How to screw your Web site with nofollow

UPDATE: December 21, 2009

In June 2009 Google advised people to NOT USE NOFOLLOW FOR SEO. Google changed the way it handles PageRank for documents that contain nofollowed internal links sometime in 2007 because they noticed many Websites were following bad SEO advice and screwing up their coverage in the Google index. You should NOT BE USING NOFOLLOW FOR SEO.

The Nofollow for PageRank sculpting advocates completely failed to notice the changes in how Google processed PageRank. Their tests were bogus, misleading, and led to completely wrong conclusions.

Matt Cutts is on record as saying:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

I think saying people “should be” using nofollow is a bit strong. More like people can use it for internal links if they’re power-user-y enough to want to sculpt PageRank flow within their site at the link level. But I’d say that most regular webmasters don’t need to worry about link-level PageRank flow within their site. I think saying “power users and webmasters should be employing on their sites” overstates it a little. It’s available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.
(Source: SEOmoz)

So people are now excited about using “rel=’nofollow’” on their internal links to “sculpt PageRank flow within their site” as Matt puts it. I stated in the comments on that blog post that no one in the SEO industry is actually qualified to do this. I stand by that statement because, as of this writing, I have not seen any of them — not even the backpedalers who have suddenly begun qualifying their advice on using nofollow on internal links — point out some of the rather obvious pitfalls inherent in using “rel=’nofollow’” on your own internal links.

As Matt and other people have pointed out, “rel=’nofollow’” doesn’t prevent a nofollowing search engine from indexing a page — it merely prevents the search engine from indexing a page through the nofollowed link. If you have 1,000 pages on your site and 50 of them point to a specific page, putting “rel=’nofollow’” on 25 of those 50 pages won’t prevent the destination page from being indexed.

Nor will it guarantee that the page won’t receive PageRank from the 25 pages using “rel=’nofollow’”. If there are other link pathways from those nofollowing pages to the destination page, then it may receive exactly as much PageRank as it would have without the “rel=’nofollow’” links, or it may receive less PageRank, but it will still receive PageRank.

So far, none of the “nofollow” advocates have made this point clear. PageRank is designed to follow the unfiltered links. The only way to ensure that a page doesn’t receive PageRank from any of your internal links is to tell the search engines not to index the page.

It would be easier for you to manage your PageRank flow by using Javascript-based links for your internal navigation. Now if that is all you do you’ll break your PageRank flow in ways you cannot begin to appreciate. But if you supplement your Javascript internal navigation with unmodified HTML links that point visitors (and search engines) to your most important content, you can dispense with “rel=’nofollow’”.

But how do you ensure that all your pages are crawled if you rely upon Javascript navigation? Truth be told, there is no way to do it. You can upload XML sitemaps and have every page point to one or more HTML sitemap pages with HTML links, but the search engines may not crawl every page.

Nonetheless, you avoid the obvious pitfalls of using “rel=’nofollow’” while still observing the plentiful negative effects of telling search engines to ignore your internal linkage. At least one hot-to-trot advocate is telling people not to link to their “terms of service” pages, which in many a Webmaster’s estimation are not very useful pages.

But what if the majority of your visitors rely upon your site search function to navigate your site? If you have your own internal indexing tool you should be okay. If you’re relying on search engine site search tools, you run into a problem if you use Javascript or “rel=’nofollow’” to prevent your “Terms of Service” page from receiving any PageRank.

Now, is it a problem if a “Terms of Service” page receives PageRank? Absolutely not. You can embed internal links on that page and use it to point your visitors to your most important pages (like your root URL, your HTML sitemap, your contact page, or your eCatalogue home page). If you only put 1 link on your “Terms of Service” page, and every other page on your site links to it, that 1 link can become a very useful PageRank flowing tool.

Of course, you have to let the page accumulate PageRank in order to use it to maximize your PageRank flow.

According to Google’s AdWords keywords suggestion tool, “terms of service” experiences the most queries in the month of February. The highest volume month for “terms of service agreement” is May. According to Google Trends, searches for “terms of service” have increased in recent years. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can go look on Google yourself.

If people are searching for “terms of service agreement” and similar expressions, you have to ask yourself, are they searching for your terms of service? How easy is it to find your “unimportant” terms of service page?

