I would like to improve ranking of a few pages in my site at the expense of the rest.

In my site cozyworldDOTca I have a sitemap for visitor that has links to all the pages in my site. Would the sitemap alone be sufficient for search engines? Can I put nofollow into most of the links in the navbar? BTW, I also have a sitemap for engines as well.

Thanks in advance for the help.

gm

P.S.Currently I am switching from one type of nav bar to another. I know, it's a bit confusing right now.

Ok so you want to tell search engines that you don't TRUST the links to your own pages and you think it will HELP??????

Why would you want to put a no follow for the nav bar?

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Ok so you want to tell search engines that you don't TRUST the links to your own pages and you think it will HELP??????

Chris,

This is not about don't TRUST, at least the way Matt Cutt sees it

Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. .... There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery.

in http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions...gles-spam-guru

In my post I was just wondering if only one page with links to every other page in the site would be sufficient for a search engines to discover all those other pages. I'd like to preserve the rank of a few main pages.

Thanks

Matt cutts doesn't speak for Yahoo or MSN or ASK

Originally Posted by firesign

Why would you want to put a no follow for the nav bar?

firesign,

Every outbound link passes a part of the page value to the target page. I do not want to pass rank from the landing page to Privacy or About Us pages.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Matt cutts doesn't speak for Yahoo or MSN or ASK

Good point. I've never thought of it since traffic from Google to my site far exceeds combined traffic from all others. Thanks.

Were there any direct indication that others do stigmatize nofollow links?

Every outbound link passes a part of the page value to the target page. I do not want to pass rank from the landing page to Privacy or About Us pages.

The logic of this still completely escapes me. Having a nofollow value on your own links to what you deem "unimportant" pages, doesn't give the rest of the links more [whatever] to share around, but it does ensure that some pages have less [whatever] to give back into the site, thereby potentially weakening the sites overall linking "juice"

More reading on internal + nofollow
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=16956

It seems reasonable to me. If you have 100 pages, and 100 internal links, 1 to each, then each page gets 1 % of whatever value said page has. If you kill half the links (and it seems as if nofollow allows that while leaving the actual links behind) then you have 50 internal links, which leaves the same amount of respect or whatever you want to call it to go around, but dotes 2 % on each page you've left behind.

And it makes sense that your About Me page would be less valuable to you than to a sales page.

This assumes PR is divided equally among internal links like we believe it is among links to outside sites. That may or may not be the case.

Search engines, or at least one of them, seem to like sites with lots of valid pages. Your About page may be doing you more good than harm. If you're able to nearly kill it off in Google's eyes, then it stops being able to much help your real pages. I'd personally expect a wash at the end of the day.

And no, I don't think any SE punishes nofollow links per se. Some don't know what nofollow is and treat all links equally, while others ignore nofollow links. I don't think any of them subtract ranking for every nofollow you get tho. I don't think any assume every nofollow link is a blog or Wikipedia spam attempt.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

More reading on internal + nofollow
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=16956

Chris,

Thank you for the excellent link. It cleared smog in my head. I'd like to quote Robert from the link you provided.

it sounds like it makes sense to me to use the NOFOLLOW tag. ... The page that contains the link does not "give up" an PR but what it gives is a "vote" based on its own PR and how many pages it "votes for " using links. So if a page "votes' for only 3 pages rather than 4, the PR of the home page distrubutes its PR in a more concentrated manner.

Since getting a top Google position rely's heavily on page reputation and PR it only makes sense to control the PR of inside pages if we can.

I was wrong on giving up PR, but still it does make sense to use nofollow tag.

By the way, this exactly what the famous formula shows

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

copied from http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#pr

Thanks for the link.

gm

Originally Posted by gm10

I was wrong on giving up PR, but still it does make sense to use nofollow tag.

Value for the rel(ationship) attribute.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

Value for the rel(ationship) attribute.

John, thanks. Also thanks for your previous post.

gm

I nofollow the tag cloud on my blog, and put those urls in my robots.txt file.

Originally Posted by gm10

I would like to improve ranking of a few pages in my site at the expense of the rest.

That hasn't really been my experience. My tag pages didn't rank for anything ... or at least they never sent traffic. I'm not sure whether they rank. The same is the case with my category pages. I haven't decided whether to 'hide' those from spiders yet, but they don't bring any traffic.

