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PageRank and Nofollow - one more time, with feeling

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 23, 2007 in SEO Theory

It seems like once the SEO community gets hold of a bad idea it just wants to love that idea until everyone who can possibly suffer the consequences of stupid practices is suffering.

People refuse to let go of this complete, total, utter nonsense idea that you can benefit from using “rel=’nofollow’” on your internal links.

Let’s take a look at something Halfdeck wrote on Sphinn:

“Interestingly, Michael Martinez posted almost the exact opposite”

His point would be valid if adding nofollow completely pulled an ancilliary page out of the SERPs. The point is not to block the page out of the index; it’s to “borrow” juice from it to reroute it to a page that needs more link love. A “contact us” page is useful, but it will show up in a site: search even if the page was supplemental. Preventing it from getting indexed is counter-intuitive. The key is to borrow 90% of its link juice and give it to some of your money pages stuck in the supplemental index.

“If I have an about page that is ranked PR 6, is it suggested to decrease the juice to that page or use the strength of the page to link to other parts of the site?”

Will the links on your about page benefit users? If not, don’t do it.

Sorry, Half, but those dogs don’t hunt. They don’t even sniff. And (to everyone who continues to mention it like it means something) stop talking about Toolbar PR because it has nothing to do with sculpting the flow of internal PageRank.

First and foremost, PageRank flows with the links. In order to accumulate PageRank on an “About Us” page, there have to be links pointing to the page. Last time I checked any random selection of technical descriptions of PageRank, none of them said anything about the PageRank stopping with ancillary pages.

Now, will links on an “About Us” page help users? Absolutely. I put them there all the time. People follow them quite often. Let’s take a look at the usability aspects of placing navigational links on an “About Us” page.

CNN does it. It would be crazy for them NOT to help guide their readers back to the main news sections, wouldn’t it?

Military.com does it. Should they prevent their users from navigating through the site, or slow them down by forcing them to hit the BACK button?

That’s not user-friendly Web design.

So, when it comes to PageRank, what goes in must go out. That’s the way PageRank works.

Should Information Week remove their navigational links from their About Us page or should they help their users find their ways across the Web site?

I opt for user-friendly navigation. Otherwise you just end up with a doorway page. The SEO community wrangled with doorway pages for several years until people started to realize that every page on a Web site can act like a doorway page and then they started designing content-rich doorway pages. We call them “landing pages” now and they usually have on-page navigation to help people get to where they need to go.

As for whether a “Contact Us” page will show up in a site search even if it’s Supplemental, well, maybe. But the problem with Google’s Supplemental Results isn’t that pages don’t necesarily show up (in fact, they won’t show up for many common queries at all), the real problem is that even if Google decides to include Supplemental Pages in a site search results listing the Supplemental Pages are placed at the end of the list.

That means Google prefers to serve less relevant content that is in the Main Web Index rather than serve the right content.

So if people are using site search to navigate Web sites (and they do this every day), you had better make damned sure they find the pages they want.

And that means if they want to find your “About Us” page or your “Contact Us” page, stripping those pages of PageRank so that they go Supplemental inconveniences your users.

Last time I checked, the SEO community was still pretty much devoted to the concept of helping search engines deliver the RIGHT results to the searchers.

You cannot have it both ways. You can NOFOLLOW all your internal links, or half your internal links, in the misguided hope that you’ll get more PageRank to other pages or you can just point more links toward the pages that have gone Supplemental.

Pointing more links toward Supplemental Pages may or may not give them enough PageRank to get into the Main Web Index, but it will absolutely give your visitors more opportunities to find those pages.

It will also make it easier for other search engines (like Yahoo! and Live) to find those pages Google doesn’t like and index them, because other search engines don’t insist on placing irrelevant pages first in a site search.

The solution to Google’s Supplemental Index penalty is not to beg Google for more PageRank. The solution is to use another site search tool that doesn’t penalize legitimate pages just because there are few links pointing to those pages.

So, I’m not responding to Michael Gray. I’m not responding to Dan Thies. I’m not responding to Halfdeck. I’m not responding to Rand Fishkin.

I’m responding to everyone in the SEO community who hasn’t managed to look at just how nonsensical this whole idea of “sculpting PageRank” really is.

In theory it can be done. In practice there is no one in the SEO community today who knows how to do it. None of the people writing on the topic have laid out a credible explanation of how one would go about sculpting PageRank so as to benefit a Web site.

At best you may accomplish nothing more than spinning your wheels. At worst you’ll sacrifice important pages that people look at for the sake of less important pages.

One of the most frequently visited pages on SEO Theory is … its About us page.

Your mileage may vary, but just because SEOs don’t think “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages should be found first in site searches and Web searches doesn’t mean other people don’t want to find them.

If your “Contact Us” page is coming up first for your name, you don’t need to put “rel=’nofollow’” on your internal links, you need to go back to Beginner SEO and relearn the basics.

We’ve spent years telling people to ignore the Google Toolbar because the TBPR values are derivations calculated only a few times a year from internal PageRank that changes much more frequently. And yet here today we still see well-known SEOs talking about TBPR.

That ain’t good SEO, not by any means. Follow TBPR-based advice at your own risk.