Controlling Pagerank With The rel=nofollow tag
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
With last week’s update of the Google Toolbar Pagerank tool, and since everyone and their mother’s are buzzing about it, I thought I’d write a short little article to give you a major tip to help increase your pagerank internally.
Most of the time we focus on creating lots of backlinks to our sites. The more backlinks we have, and the higher quality those backlinks are (a link to your site from CNN.com is much better quality-wise then a link back from your little brothers blog that gets 12 visitors per day), the better Pagerank your site will have.
But backlinks aren’t the only consideration when it comes to Pagerank…there’s one more, and it’s an important one.
I’m talking about juice….specifically, Pagerank Juice.
What is Pagerank Juice?
It’s a little tricky to explain. Imagine that CNN links to your site, let’s say they link to your main page http://www.yoursite.com
That link carries with it a certain amount of juice. The problem is, Pagerank gets distributed to all the links that are listed on the page of your site that the link points to.
I won’t get into the math of exactly how the juice gets distributed, mostly because it’s Monday morning and my head hasn’t started pounding yet…and I’d like to keep it that way. But it doesn’t really matter. Just imagine that the juice sort of gets evenly distributed to all the links on your web page.
So let’s say you have your main page at http://www.yoursite.com and 6 links on that page….one link to your “about me” page, one link to your “contact me” page, one link to your “privacy policy” page, one link to your “sitemap” page, one to your “second cool product” page, and one link to your little brothers blog (because you feel bad that only 12 people per day seem to visit his sorry little blog).
All that totally awesome Pagerank juice that’s currently flowing to your web site from the link from CNN.com gets passed evenly to each of those 6 sub-pages.
That’s not good.
Why? Well, who cares if your “Privacy Policy” page has a good pagerank? We don’t really care if ANYONE ever goes to that page!
And your brothers sad little blog, well, he really shouldn’t get all that nice CNN Pagerank juice should he? (jeesh, you’ve really got to stop this destructive competitiveness with your little brother!)
So what exactly do we want to happen? Well, we want your main page to get most of the juice, which it does, and then we want the rest of that sweet Pagerank juice to go to your “Second Cool Product” page, so that it’ll get as much leftover Pagerank Juice as possible.
So what’s a lonely webmaster to do? Luckily there’s the rel=nofollow attribute tag to the rescue!
What is the rel=nofollow tag?
It’s a simple snippet of code you put in the link code of each, well, link on your web page that you don’t want the search engines spiders to follow. It looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/about-me-page.html” rel=”nofollow”>About me</a>
Pretty simple eh? Now, Google, or any other major search engine will see that link and know not to follow it, and your Pagerank juice won’t flow to it either!
You can do that to links pointing to parts of your site that you don’t want the search engines to spider, but you can also do it to external sites that you don’t own (like your brothers crappy blog) that you don’t want your pagerank juice to flow to.
As a general rule, you should add the rel=nofollow attibute to all outgoing links to other people’s sites that you link to on your site. You should also add it to all links to any non-important pages like your contact page, or your privacy policy page, (not your sitemap page because we WANT the search engines to index that!), and generally any utility type pages that you don’t care about getting listed at the search engines.
Just going through your site and no-following external and less important links can dramatically increase your web site rankings at the major search engine by boosting the internal distribution of your Pagerank juice.
Questions? Comment below!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