The point is less to improve the ranking for the rest of the site as to not throw a few dozen copies of the same content, slightly rearranged, to the search bots. It's a little of both ... I wouldn't bother if I didn't think there was some potential benefit for me. But that's more about not giving the wrong impression.

I don't know how many search engines - and potentially other systems - look positively, negatively, or indifferently at nofollow. But I do know wild cards in the path aren't part of the robot exclusion protocol, even if Google accepts them.

Anyway ... if you have concerns about whether there's a stigma attached to nofollow, use javascript.

throw a few dozen copies of the same content, slightly rearranged, to the search bots.

I wish. :{

In my post I was just wondering if only one page with links to every other page in the site would be sufficient for a search engines to discover all those other pages. I'd like to preserve the rank of a few main pages.

Thanks

Yes it is.

Originally Posted by phppoddotcom

[u]
Yes it is.

Just when I gave up. You are the best.

Well with only one link they might be crawled a couple of times

But it is highly unlikely they will stay in the SE index

The logic of this still completely escapes me. Having a nofollow value on your own links to what you deem "unimportant" pages, doesn't give the rest of the links more [whatever] to share around, but it does ensure that some pages have less [whatever] to give back into the site, thereby potentially weakening the sites overall linking "juice"

More reading on internal + nofollow
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=16956

I read through parts of that thread and some of the assumptions seem wrong to me. I'm one who believes using nofollow on some internal links of your website can be beneficial.

It was mentioned several times in that thread that "Attaching rel=nofollow to a link shows that you don't trust the content at the other end of the link, or don't want to be associated in a positive way with the site you are linking to, or even that you haven't even looked at the content the link refers to"

In my opinion, Google created nofollow for two reasons and that was to combat against blog spam for the sole purpose of increasing search engine rankings and to reduce the buying and selling of text links in general.

The problem is that it lumps the good links with the bad. For example, we sell text link advertisements here on webmaster to other relevant websites.

I "trust" these advertisers. These links are not spammy. These links are relevant ads. We now use nofollow on all our text link advertisers not because we don't trust or endorse these website's but rather because Google will penalize your website if you don't.

People who talk about "bleeding PageRank" don't know what they are talking about, but even among that crowd, most of them agree that you would WANT to use your internal linkage to puff up your PageRank.

So, anyone who advises you to use REL=NOFOLLOW on your internal linkage REALLY doesn't know what they are talking about.

The author of that newsletter is misinforming his readers, and it's advice you can safely disregard.

You cannot "bleed" PageRank. And you certainly only hurt yourself by telling search engines that you have unimportant pages by using REL=NOFOLLOW when linking to your own pages. You might as well stamp them as "SPAMMY, CRUMBY, AND NOT WORTH INDEXING" because that is what you are telling the search engines who honor REL=NOFOLLOW.

Links on a WebPage flow Page Rank through other links on that page (internal and external). Therefore, the more links you have on a page, the more your Page Rank is split among these links.

So what is wrong with adding nofollow to the links on your privacy policy and then adding a NoIndex tag on that specific page? You are then not flowing any Page Rank to that page and because you used a "noindex" tag Google should not be indexing that page anyway.

Also, using nofollow will not prevent Google from indexing a webpage on your website. It just tells Google not to flow any Page Rank or Trust Rank to that link (and just because I don't say "I trust you," does not mean "I distrust you." I just means I'm indifferent.

Please correct me if I'm wrong and I could be.

Tim I agree with you. I think we're long past the idea that nofollow is only meant to say you don't trust the page on the other side of the link. Maybe it was originally defined that way, but Google has certainly changed that view when they insisted on using it for advertising.

Nofollow can be used as a way to increase the flow of link juice or PR into one page at the expense of another. That makes sense in some cases. I have a login page on my site where clients can access old invoices and pay bills. I need to link to it so clients can easily find it, but there isn't any reason to have that page show up in search results. Why have the links increase the value of the page in Google.

So why not nofollow links to that page and redistribute the value of the links to other pages I'm linking to.

Originally Posted by vangogh

So why not nofollow links to that page and redistribute the value of the links to other pages I'm linking to.

Exactly.