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There has been a lot said recently about the effectivness of the rel="nofollow" attribute with regards to internal PR.
Many SEO professionals believe that the rel="nofollow" is the golden nugget for funneling PR from non themed pages (contact, terms, clients, login pages etc.) to their most important on-topic pages. The Efffect? The PR that was allocated to the non-themed pages will then be passed on to the on-topic pages, thus helping rankings of the latter.
I can see how this would work short term, but I can also see how in the long term the SE's will treat this as a black hat technique as the site owner is effectively manipulating PR.
An alternative to 'nofollow' would be to use a robots.txt file and exclude spiders from indexing the non-themed pages - the big question is though would this technique accomplish the same goal and funnel PR from the non-themed to the on-topic pages?
IMO the robots.txt method will accomplish PR funnelling and is the truly ethical way to go, you may disagree though. Let's discuss!
Thanks for reading! Lee
robots.txt is a much more effective and safe way to block unimportant pages from getting a share of link juice and PR.
nofollow tags will go in vain if you have external links pointing to those pages. Robots.txt is absolutely safe that way.
<meta name="robots" content="none">
What about:
<meta name="robots" content="none">
It will also work - though it will take a lot of time putting this tag into all the pages you want to block from the bots.
Robots.txt is the easiest, fastest and safest tool for disallowing pages to be crawled by the search engines.
