Sheep leading more sheep.

I wonder how Cutts & co. are going to like the outcome of this debacle.

Michael, of course not, and that’s exactly what I wrote:

“True, Google’s index has been volatile lately (with reports of traffic spikes, dropped pages, etc), and like you say I’d have to undo the changes and reapply them to be sure”

Still, one week since I implemented a modified Third Level Push on seo4fun.com, I’m seeing a 40% increase in index penetration,…

And what is the connection between what you’ve done and what you’re seeing, Half? Just because you do something doesn’t mean that is the reason a search engine changes its index.

I can sit around and do nothing with Xenite.Org and watch its number of indexed pages go up and down all year long. I basically do just that. I add content and once or twice a year I modify the design of some sections but for the most part it coasts and there are fluctuations in rankings, referrals, indexed pages, etc.

There are four reasons your search visibility changes:

1. You do something with your pages
2. Other people do something with their pages
3. The search engines do something with their data
4. People search for something different

It’s not as easy to show that the changes you make to your site have a direct impact on changes in the search index as just doing something and seeing what happens.

Showing cause and effect in SEO is a very difficult, tedious process.

…though I don’t think its realistic for people to aim to rank on the front page for ‘contact us’,…

No one should be competing for “contact us” but anyone who has a site search had better make sure the “contact us” query works on their content.

Still, one week since I implemented a modified Third Level Push on seo4fun.com, I’m seeing a 40% increase in index penetration, increase in rank for many odd-ball keywords, like “supplemental results”, and increase in hits to low-end pages.

Sure, my sites only ~150 pages big, though another site I’m working on with 2,000+ pages is also seeing an increase in index penetration.

True, Google’s index has been volatile lately (with reports of traffic spikes, dropped pages, etc), and like you say I’d have to undo the changes and reapply them to be sure, but my site’s ranking and number of pages in the main index haven’t changed all that much this year until a week ago.

I don’t advocate using nofollows on links to TOS, Contact Us, About Us pages (though I don’t think its realistic for people to aim to rank on the front page for “contact us”, though, unless they’re prepared to outrank sun, cnn, msnbc, wikipedia, and reuters). First, people looking for your contact info may come through some of those pages. Second, I have a few people link directly to my “About Me” page.

Third, and most important, I recommend using nofollow on internal links only when you want to keep the target URL in the main index but modify the amount of PageRank flowing to it.

If you want to completely block PageRank flowing into a URL, use robots.txt. If you want to keep a URL out of the index, use META Noindex. If you want to reduce PageRank flowing into a page (e.g. the Home page – which usually has more than enough PageRank to stay in the main index), use nofollow.

….that’s the whole point. You want the destination to be indexed and receive PageRank. If you don’t want either of those things to happen, use robots.txt or META noindex instead.