Question about the basics of nofollow and page juice

[smithaa02]

A number of people on this forum have stated that they have nofollow'ed large segments of their website to offset some of the spring changes google has rolled out.

My question is (maybe this is kind of basic) but wouldn't this leak juice? We're considering nofollowing a number of internal pages as well for our main company website, but I have read from Cutts that nofollowed links still dilute juice.

eg

Before nofollow say we have 10 links to internal pages from the homepage. For the sake of simplicity say we had 10 juice points to pass on for a total of 1 each. If we no-follow 5 of these links, we don't increase the remaining juice from 1 to 2, because of google's new policy, right?

The big worry then is that this would be 5 points of juice that would be lost into a black hole. Because normally those 5 points would have been passed onto subpages (minus decay) and those subpages would have passed on that juice as well including to the home page.

So ignoring the issue of external links altogether, if I no-follow some of my links I'm significantly losing aggregate juice for all pages, right? Because juice kind of ricochets around before it decays too far, no-following (especially from the homepage) would seem to me to be quite risky, yet it seems quite popular.

Am I missing something?

[aristotle]

You're right -- Adding nofollow tags will cause some of the "link juice" to disappear into a black hole.

In fact I don't see what you would gain by doing this anyway, especially on internal links.

[smithaa02]

Well this is advice from an SEO company we've hired. They say to better rank for a keyword that we are targeting (for the homepage), that we need to no-follow several of our homepage links that link (not directly to external websites) but to our pages that contain iframes that include these external websites. He says because we aren't nofollowing these homepage links that we are bleeding juice.

[wheel]

That's quite the SEO company you've got there.

If a page needs more link juice, the answer is to increase the incoming links, not screw with the outgoing links.

Plus, in addition to aristotle's point that nofollow doesn't allow you to hoard link juice completely anyway (perhaps not at all), there's lots of people here who suggest that linking out actually increases your rankings. i.e. some evidence that removing the effect of those links could lower your rankings. I don't know if that's true, but I'd buy it before I'd get into pagerank sculpting on my inner pages.

[tedster]

It's been over a year since Matt Cutts announced that this "old time" PR scuplting no longer works... and that the change happened in 2009 but no SEOs publicly mentioned it so he thought Google should.

PR Sculpting Doesn't Work and Internal NoFollow Can Harm Your Site [webmasterworld.com]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

It's been a year that my 'old time' nofollow sculpting hasn't worked on new sites but its still working on sites that had it in place before then. I suspect Google doesn't apply the new rules until it does a re-evaluation of the page and that doesn't seem to happen often on pages you don't make changes to. Moving forward it's best not to use nofollow on ANY link that points to ANY page on your domain, not even the privacy policy. (hey, if you can't couch for your own privacy policy...)

Sculpting isn't dead, if a page is of little importance to you but is getting a lot of Google love you can have links on it pointing to other pages to boost them a little. A word of warning about this however, Google seems to place full value on links that were in place when the page was first published and, in my experience, not to links that were placed there after that first crawl so plan in advance. I like to 'drain' rank from my category pages(which have sitewide sidebar links) by interlinking the articles within. Less goes to the categories, more to the articles, it works.

[smithaa02]

Thx everybody for the feedback...definitely now don't want to nofollow internal links.

How then do I get more juice for our home page for our key term ('Blue Widgets')? This SEO company has been link building for about 6 months but we haven't had any results (and this is for a lot of links). He thinks his backlinks are fine for quality and quantity and it is our site architecture that is the issue now. Now we have a decent sized site (~1000 pages+) and our homepage has about 100 links on it. It is possible our SEO guy has a point in that our money phrase 'Blue Widgets' is not being concentrated onto the homepage but is leaking out to our subpages? He really wants us to remove any unneeded links from the homepages to our subpages and to no-follow any of our dead end pages that link to external websites. Is he on to anything here?

[Planet13]

Is he on to anything here?

Or is he ON anything?

I look at the pages on my site that have the best inbound links and I change the content in it so that I can put an in-content text link back to the page I am trying to rank, right in the first paragraph.

What types of links has your SEO been getting for you?

When your SEO says that he has built high quality AND high quantity inbound links, then there is a good chance he is mistaken about one or both of those things.

but if you know the types of links he has been getting, that would be best.

[smithaa02]

The type of links have been mostly smaller somewhat natural looking sites (number of blogs). Probably an average of 3 page rank, very few other outgoing links competing with us. Total # of links...has to be over a thousand (in fact this surge of links in the past year has me worried about our link velocity). Many of the links actually look incredibly organic and a casual visitor could very well have no idea they are paid (they are in content and mesh with the website the link is on). Most of the links use 'Blue Widgets' as their anchor text but do vary with like 'Blue Widget Repair' and many links do link to our subpages to create diversity.

So I think quality is ok (although our link acquisition rate has been totally unnatural).

Getting back to on-site factors...can our own pages be competing amongst themselves for this 'Blue Widget' phrase? Does that how it work with google?