, the search engines are using PageRank (or whatever global popularity variable they calculate - StaticRank/WebRank/mozRank) to determine their threshold for indexation. I think Mr. Martinez's prescient comment on this topic (from an Eric Enge post last year) provides excellent insight:
PageRank is now used as a quality filter on the other end — Google divides the Web into pages with sufficient PageRank (the elite pages admitted into the full Main Web Index) and pages with too little PageRank (the pages — probably the majority of Web documents — that are stored in the Supplemental Results Index).
But Google also says it uses PageRank to help determine crawling priorities. In a natural crawling system PageRank would only be an indicator of the probability of a crawl, but Matt Cutts and other Google representatives have made it sound (to me) like Google actually favors pages which meet some internal PageRank threshold requirement...
...PageRank was never very important to RANKINGS, but now it has become extremely critical to INCLUSION.
I somewhat disagree with his final sentence and believe that in many cases, PageRank (or global link popularity/juice) can play an important role in rankings, but I find his underlying logic very sound. Link juice, in whatever form it's calculated, appears to play a substantive role in both indexation and crawl rate. We use it inside Linkscape to help determine which pages are important and deserve crawling, just as the major search engines do, and I don't see it going away anytime soon.
Does PageRank Sculpting Matter for My Site?
That all depends on what kind of site you've got. When we've seen PageRank sculpting provide benefit, it's almost always on large domains with tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. In these types of environments, eliminating juice from passing through 5-10 links per page (everything from the copyright policy to the login/register links to the terms of service) can have a massive impact on how much juice flows down the category stream to the pages that need it most - new content and long-buried archives. Using it on much smaller sites with tight, carefully controlled link architecture hasn't produced the same sort of value.
It also depends on the issues you're having. PR sculpting solves a very particular kind of problem - one where crawl rates and indexation of content are the primary concern. It's barely going to help you rank better for your primary terms on your site's homepage and it's certainly not going to make your site convert better or entice more people to link to you. Applying PR sculpting to problems like these would be akin to taking Viagra to help get rid of a sore throat - only in very weird circumstances could it help. :-)
When Should I Engage in PageRank Sculpting?
A lot of advice in the SEO world suggests that PR sculpting should be used only when all other methods for improving SEO are completed. I disagree strongly. My feeling is that using nofollow to flow link juice is something that should come up at the same time site architecture and link architecture does - when you're trying to figure out how to get the search engines to index all your content and find new content as quickly as possible. Building nofollow into a site's architecture intelligently from the start (or in the planning stages of a redesign) is almost always better than using it as a band-aid after the fact.
Isn't PR Sculpting a Dead Giveaway that I'm an Evil SEO?
Well, considering that nearly 1% of all pages on the web (according to Linkscape's crawl data) engage in internal nofollows to flow link juice, I'd say no. We're talking in the hundreds of millions of pages, so adoption is pretty rampant - more so, in fact, than 301 and 302 redirects combined! Huge sites like Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, About.com, Facebook and millions more are using it. The search engines themselves endorse the use of it and say publicly that it's not a flag for spam or manipulative activity.
If you're incredibly paranoid about nofollow, do what clever SEOs (many of them black and gray hat) used to do back in the days before nofollow and use externally called javascript redirects or some other method for letting humans follow the links while search engines can't. PageRank sculpting has been around a lot longer than nofollow, and back in the early 2000s it was employed to great effect according to a few folks who did so back then. It achieves the same effect (and follows the same principle) - you've got links that engines can follow, and others that are just for human visitors.
Well, I think PR Sculpting is a Waste of Time
That's OK by me. There's a lot of differing opinion in the world of SEO, and this is certainly one where some SEO practitioners disagree. However, I'd urge you to, at the least, try some tests with it and make sure you're not missing out on opportunity before dismissing it entirely. After all, SEO is all about testing, refining and implementing based on data - from what we've seen in the projects we've worked on, it's been a positive tactic and one that, when done well, have a valuable impact on getting more pages included and new pages included more quickly (as well as occasionally helping long tail content rank better).
