rel="nofollow" for internal links

[Broadway]

I was revisiting this thread about Matt Cutts statements regarding the use of rel="nofollow" in link anchors.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Is there anything new to report on this topic? Further clarification from Matt Cutts?

Is it considered appropriate to use rel="nofollow" on internal links that point to site "administrative" pages (such as Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, etc...) as a way of minimizing PR bleed from those pages that link to these administrative pages?

[tedster]

That linked thread in your post is the latest official word - I didn't even hear a murmur at PubCon. We have had some reports here of people using rel="nofollow" internally and then seeing ranking problems soon after. I'd say you should be careful of breaking PR circulation and orphaning pages, or isolating sections of a site.

[phranque]

i spoke to matt on friday at pubcon and he said he would be posting a review of this subject on his blog soon.

[adamxcl]

At Pubcon in a site review session, Matt did say to put "nofollow" on pages that you don't need pagerank juice going to, such as privacy policy, admin pages and so on. He said you can funnel pagerank through selected links and pages. Kind of surprised me to hear it so plain. I also asked him privately about "nofollow" on my site for certain reasons.

End result of conversation is a major change to my site adding nofollow to many pages that aren't really relevant to ranking for anything.

[nedguy]

grrrr

I have a fiercely independent travel directory. I specifically do not sell links (paid review only) and I strongly recomend every site I link to (whole purpose of site).

For this reason I have been stoically resisting putting Google condoms on my links... until this week.

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Google simply isn't clever enough to recognise that a directory with an e-commerce page is anything other than an evil link seller.

So are you telling me I now have to go back through the site putting condoms on every internal link as well, just to please the Internet playground bully who, again, isn't clever enough to recognise the difference?

[glengara]

I wouldn't use nofollow on internals, I'd put more care into the internal architecture....

[nedguy]

"I'd put more care into the internal architecture.... "

Could you expand that thought?

Relative v absolute?

Tree hierachy v flat folder?

Something else?

thanks

[wheel]

Matt did say to put "nofollow" on pages that you don't need pagerank juice going to, such as privacy policy, admin pages and so on.

Another new use for nofollow?

No thanks. My contact us page is trusted content. Does nobody here ever do a search for a business by phone number or street address, or even 'company name city name"? I do it all the time. Pull that info out of the index and suffer the loss of probably the finest of targetted traffic. Personally, I want that information up high on my site's list of important pages so that I rank at the top for those kinds of searches. Not ranking right at the top for a search like that gives one kind of an icky feeling.

This nofollow thing has some serious bite-back potential. It's been pushed by the SE's, then twisted by them for their own purposes, and is now being twisted again. What if some bright SEO person figures out a way to twist the use of it to get better rankings (this thread being a small step towards that)? Then they'll have a monster on their hands. And I AM going to say 'I told you so' :).

[glengara]

"Could you expand that thought?"

I'm wary of "channeling" PR as IMO it signals SEO involvement so I prefer simply to restrict by numbers.

[adamxcl]

I was kind of surprised by the channeling aspect of pagerank as well. When Matt mentioned it, it was so far away from the original aspect of when it as created that I was taken aback. But that is what it has evolved to, "do you want to share your pagerank with this page?" I can understand it now if that is what one is supposed to do. Pump up content pages and devalue certain pages because people aren't searching for "privacy policy" in general terms.

As far as contact pages go, a link from the main page or a couple pages would keep it indexed. But maybe it doesn't need to get pagerank juice from all 40k pages on a site? That's how I took it. I wouldn't alienate any page.

[jomaxx]

Presumably that contact page has the usual navigational links, so the PR can flow right back out to the rest of your website with little friction. I've personally never seen the need to micromanage PR on this level.