tedster - 12:46 pm on Jul 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

If we take Google at their word, then the rel="nofollow" attribute is simply not followed at all, not even for url discovery. That means the target url cannot play a part in circulating PageRank through the site. So indiscriminate use of the tag might choke off parts of the site from their rightful prominence.

in contrast, the robots meta tag will NOT stop the url from accumulating PageRank. If you use "noindex,follow" as the attribute value, then the page will still help to circulate PageRank, too.

I've been with pageoneresults on the internal rel="nofollow" issue for quite a while - it just felt wrong to me, so I didn't use it. However, I have been hearing about some successes from various SEO folks, so I'm curious. Googlers like Matt Cutts keep talking about it in a cautious but postive light, and that heightens my curiosity.

I'm currently working with one team to develop a large site High 6 figuires of urls at launch) thats due to go live in early fall. There are some flows in the site wireframe that look to me to be wasting PR circulation in a major way, especially since there are so many deep pages that we want to get cooking.

So I'm thinking of launching the site with a few rel="nofollow" attributes just to see what happens. For one thing, those urls will not be available through any other links anywhere, so I'll get to test if Google indexes those urls or not, even as url-only. If anything interesting shows up, I'll be sire to report on it.

[edited by: tedster at 1:31 pm (utc) on July 9, 2008]