Feel free to share your own thoughts around this - one question that nags at me is why this is suddenly a hot topic again... Was there an announcement or a trove of discussion on the issue that I missed during my week in New York?
Rand, can you explain more? I'm missing it:
"Start nofollowing those links a few at a time, until all the pages that remain with links pointing to them are in the engines' index."
OK, you had us make new pages that would rank for made up terms and point to them from our high PR page. Then you had us start to nofollow links to some of those pages after they were indexed. The ones remaining have benefitted from sculpting because you can find them, right?
But that doesn't mean they're ranking better. You're putting them out there for nonsense words with no competition. They rank just by being indexed, unless I'm missing part of your explanation.
It is confusing that a search engine might drop one of the other pages just because you nofollowed it, too. If it has found the page, it should keep going back to the page regardless of a nofollow link that was added to it elsewhere. The page itself, once found, should dictate if it gets indexed or excluded. If you're finding pages get dropped just by nofollowing to them, that's kind of scary. It suggests people might start nofollowing to competitors to knock them out.
What I think you're saying is that these pages, since they have so few links pointing at them (really just one) get deemed as less important once a search engine sees the one link is nofollowed -- so they get dropped -- and that's a sign that sculpting can make other pages important. But then again, that's not. It's a sign that sculpting can take value away from a page but not necessarily make the remaining pages get more.
Having said all this, I've talked to several SEOs who are convinced like you that this does help them. Of course, Matt Cutts at Google recommended it even last year. So I suppose it does, though I still lean more on the side of this being something people should worry about (if at all) after a long line of other things. But that's me :)
Putting on my search engine building hat here... When we did Linkscape, we needed to determine a way to prioritize which pages get crawled, how often they're crawled and what level of depth we're willing to follow. The engines apparently (and explicitly) all do the same thing. Since links are a way of passing juice - a big determining factor (and probably the primary one) in whether a page gets crawled initially, placed in the index and listed in search results, spending your juice wisely becomes important. It's less so if all your site's pages are already indexed and more so if a large number of them aren't getting indexed (or seem to fall into the supplemental results and only get served for very long tail or site specific queries).
The one thing that concerns me, and makes me worried that you're missing the principle of nofollow and the mathematical theory behind it is this:
You couldn't knock a competitor out by pointing nofollowed links to them - that's completely antithetical to the way PageRank/Link Juice operates. The only way you could knock them out is if you found all the links pointing to them and nofollowed all of these. In effect, this would be like removing all those links, and the engine would no longer have any link popularity score assigned to that page, in which case it wouldn't meet the threshold for inclusion.
Take another look at the diagram above - I feel like that does a good job illustrating how this works and why the "knocking out" with more nofollowed links thing isn't possible.
Damn, now he tells me.
Hand me my dictionary, he's using college words. :-)
>>>Putting on my search engine building hat here... When we did Linkscape
With all due respect Rand, you built your search engine in the dark... how you figure out which pages to deem important and how an engine with 80% market share that is the top focus for almost every SEO on the planet might differ just slightly. ;-)
>>>Was there an announcement or a trove of discussion on the issue that I missed during my week in New York?
Nofollow was brought up during the ask the seo's session, which I thought you had attended, but maybe I'm mistaken. The general gist of the panel (if memory serves) was that Todd Friesen, Jill Whalen and Mike Grehan had nothing against using it but didn't see it as a "top ten things a website that wants to rank better should do". Bruce Clay thought nofollow was an amazing tool to use to sculpt or as Bruce called it originally, silo your pagerank. My opinion was that I'd seen it work, but I don't see the benefits of using it as enough to risk it also being seen as a red flag (telling me Matt says isn't going to qualm my fears there), I think it's not a "top ten" thing to really focus on and that when someone finds a way to abuse it, and believe me, they WILL, then everyone is going to be running around "fixing" their use of it to conform to Google's new guidelines. I'd rather just build a site with good internal architecture myself and market the hell out of it. But that's me. I also don't run 100K page sites.
