Tuning with rel=nofollow

[Tonearm]

I removed a fair number of pages from Google's index a while ago to make room for more content pages in the non-supplemental index. It seemed to work great. About 2 weeks ago I decided to try adding rel=nofollow to a lot of my internal links to focus Google on the real contextual links of each page in hopes of increasing the number of pages in the non-supplemental index. I added rel=nofollow to navigation links, duplicate links, and others. I've lost about 10% of my pages from the non-supplemental index.

Now I'm trying to figure out if less overall PR flow throughout my site has caused this, or if I just went too far and added rel=nofollow too aggressively.

What do you guys think?

[Johan007]

I do not understand the question. You set out to achieve your goals in the first paragraph and then contradicted your self in the second saying you did not want pages lost in the first place!

I have terrible grammar and sentence construction so like me take longer to write your post and check it makes sense and unambiguous.

[edited by: Johan007 at 9:38 am (utc) on Dec. 10, 2007]

[phranque]

matt cutts [mattcutts.com] has promised to blog on this exact subject in the "near future".

[Tonearm]

Johan,

We've got a 2-stage process here.

1. First I removed non-content pages from the non-supplemental index to make room for content pages. I did this by adding noindex tags (I should have mentioned this before). It worked.

2. Then I tried to optimize and simplify Google's link map of my site by adding rel=nofollow links to duplicate links and navigational links. I now have about 10% less pages in the non-supplemental index. Not a good result.

Now I'm trying to figure out if less overall PR flow throughout my site has caused this, or if I added rel=nofollow to some key links I shouldn't have.

[edited by: Tonearm at 3:14 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2007]

[Tonearm]

Has anyone else tried something similar to this?