Index follow on menu links

[Puma]

Using firefox seo I see that many sites have no index no follow for their websites menu items. I'm a bit confused as it was my understanding that webmasters would want google to follow the menu links to other pages on the site. Could someone shed some light on this for me.

Thanks

[onlinebingofinder]

it always seems to me that this is down to personal taste, i don't think there is one size fits all - as with everything in SEO - it depends on you and your site and how you want to 'link juice' to flow throughout. For example i would no follow my contact page, there is no point in leaking valuable page rank to this page, no one will ever search for your contact page, you want the flow of juice to go into pages that you want people to find. Thats how i think of it at least.

The other thing i have seen is people linking from a page, to the same page which till this day i cannot see the logic in but i know if one person usually does it, the rest will blindly follow

[Puma]

Good advice for sure, I figured link to unimportant pages such as the contact page would be a waste but what about menu items pointing to , let say, my top 10 favorite casinos. Would you index follow that menu item?

Found this piece of information in my search

Robots - When a spider from a search engine reaches your site, you can actually instruct the spider to index content in different ways by using the Robots drop down menu in Joomla! 2.5.

Index, Follow = the spider will index the entire site - the front page and every other page on the site.
No Index, Follow = the spider will not index the front page, but will index every other page on the site.
Index, No Follow = the spider will index the front page, but will not index any other page on the site.
No Index, No Follow = the spider will not index the front page and will not index any page on the site.

Please note that just because you tell a search engine to index some content and not other content, it may not pay attention to you. Trusted search engines will understand this code and will follow directions, but other search engines may not be able to understand the code or simply may not care.

[universal4]

Build your site for visitors, and to me that means you would want all pages indexed and links to all those pages followed.

If the pages are there for the visitor to see then let the engines know they exist.

Rick
Universal4

[Puma]

Excellent advice Rick. Ty

[lots0]

The folks that are using no-follow/index on internal pages like that are trying to 'sculpt' PageRank in a wasted effort to either stop their PR from leaking to other sites or to increase their pages PR.

This worked for SEO about 30 months ago, but google has made a few tweaks and trying to 'sculpt' pagerank can hurt your ranking more than help it now.

Just one more example of why it is stupid(IMO) to chase SEO. As soon as a SEO 'trick' is found, the googlies start figuring out how to shut it down.

[Puma]

So perhaps my main focus should be loads of unique content/articles and let Google just do its thing.

[lots0]

So perhaps my main focus should be loads of unique content/articles and let Google just do its thing.

Yup...
Good content along with logical site structure and navigation are a winning combo.

[Ord Allenbea]

Keep in mind that no follow does not mean Google or any other spider will not follow the link. The no follow attribute was originally created for affiliate links and advertising links. While Google and others will still follow these links, there is nobody that can tell you what amount of credit, if any, is given to a no follow link (only the search engines themselves know this).

Your main focus should be on quality content which includes semantically related words, proper grade level (flesch kincaid), proper significant word ratio percentage, and etc.

[derekjay]

In line with what L0tso mentioned, this is all in an effort to "sculpt" the flow of PageRank and link equity. Whether or not there's any value is debatable, but I would recommend nofollowing and noindexing any duplicate content on your site (ie, generic terms & conditions, privacy policy, etc).

Again, thats just my opinion and some will disagree.