>>>We're talking in the hundreds of millions of pages, so adoption is pretty rampant - more so, in fact, than 301 and 302 redirects combined!
One thing you're missing here though is that 301's and 302's have other reasons to be implemented than SEO. Nofollow, outside of a comment area on a major blogging platform is something ONLY an SEO or former link seller newly adapting to Google guidelines after getting whacked would use. Nofollow has zero existence outside of the Internet marketing world. 301's and 302's do. I'm fine with being called paranoid for not wanting to throw up "red flags" - but you can't realisitically use the use of 301's to say nofollow is ok as far as "flags" go.
>>>Huge sites like Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, About.com, Facebook and millions more are using it.
And sites that large have also long had different rules than the rest of us in Google. I can name three household name companies right now buying links like they're going out of style, holding top rankings and even though their link buying is aggressive and obvious, they see no ill effects. "Huge sites" and the rest of us don't have the same rules.
That said, for the few clients I work with - I tell them about nofollow and all of the information out there. I basically advise that if they are going to use it, no funny business - pages like privacy, terms - thinks blocked via robots.txt - I tell them they can implement it if they'd like... doesn't change how I feel about using it for my own commercial sites.
Search engines have long said that one of the ways they prioritize what to index is looking at the number of links, and especially the importance of links, pointing at a particular page.
Completely separate from this is the idea that links are also used to help decide what links rank well. The big difference between link use here is context. The context of the link (anchor text, surrounding words) can help trump the importance of the link (PageRank score, JerryRank score, whatever you want to call it).
From what you've said, this test is proving sculpting as a useful way to encourage indexing of pages. It's not proving anything about causing those pages to rank. You listed some pages on an important page. You got all of them eventually indexed (without sculpting). Then you nofollowed some of the links to those pages, and they fell out of the index. So nofollow can help those pages be seen as less important to be indexed. Of course, if you hadn't nofollowed them, they might have stayed in since the test you described didn't start until they were all in.
In terms of not understanding nofollow, I know how it works, and I can describe it without needing any math. If I nofollow a link, the major search engines understand that I do not want them following through to that link and indexing it their listings. It also means I don't want them giving any ranking credit to the link, as well. At various times, they've all treated this in different ways -- but I think Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all now act in the same way. Nofollow means don't index, don't give ranking credit.
Now in terms of using nofollow to knock someone else out, I agree that this is unlikely. Your test suggested that this might be a possibility, in a pretty unique case.
Consider. A search engine finds a page you've created (B) from a link on another page you control (A). This is your test. Once it has found B, it should keep going back to B forever. It knows B exists, and search engines constantly revisit the pages they know about. As long as B isn't blocking itself from being crawled with a nofollow meta tag or through robots.txt, all is good with one exception -- if the search engine itself decides B is no longer worthy for inclusion (it was seen as spam, not as important, etc).
Now in your test, A puts up a nofollow to B after B has been indexed. Then B disappears. What's up with that? A is not the boss of B. As I said, the only reason B should go away from the index is if B itself explicitly blocks spiders (it wasn't) or if the search engine decide B doesn't deserve inclusion.
And that brings up the competitor thing. If B disappears, it suggests that it needs at least one link pointing at it to be listed (Inktomi used to operate this way). When you took that single link away, it lost importance and wasn't included.
Like you say, to knock out a competiitor in this manner, you'd have to knock out all the links to them with nofollow, which would harm both ranking and indexing. Maybe in some strange situation with a single link from a public site, some wiki situation, you might be able to do this.
Perhaps a bigger concern is that with sculpting, this suggests you might harm yourself more than help.
Consider that typically, sites have been told to ensure they have good natural linkage to all their pages. Now they start wiping out links except for ones they've really thought about. That means you might get some pages that had a single link from within a site losing that link. And then those pages might get dropped from being indexed. That's a bad thing. Potentially, you could counter it by using an XML sitemap, but other than for Yahoo, sitemaps are still a source that's considered for inclusion rather than guaranteed.