Do a little keyword research before you try to sculpt PageRank on your Web site. Understand who your market is, because if you arbitrarily decide that your “About us” page, your “Contact us” page, or your “Terms of Service” page is not important without consulting your visitors and potential visitors, you’re making a huge gamble with your content and your site’s user experience.

Call that the SEO Slow Start method, if you will, because you’re not doing yourself any favors by blindly slapping “rel=’nofollow’” on pages that you arbitrarily decide are not important just because some SEO idiot tells you it’s safe to use “rel=’nofollow’” on your internal links.

Search engine optimization begins with keyword research. Amazingly, many SEOs don’t bother to look at “unimportant” keywords to learn just how many people may actually use them. So while you may not be competing for “contact info”, “terms of service”, “privacy policy”, and other useless pages, your visitors may very well be searching for those pages.

You cannot rely upon your internal navigation to work for everyone. Some people think in terms of “how do I search for this content” even though they have already reached a Web site through search.

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If you’re going to optimize for search, you have to understand how people search, where people search, and what they search for.

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If you can reasonably determine that no one would be searching your site for “contact info”, “terms of service”, “about us”, or other useless ‘overhead’ pages, do you have a compelling reason to try to “sculpt PageRank”?

Furthermore, if you’re using an XML sitemap or build inbound links to many of your deep pages (or if your content is compelling enough that other people link to your deep pages), you have no control over when the pages using nofollow on internal links will be indexed. Some of them may never be indexed. Worse, you may end up autonofollowing all of the outbound links on your deep content pages that have many external links.

What is your plan for ensuring that you don’t squander PageRank you receive from other sites?

If every page on your site is indexed such that it can be found for a reasonably common expression, then your site is most likely fully indexed in the Main Web Index. Your pages don’t need any more PageRank. Hence, you don’t need to sculpt PageRank.

If the only pages on your site that won’t come up for reasonably common expressions are duplicate pages, relatively empty dynamically-generated pages that serve little to no purpose, or other pages that don’t enhance your site’s visibility in search engines, you don’t need to sculpt PageRank.

If you are not in fact seeking to build a PageRank Trap (a link-worthy page to which only external links point but which is used to boost internal PageRank), then you most likely don’t need to sculpt PageRank.

Some people claim you’ll get more pages indexed by sculpting PageRank (and then may clarify that false statement by saying “you’ll get more important pages indexed by sculpting PageRank”). Using nofollow on your internal links will in no way ensure that you “get more pages indexed”. It may help you get more of your important pages indexed but there are more efficient ways of doing that.

However, before you start agonizing over whether your most important pages are indexed, have you checked to make sure that your opinion of which pages are your most important ones are the same pages your visitors feel are the most important ones?

People who are new to search engine optimization don’t know enough about keyword research, Web site structure, user behavior patterns, and PageRank to be attempting to sculpt it even with the most widely recommended page-by-page guides available.

If you’re telling people who cannot describe a typical user’s behavior on their site to use nofollow to sculpt PageRank and “get more (important) pages indexed)”, you’re handing out bad advice.

If you cannot describe the inherent pitfalls adequately (and so far no one really has), you’re in no position to be advising people to use nofollow on their internal links. Not only do they not know what they are doing, you don’t know what they are doing, either.

Some people get lucky with just about every stupid idea the SEO industry has picked up and passed around. That is how SEO mythology evolves.

If you really know how to design link pathways, you don’t need to resort to sculpting PageRank to ensure that your most important pages are indexed. The search engines will see your link structure and follow it to the logical conclusion that pages A, B, and C need to be indexed.

That’s the power of true search engine optimization. You lay a strong foundation with good architecture so that you can devote your time and effort to useful, meaningful tasks.

I’ve said all that really needs to be said on this topic. If people in the SEO community spend the next two years struggling to sculpt PageRank with nofollow, they’ll get what they ask for: poor indexing, low-quality visibility, and a lot of frustration. If there is going to be a Great Nofollow Debate, I think I’ll just move on.

If someday someone proves they can pull it off, I’ll be glad to take a look at their methodology. Right now, no one in the SEO industry actually has a credible methodology to talk about.

‘Nuff said.

See also:
The PageRank control myth and the nofollow for SEO myth

Matt Cutts, Michael Martinez, PageRank, and Link Flow