When you think of a link with the “NoFollow” attribute, your first thought is likely that of a worthless link to your site. While having the NoFollow tag applied to external links does diminish the value of that link in terms of your site’s Pagerank and SEO, effective use of the NoFollow tag is essential to use within your internal link structure. There are probably several pages on your website that contain little to no relevant information or content, while still benefiting from the flow of link juice (or Pagerank) within your site. An example of such a page would be a registration or login page.
By altering the structure of your site’s internal links, you can effectively stop your valuable link juice from being consumed by these irrelevant pages. The easiest way to accomplish this is through the use of the NoFollow tag. By adding the NoFollow attribute to any links on your site that are directed towards non-content pages, you are effectively increasing the power and importance of the other pages on your site.
There are several common examples of pages that should be linked to with a NoFollow link:
- Login
- Registration or signup
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service
- RSS Feeds
- Categories
- Blog tags
- Admin section
- Contact form
There are probably other good examples also, but these are some of the most common ones. There is really no good reason to have link juice passed to a login page or any non-content page for that matter.
You can also trap your valuable link juice by adding NoFollow to external links from your pages. While this will improve the SEO for your site, it also eliminates any link credit for the pages that you are linking to. Personally, I believe that relevant external links should be followed, but not everyone feels this way. If the link is an advertisement or an affiliate link then it is fine to NoFollow it, but if you are discussing another website on your site, I think there should be some juice passed there. As you are probably aware, this blog is a DoFollow blog which means we follow external links and even follow comment links to benefit those that take part in the exchange of thoughts and ideas here. This is an issue that will have to be decided by each individual webmaster, but I felt obligated to at least mention it in the spirit of this post.