Overall, I wish I could say the test is proving that pagerank sculpting for ranking works, but I don't see that. When I've read it more closely, I see you refering about indexing. But no one is buzzing about sculpting as an indexing tool -- I think they see "prove" and "sculpting" and think it's a ranking thing.
I do see the test potentially showing that sculpting helps with indexing, but then again, potentially it is harmful. There are a number of other things I'd do first to encourage indexing than hitting sculpting out of the gate.
As for ranking, the chart doesn't really show or prove anything. It assumes that each link gets an equal shared credit of the authority of the page hosting it. The original paper on PageRank back in 1998 worked that way. This is 2008, 10 years later. Over that time, we know that search engines automatically discount some links on pages that they see. We strongly suspect that they might automatically discount links within the same site in navigation, with the same anchor text and so on. We've had papers suggesting that links appearing in body copy migh inherit more authority than other links on the page. So to suggest that by removing one of three out bound links, the other two share the "extra" credit? Yes, in very very basic terms, I agree. But in reality, it's far more complicated than that.
I know the intent of the chart has to be basic, to some degree. But after so many years of trying to explain to people that not all links off a page get treated equally, I want that chart to be slightly more complex, I guess. I mean we used to have people who didn't want a link on a page with 15 other links because they feared (a) the page had too many links, so they'd be seen as bad or (b) they weren't going to get much credit anyway. So they'd scoff at like easy links from the Open Directory. It's insanity. If it's a good page, with an audience you want, you want the link. Trying to triple-guess how PageRank may or may not be working at that point is crazy.
Anyway, like I said, I've talked with you and others who are convinced that sculpting DOES help with ranking. And Matt Cutts himself encouraged people to do it last year, though personally I felt there was an element of "see, nofollow's not all bad" motivation behind to counter the anti-nofollow crowd rather than him seeing this as a top hot SEO tip. But if it's working for folks, it's certainly a legit tactic, so have at it
a. thanks danny.. i've always liked reading your thought processes since day one. I totally agree with a simple fact, to paraphrase...
"once a link has been indexed, it's in google forever.. either as a deadlink, or a page that has object properties, i.e. URL, root domain, title, inbound PR, outbound PR, etc...
so getting it indexed then adding nofollow seems somewhat futile, for that extra .X PR addition..
b. Rand - take a sec.. think about trying to do PR sculpting W/o no follow. how about "noindex", also you are missing a crucial part of the equation.. bounce rate vs. link juice. i do PR sculpting entirely differently but thank you for the research to offset my findings.
GO STARS!!
=)
So - I'm kind of thinking that one of a few different scenarios are possible:
1) Search engines use global link popularity calculations as a metric in the indexation and crawl equation, but not rankings.
2) They use it (PageRank/WebRank/mozRank/etc.) for both indexation/crawling and in rankings, too (this is my general opinion)
3) They calculate it (and show it, for example in the Google toolbar or in Microsoft's Webmaster Tools), but don't really use it for anything
In case 1 or 2, using nofollow (or any other method) to bias which links are for humans vs. engines has innate value to aspects of SEO. In case 3, it doesn't, but this seems very unlikely to me, and the messaging from those working at the engines would seem to follow that line of thinking.
What I do grant is up for debate is how effective and how valuable it is compared to other things you could do on your site. We've had success with it, as have our clients, but I think it's great to play with it, test it and come to your own conclusions. I thought my blog post did a fair job expressing my personal opinion about its value and its use and contained this caveat.
i concur with your summary.
thank you again for stimulating the mind.
When it comes to the question of "Does PageRank Sculpting Work? Matter? etc." - it all comes down to a matter of size.
If your site only has 800 or less pages, then you can do it if you have time, but otherwise don't bother. Your efforts are better spent elsewhere.
If you have 1000-10,000 pages - then you'll probably see some reward from your efforts.
10,000 or more pages - then yes - pagerank sculpting matters and works.
This is good advice. SEO is not a strict set of steps that you follow for each case. It often depends on what makes most sense to the individual client.
I agree with vingold. Just because sites are employing a tactic doesn't mean that it makes sense for the general web user. Mega-sites like Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, About.com, Facebook get away with things that small sites simply don't get value from.
