SEO Tycoon

**watchitmister** · 07-01-2010, 09:39 PM

I have been reading another post about NoFollow links and was going to post the question on there but decided to make it its own separate animal.

Let's say you have a page with say 15 links on it, but the majority of the links are not really keywords or pages that you would really want to rank high for in the search engines. Maybe they are pages for suggestions, advertising, etc..

Would it be smart to make those links nofollow so that it increases the link juice passed on to the other links on that same page?

How much impact will it have on search results?

**Social-Media** · 07-02-2010, 06:53 PM

Quote:

Would it be smart to make those links nofollow so that it increases the link juice passed on to the other links on that same page?

This no longer works. People used to do this and it was called PR sculpting. But not so long ago Matt Cutts announced that Google had actually changed their algorithm about a year prior so that if a page has a PR of 100 pts, a total of 10 outbound links, 5 of those 10 links being nofollowed... then the 5 followed links now get approximately 100/10 PR pts instead of 100/5 PR pts which was the case previously.

You can see the post from Cutts here (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/). Pay particular attention to the paragraph just before the first Q & A:

Quote:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

So if the pages you are nofollowing are actually pages on your own site you are actually hurting your site because the PR that would have been passed out on the NOFOLLOW links to other pages on your site just get wasted... they go into a black hole... and can therefore not be passed out from the target page of the nofollow link to other pages on your site.

Nofollow should be used to link to sites you don't trust or are not willing to vouche for... which is what it was originally designed to do to combat comment spam.

**bigcat1967** · 07-03-2010, 04:10 PM

Quote:

I have been reading another post about NoFollow links and was going to post the question on there but decided to make it its own separate animal.

Let's say you have a page with say 15 links on it, but the majority of the links are not really keywords or pages that you would really want to rank high for in the search engines. Maybe they are pages for suggestions, advertising, etc..

Would it be smart to make those links nofollow so that it increases the link juice passed on to the other links on that same page?

How much impact will it have on search results?

watchitmister: yeah, Social is right. Unfortunately, there is a lot of junk on SEO forums and you have to be careful what you read. Fortunately, this forum's moderator (Chris) will get on ppl when they talk non-sense, and I think that's why webmaster-talk is a very informative place to learn SEO.

If I were you, I would read google's blog as well as Matt Cutt's blog (even though at times he might be telling little fibs himself - but that's for another time & place). Most of all, you have to experiment with what works for you.

Good luck in the future.

**lynxus** · 07-03-2010, 04:39 PM

SEO will allways be a set of tried and tested myths.

With googles results taylored to peoples locations, What they browse etc.. Its going to get worse for SEO "experts"

Following the decent rule of:
- Have good content that people actually want to read.
- Keep your keywords simple and to the point, Dont over stuff and keep your text in plain english ( Ie: dont drop keywords left right and centre. )

You will be best off with just these.

If done correctly,
Backlinks , PR and all the goodies of social networks will come your way by themselves.

**chrishirst** · 07-03-2010, 05:13 PM

Ever since Google became "popular" there has been these "PR Sculpting", "Link Flow directing" and other such crazy schemes with plausible sounding names, all with the sole purpose of "convincing" Search Engines some pages are more "important" than others.
And of course SE "spokespersons" do their best to muddy the waters as much as possible.

There is a very easy way to let SEs know which pages are important and which are not.

Link to the "important pages" from as many other pages as possible and as many times as possible, but don't link as much to the "unimportant pages".

It's a simple as that, no need for odd tricks with a rel="nofollow" attribute, "nofollow" in the robots meta, robots.txt tricks or anything like that.

**jamesfu** · 08:12 AM

james_fu@ecpss.com

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