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Michael: I seriously doubt anyone has conducted a survey. Dan Thies started the whole myth about these types of incidental pages being unimportant. He has a lot of people chasing their tails over nothing.

Most business sites WANT their “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages to be easily found in search results, and PageRank is not making that huge an impact on typical queries.

dodito:”There are topics that are of bigger interest/more important than others to users on your site. By addressing their needs, these topics will automatically flow to the top (i.e. in menus, linked to most frequently, right anchor text inside documents, and most often quoted on your own site etc. etc.). If you do this well, wouldn’t you address say 75 % of all necessary SEO requirements at the same time ?”

Michael: Search engine optimization is not exactly the same as Web site optimization. An optimally designed site might actually rank poorly in search results for many relevant queries, even if it has the most extensive content.

Good Web site structure has to look at more than just what is included in the navigation system. For example, on a 1,000-page site you’ve probably organized your content into categories. You want to emphasize cross-promotion between categories that have easily recognized connections. That doesn’t have to have much if any impact on search results (for example, I use Javascript banners on Xenite.Org to lighten the load on my server).

A robust Web site should employ all the tools available and necessary to address the audience without regard for what search engines will do. I’m not saying a Web site should disregard search engine rules — rather, search engines are only part of the overall Web promotion picture.

wyliet: “Ok so the nofollow tag might not work (speculation both ways really), but do you think it should work in this way, to help users sculpt page rank?”

Michael: No. To “sculpt PageRank” you have to be able to measure it in a timely fashion. That simply isn’t possible.

Using nofollow on internal links is nothing more than a time-wasting SEO fad. You might as well be submitting links to a free-for-all page.

wyliet: “Should web developers be able to show content that is more relevant to user’s searches by using this tag?”

Michael: Rel=nofollow has only one function: to hide content from search engines. You’re telling them not to follow the link, not to count the link, not to treat the content as if there is any relationship between it and your page.

If you want to show search engines which content is more relavent to the queries you’re targeting, point more unrestricted links toward that content.

My complaints about the poor quality of Google’s search results stem from Google’s willful, deliberate segregation of the Web into two categories: Preferred Pages (Main Web Index) and Supplemental Pages. Preferred Pages are always shown first in search results regardless of how much more relevant the Supplemental Pages may be to queries.

You cannot improve the quality of Google’s search results by using rel=nofollow on your “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages.

If you’ve made it possible for your users to create profile pages where they can link out to their own Web sites, you might want to consider putting rel=nofollow on outbound links so that you don’t unwittingly help promote spam sites.

But telling search engines not to follow your internal links is like calling a press conference and then telling the media to go away. “There’s a story here but I’m not going to show it to you.”

Hence, you might as well NOT put those pages on your site.

That is with an intermediate level of SEO at best. I am not sure I understand how it can be possible you feel “competition” from an “about us” page if that is not what you want, and why you would want to resort to PR to influence that?

About cross promoting: we (will) do this all the time: there are quite a few pages that score in the long tail. Well.. we just thought about which topics should be of interest to them, and in our new template, we (will) point them to these pages first. Just in case the long tail page does not deliver.

Is it so hard to think what people would want when they get to the About Us page, and point them to these other pages as “suggestions” ? Is that really less efficient/effective/user-friendly/lesser ROI ?

I am a bit surprised how algorithmic people think in the SEO community.

I have a question:

There are topics that are of bigger interest/more important than others to users on your site. By addressing their needs, these topics will automatically flow to the top (i.e. in menus, linked to most frequently, right anchor text inside documents, and most often quoted on your own site etc. etc.). If you do this well, wouldn’t you address say 75 % of all necessary SEO requirements at the same time ?

Michael: You may cite my post.

If you had something else in mind, feel free to elaborate on the details you’d like to see.

Halfdeck: “Yeah, let’s just turn the About Us page into a Site Map.”

Michael: That’s pretty much what I would do for any Web site whose “About Us” page actually shows up first in the search results for anything other than “About so-and-so”. It would be a great opportunity to cross-promote other content on the Web site, provide a little link anchor text, and to show the search engines where the PageRank should go next.

Yeah, let’s just turn the About Us page into a Site Map.

citation needed