mattrix - 10:04 pm on Mar 29, 2007 (gmt 0)

I overused the rel="nofollow" attribute on my site at one stage and when I removed a lot of the nofollow links my rankings most definitely improved.

My reason for doing it in the first place was to stop the indexing of pages on my site which could be perceived as duplicate content.

A more specific description of the pages is in question is this - imagine lists of items with each item having a 100 summary. These items are pulled from the DB and I had different "views" of looking at or categorising these items. I thought that having all the different category pages (the category pages of course have overlapping items) indexed was a bad thing from a duplicate content point of view and also from the perspective of dampening PR. I planned to direct all proper links to only the one category view page so as to increase it's ranking (I justified this as rather having one page in the top 10 than 10 pages in the top 50).

Somewhere my thinking was flawed, however, because when I eventually removed the nofollows and allowed all pages to be indexed my rankings got better.

I have still got nofollows on certain pages though e.g. privacy policy, contact us, terms and conditions that just wouldn't be relevant from the point of view of being listed as search results.

This isn't particularly conclusive but maybe some of you will find it useful.