Today’s post is written by a local-to-me guy, Zach Roth. He’s an SEO expert coming to us from SEOP, a search engine optimization firm in Orange County. His myth-busting is right on…have a read.
Of all the misconceptions and myths fluttering about the SEO industry, this has to be one of the top repeat offenders. If I had 5 cents for every time someone told me they were planning to block a page on their website by adding a “No-Follow†tag to it, I’d probably have about $10.85. That’s a good bit of coin for simply witnessing a sadly confused and frustrated search pioneer at work. That’s why I’m going to prove to you that a no-follow tag is more like a piece of chewing gum than anything else, bust Myth #7, and show you the steps TO follow to properly incorporate this crucial SEO element into your site.
Let’s first start by directly addressing the common myth that is often muttered from a webmasters lips:
Myth #7: “I don’t want this page getting indexed, so I’ll just no-follow all links pointing to that page.â€
The no-follow tag has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a page will get indexed into Google. In no way, shape, or form does this tag “hide†anything from Google.
Instead, this tag simply tells Google “Do not pass any authority to the page I am linking toâ€. It is a tool which web masters and SEOs can use to help control the flow of authority through the site.
So what if I don’t want Google to know about certain pages?
With regards to blocking Google from indexing the page: Google indexes very aggressively, there really is no way to 100% for sure hide something on your server from their spiders. The best suggestion I could make is in addition to the meta NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW tags to the head tag of a page is writing a proper robots.txt block as well.
Whipping your PageRank into shape using no-follow tags
Using the no-follow tag on specific links throughout your website is also called PageRank sculpting. Ultimately, it allows us to divert the authority that is saturating unnecessary pages we don’t care about ranking, and re-consolidate it to strengthen the pages we actually WANT to rank.
When I’m explaining the no-follow tag to people, I like to paint a quick portrait in their minds that I often find helps. Just for a second, pretend that the inbound links (also called backlinks) pointing to your website are droplets of rain pouring down into a series of buckets stacked like a pyramid. Water is literally the authority, PageRank, or “link juice†passed to a website. Some of these drops (or links) will be fatter and carry more weight, or authority, while others will be rather weak and not contribute to the total volume of the buckets.
Imagine this rain is all flowing in to the very top bucket first, the homepage. This first bucket is completely riddled with holes (internal links) through which the water passes to the buckets below (interior category and subcategory pages). The authority hits the homepage and flows through the links accordingly like a stream of water.
In this scenario, a no-followed tag would literally equate to the piece of gum you clog one of the holes with to prevent water from flowing to the specific bucket below. What this does is help water to build up in the bucket above.
When thinking of PageRank like water hitting your homepage, and then literally flowing through all of the internal links on your pages; we see that the no-follow tag really is an authority dam. With this in mind, it would be senseless for us to waste our precious “water of authority†by dumping it in to pages we could care less about ranking such as:
- Pages that are primarily image or flash based
- Any sort of dynamic login page, registration pages, forgotten password pages
- Pages containing submit forms and request quote pages
- Terms and Conditions
- Shipping Policy
- Privacy Policy, etc.
- Any other irrelevant or content-less pages
The proper way to incorporate this tag is by applying it in the rel property of an A tag for which you do not want to pass authority. Therefore, if I was wanting to no-follow the privacy policy on my site I would craft every link pointing to it on my entire site to look like this:
<a href="http://www.domain.com/privacy-policy/" rel="nofollow">Privacy Policy</a>
Whether you are hiring a professional search engine optimization firm, or planning to take on tackling SEO yourself, please take a minute to ensure you aren’t wasting your precious site authority by letting it leak into meaningless pages. Use the no-follow tag on your site not to prevent Google from indexing any pages, but rather to tell its spiders to not pass any link juice to them. You’ll thank yourself later when you see your target keyword rankings in the SERPs for your more important pages.
5 Comments
Love it when I can actually understand SEO concepts. Thanks for making the concept approachable & implementable.
Zach did do a great job. I’ve never heard the drops in a bucket analogy before, but it’s definitely a keeper.
Sarah,
What a great post. I’ve NEVER understood the “nofollow” thing until now. Thanks to Zach and to you for another myth-busting post!
Heather
Thank you all for the positive comments. I’m excited that people are now understanding better the “no-follow” tag and its true purpose and value to SEO. If you walk away after reading the post with a clearer picture of the way authority flows through sites and how the no-follow can be used to sculpt site authority, my task in busting the “no-follow” myth has been a success.
Thanks again to Sarah for the opportunity.
Zach Roth
This actually a myth itself as clarified by Cutts recently. Nofollow acts like a blackhole, the water flows out but not to the otherside. Therefore ’sculpting’ doesn’t work. Internally there is no reason to use it.