Internal links - No Follow?

[TravG]

In looking at GWT I have a lot of internal links to pages that I do not necessarily want a lot of links to - like my "terms page", "about us" page etc etc. I would rather have the "most" internal links to revenue generating pages. What is the best way to handle this?

I would say rel=nofollow but why would you ever want to tell google or other search engines not no follow an internal page? I would think that would look funny to them, like they may ask "why does this person not want us to follow internal links?" Am I being over paranoid about this? Anyone else have this problem and found a work around?

[dfiocch]

I would go with a "noindex,follow" tag instead of a "nofollow".

[universal4]

That might be a good choice dfiocch,

There has been much written over the years about pr sculpting, and when using no-follow on links, even if you are not doing it to sculpt pr it could give the appearance that you are, which may or may not have a detrimental effect.

In no way am I stating that pr is really important, it's just that in the past that is often where many of the discussions about using no-follow on internal links had led.

Rick
Universal4

[wonderpunter]

I no index follow.. after all your navigation links are usually still on display in most pages.. no reason to stop the flow

[martinseomcgarry]

Google bang on about natural, organic, authentic etc.

For me, there's no reason to No Follow internal links at all. If you set up multiple internal links to specific pages, its because at some point you are telling your visitor that the page in question is a resource they may find useful.

If you navigate a user to a page, you should navigate a search engine as well - that's a normal internal link process IMO

[TravG]

no index follow is what I am going to do. I should have thought of that myself so thanks!

I do not think PR is dead, its alive and kicking, the little green bar is just dead. We just so not know anymore what the PR of our pages are anymore.

[baldidiot]

AFAIK you can't sculpt link flow using nofollow - the 'power' of the page is divided by all links, regardless of whether they're follow or no follow.

Matt cutts did a few videos of this on youtube back in the day when page rank sculpting was all the rage.

[Bobby Sand]

I personally don't believe it will make a massive about of different whichever way you approach this. For any decent site, you'd expect the about us, terms and conditions etc and this adds to the authenticity of the site in a way. Areas I'd consider this for would be more along the lines of pagination etc..

[superme]

Why bother with no follow or no index any page of your site, even terms and privacy, it is not normal to make those pages no index or no follow, just let it be, when you see Amazon or any other brand with such tactics then do it, but I think you are focusing here in wrong direction

[TheGooner]

Agree with superme.

I do NOT believe that Google's intent with their algo is to have webmasters worrying about internal pages and putting no-follow or no-index.
Indeed the whole idea is nonsense - why would you link repeatedly to a page that you don't think is worth of indexing?

Some SEO experts might have written / said that you can / should sculpt PR or rankings this way - but they're selling snake oil IMO.

[TravG]

I am not worried about sculpting PR or any of that. My goal is to just make sure the pages that offer the most value to my visitors, ie reviews, bonuses etc, get the most internal links and best chances of being seen as the strongest pages in the website. While content is obviously the best way to do that, any little push to help Google know which pages are the ones I want my visitors to go to is a good thing, IMO.

A T&C's page may have the most links, and you would assume Google would know that page isnt very important because the content of that page doesn't match any quires in most cases, but why not help them know that. It is just like demoting a sitelink. Google just through the way they see web pages through links may think that page is important to the webmaster, but it isnt and that is why they allow you to demote a sitelink. Same kind of thinking here.

[dfiocch]

TravG,

according to Google's statements about Panda you should tag as "noindex" the "thin pages" (pages that doesn't add value to visitors such as profile pages or sorted lists or click-to-action pages and so on).

I have my T&C's page "noindexed" just because (i think) no one want a T&C's page on search results. I don't wont them, so...

What Google stasted, btw, it's a "tip" not "you must do".

Just do what you think it's better for your users. Period.

IMHO

[zalozite]

Hi, i will post a short explanation, that i find from Matt Cutts, specialist in google.

So should you use the nofollow attribute at all in your internal links? Google’s webmaster site recommends the use of nofollow in some scenarios:

Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index.

This stand is however completely different from what Matt Cutts has suggested in one of his recent videos.
Matt has unequivocally advised that web publishers should not use rel=nofollowwhen linking to any of their internal pages even if they don’t want to see those pages in search engines.
He didn’t share any specific reason that made Google to change their original stand on the use of nofollow in web pages but, as a publisher, what matters more to us is the current recommendation which is ” no nofollow on internal links.”

[brodog]

Interesting. I've been using nofollow to link to pages that are duplicates like common privacy or terms pages that I don't want indexed or crawled because they contain duplicate content. I also use the noindex metatag in the header of those pages and block them in robots.txt.

For me, its the duplicate content thing I want to avoid. Yeah, I know I should be creating unique privacy/terms pages for each site. But who has time to do that on a big network of sites?

This thread has made me re-think one side of this strategy.

The link to privacy and terms pages lives in the footer section of my sites and that gets copied to every page on the sites. Its a pretty common sight on the web. One solution would be to just include those links in the footer of the home page only. That would get around the multiple links problem.

PS: Easy to do in a static site but maybe not so easy in Wordpress. But I don't use Wordpress, so... easy for me.