In my last post I discussed the benefits of Link Juice to help boost your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).  Another element that is often overlooked when optimizing a site is that you can control which links on your site are followed by the search engine spiders.  One way to ensure control is by using the Nofollow Attribute in your anchors and links.

Using Nofollow carefully can be a highly beneficial strategy for keeping your page authority and relevance intact in the eyes of the search engine spiders.

Essentially, if you have pages that are doing well (have that authority and “Link Juice” with the search engines) you might want to be selective about which linked pages can partake in the Juice sharing.  By using the attribute rel=”nofollow” in any link, you are telling the search engine robots to “not follow” the link and in turn not associate your page with the page to which it links.  This has no affect on any visitors to your site clicking the link and arriving at the proper destination.  By using the Nofollow attribute, you are simply reserving the Link Juice for pages with which you really want to share.

Example of Nofollow: <a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>My Link</a>

External Links

Traditionally, using Nofollow in a link works extremely well for preventing spiders from following external links - especially on sites with many outgoing links, or sites that allow visitors to add their own links (i.e. blogs) - in order to prevent sharing your Link Juice with sites you want to link to while not sharing your authority.  For instance, bloggers often use Nofollow to prevent users from comment spamming “questionable” links within non-moderated comment areas.  In fact, Wikipedia has applied this attribute to all external links from all of their pages. 

Internal Links

Aside from linking to external sites, another lesser used yet very powerful approach to using the Nofollow attribute is to selectively link to internal pages within your own site. 

As a site grows in page number and content volume, it will inevitably have many pages that are “more important” than many of the others.  Some of these more important pages may also end up buried several directory levels deep into your site hierarchy (generally speaking, the closer a page is to the first level, the more likely it will be indexed and in turn perceived as being of higher importance to the search engines).  Nofollow links can be used to filter out links from higher level pages (or higher “Link Juice” pages) to less important pages to ensure that the “Link Juice” is reserved for the important pages and not being wasted on the lesser ones.   This “filtering through Nofollow” approach allows search engines to find the appropriate content while limiting their access to your lesser content.

The strategy of selective linking can also be used to ensure that like pages are linking to like pages - thus allowing the search engines to see the relevance of the linked pages to each other and in turn increase relevance and authority of these pages for the associated topic or keyword.  Thus, you can apply Nofollow to all links to other pages on your site except for a select few that direct the robots through your desired topic path.

Using the Nofollow attribute selectively to direct the search engine spiders through your site, if used correctly, can be a powerful tool allowing another level of control over how your content is indexed and how your Link Juice is shared.

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About The Author

Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist at Lyris. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance.

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