Personally I favour PR sculpting with the use of Javascript - I am not too convinced that search engines behave EXACTLY the way they say when it comes to nofollow.
good point. personally, i damn near fell over in my chair at SMX Advanced when the rep from MSN said that they ignore nofollow completely (!).
in my experience, yahoo seems to be a bit erratic about obeying nofollow, but google's generally good about it.
Agreed on that point, the stress being on EXACTLY.
We have a site with over 40,000 pages and PR Sculpting definately had a positive effect for us, and it happened pretty quickly
Seems to me a better approach to testing this theory would be to do the following:Create page A and get it indexed.Create pages B and C and optimize them for the same keywords.Link page A to pages B and C with the same anchor text. Inevitably, either B will outrank C or C will outrank B for the targeted keywords - they cannot tie.Give Google some time to make sure the ranking of B and C is stable.When you feel the ranking position of pages B and C is stable, nofollow the link from A to B or C (whichever one is ranked higher).Wait and see what happens. If nofollow cuts off the PR flow and thereby affects ranking, pages B and C should reverse position (or perhaps the page you nofollowed will be dropped altogether?).Cheers from Seattle!
OD
Rand, I must admit that this was an impressive article. But still I think I was missing something. You did not mention the implementation of the robots meta tags attributes "noindex", and/or "nofollow". Also you did not mention about the implementation of robots.txt rules.
Also, if you want to pose it this way, I am maybe for you one of the incredibly paranoid about nofollow" SEOs, even if I think I have good reasons why I do not use them. But that is a different story.
I use for example for my affiliate links 301 redirects, and I forbid the search engines to follow them via robots.txt. Do you call that old school? I hope not. :)
If I would dare to disagree with you about the necessity of PageRank Sculpting I would have been a liar.
This year I've done PR Sculpting to over 15 customers web sites, and they all experience an incredible boost in their rankings.
Thanks for sharing Rand. :)
I think you were the main source of this upcoming topic Rand!
"The engineers all felt that "PR sculpting" - the practice of using nofollow to flow link juice to and through a site to maximize and control how it was assigned to internal pages - was, generally, something that could potentially provide value [...]"
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-lessons-from-the-search-engineers-at-smx-east
Great Coverup.
1st reason for the question to arise was the Launch of Guide to Pagerank Optimization. If on PageRank Sculpting, SEOmoz has written a full guide then it has to be some credibility.
2nd reason - with launch of Linkscape, the question of how to use linkscape for PageRank Sculpting (A new Blog/Youmoz Post topic).
i most definatly agree with PR link sculpturing. It is model that all SEO's worth there salt should add as a part of any SEO project. Why would you want PR on a privacy policy, contact page for? I have no idea either. Why waiste the PR potential on important product(s)/service(s) pages. Not that I think PR leakage is too important, it all helps and if done correctly it works a treat. Matt Cutts a guru in the industry stated months ago now suggested that it os a good idea. Try it what do you have too loose? I did and i noticed increased traffic for a client.
I understand the theory of what and how to implement what you're saying.
I guess I am going to just have to do more experimenting to see if it will make any appreciable difference on the size sites I work on.
I don't think you could make your point any simpler, unless you want to switch to the really fat crayons. (they show up better than those white board markers)
I have a question that is more in regards to using sculting for pagination. I saw Rand's whiteboard friday on pagination but it didn't seem to answer the question.
Let's say I have a category on an ecommerce site with 10 paginated pages. Obviously, we want the first page to get indexed and the other 9 pages to not get indexed because they are targeting the same keywords as the first page. What is the best way to noindex those other 9 pages? Is it by using the nofollow tag on the links to those 9 pages or would it be best to use the meta robots "noindex, follow" on each of those 9 pages? The "noindex, follow" would deindex those pages but still allow the products on those pages to get indexed and rank because engines are still following the links. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Do you guys out there had positive results with PR Sculpting?
Would a noindex or a disallow be a better practice than a rel=`nofollow` ?
sitemap.xml: should i wipe non-relevant pages (terms of use, shopping cart, etc.) ?
