How to Manage Your PageRank Flow Using the Nofollow Tag

The official Google blog announced recognition of the”nofollow tag” in January 2005. This tag did not gain widespread awareness until Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson to the SEO world, further clarified its many uses in his blog.

This post explains an excellent alternative use for the “nofollow” tag — helping to divert “link juice” to the most important pages and giving stronger link flow to improve your SEO results. What is the “nofollow” tag? The nofollow tag tells Google spiders not to pass the popularity value of a second-generation internal or external link to the page being linked.

This is best applied to specific internal pages, outbound links, paid links, or pages with duplicated content. The “nofollow tag” is not to be confused with the “noindex” tag, which prevents a page from being indexed by search engines.

An Alternative Use of the “Nofollow” Tag.

Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin (SEOMOZ) summarized what Cutts conveyed when asked if using the “nofollow” tag was a good tool for preventing wasted PageRank. “Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages.”

If you think of your website as a grapevine growing, and your PageRank as the available nutrients, you can do what grape growers do –prune the dominant vines in order for the already thriving clusters to flourish.

Once you have established what vines (pages) are producing the most fruit (SERP listings, traffic, conversions), use the “nofollow” tag to prune any pages that are not necessary for keyword searches.

You can also use a “nofollow” tag to divert less relevant pages that may be competing with each other. Some of the most common pages that are useful for your visitors and search engine trust factors, but not necessarily for appearing in qualified searches, may include your Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Links page, Login pages, and others.

Suppose you are linking to these pages from your homepage.

In that case, you may be leaking some value that would be better directed to service description areas, a blog, how-to articles, and other valuable, content-rich pages. Although I have known about the tag for a while, I plan on using it a lot more in the next few months as I do my best to improve the link flow for our client websites.

For many of our marketing clients, we have used the most powerful SEO techniques. Now is the time when all the little things count.

Can you think of any other standard pages that might be a candidate for the “nofollow” tag?