The "Noindex" robots.txt directive would be the best option, making sure though that those pages have outbound links (internal or external) and are not masked with the nofollow attributes, javascript or so ever.
I just don't get the position against PR sculpting. Especially in the agency level, we use every weapon in our arsenal to just have one more inch more than the next guy has for every client. If PR sculpting will even get me one more rank above the other guy, why not do it. The keyword in our job titles is optimization (or optimizer). I always thought of the terms as being equivalent of fine tuning a website (at least from an on-page perspective). I am behind you 100% Rand.
Good points about using all the tools you've got. I've seen strong experimental and theoretical results, and we've seen strong evidence in practice too.
The argument I hear from the search engineers is that there are a lot of tactics out there and a lot of terminology. If you're charging by the hour, then it makes sense to tell your client about which tactics are going to give the best ROI, and hopefully why. That depends on the client.
The problem the engines face is that there are millions of webmasters out there. Most are small and need to focus on quality content first (followed by good usability, etc.) The kinds of people that we deal with, and many people in our audience too, might not fit the "average webmaster" mold.
This is helpful. I was wondering if small site like this abercrombie store can benifit from pr sculpting. The PR is very low for that after all. Further, should it link to high PR site like the A&F offical site? So said it will do good since the official abercrombie site is related to the keywords but it will definitely pass link juice. What should I do?
I think sometimes doing PR sculpting works wonder. Especially when high link building speed appears not affecting the website ranking or traffic.
Nice post and good comments but my confusion is exactly when to use nonfollow and when to use noindex.
We will certainly want terms of use,shopping etc to be indexed.. but would not like to pass link juice then when to use noindex?
Clips.webdevart.com is ranking #1 for yootermimitank
I mean they have a whopping 181 backlinks, and SEOmoz only has 1.8 Million so i can see the logic in that.
:-/
Hello everbody. Thanks for all the great info you are sharing on this site.
I have a question regarding PR sculpting. I've heard that having a lot of content/pages on your site is a good thing. By using nofollow for PR sculpting you effectively reduce the number of pages indexed (they can either be dropped or made unimportant). Can this have a negative effect? It's like if the total link juice of the site depends not only on links but also on the number of pages indexed. Personally I don't believe that, but it would be good to get more expert opinion.
From a search engineer perspective, you want to make sure that your quality content (or your converting content) is getting noticed and "voted" for. If you've got 10,000 "organic" pages (maybe product pages or the like) makes this process very difficult for both the webmaster and the search engine. But having lots of pages just to have lots of pages probably won't help you in the long run.
It's an interesting topic and i would love to hear more about it.
I would like to know what are the best practices for PR sculpting on each type of site.
For example, on an informational 100 pages website, on which pages should i put a nofollow ?
On a blog, on which pages should i put a nofollow ? sitemap ?logo (pointing to home or news) ? terms & conditions ?tags ?search ?comments ?archives ?On a huge portal (20k pages with a lot of duplicate content), on which pages should i put a nofollow ? articles ?sitemap ?logo (pointing to home or news) ? terms & conditions ?tags ?You guys do the best seo posts on the web - i love seomoz !!!
i like the third point and i tried it so many time with great success, great post SIR
for the larger poorly optimized enterprise sites that i have worked on the three most important factors for boosting rankimgs and profitibilty have been
1. Clean, static URL's
2. Focused page titles
and finally tightly focused page sculpting.
i challenge anyone to prove that wrong.
Can't argue with the first two points but the third point, pls read https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
How come seomoz.org doesn't nofollow their contact, privacy, terms, about us links in the footer?
I have had success using nofollows on certain links on smaller sites, less than 200 pages.
Rand -
Big fans of your and of SEOmoz, but I gotta say I was disappointed by this post.
1) I have to register in order to leave a comment? Lame.
2) You link to an article not publicly available. Lamer.
3) You seem to be praising the insidious nofollow tag, which should be banned from use.
Hope you return to your usual stellar form soon!