…and double the number of your pages indexed in Google! — By Geoff Hineman

Of the many techniques available to SEOs, perhaps the most hotly debated is the use of the nofollow tag for PageRank sculpting. While many SEOs support nofollow as a proven and verifiable way to help important pages rank higher, others approach it with hesitation, preferring instead to adjust their site architecture or their robots.txt file.

This report pulls back the curtain and takes a closer look at the mystery and even danger surrounding the different techniques available for using nofollow to sculpt your PageRank.

PageRank and NoFollow Defined

Let’s start by making sure everyone is on the same page. Since Google is making the rules we’ll begin with Google’s official definition of PageRank…

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets links from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”

In the simplest terms, the more links coming into a page, the higher its PageRank will be. Each page then has the ability to pass PageRank on to other pages through links. This process is also known as passing link juice. The nofollow attribute comes into play at this stage.

A page with 10 outgoing links will pass link juice equally through each link, allowing for each link to pass 10% of the page’s link juice. Adding a nofollow attribute to five of those links, however, will double the amount of link juice flowing through the remaining five links, allowing them to each pass 20% of the available link juice

That means by carefully selecting which internal links you place nofollow on, you can divert link juice away from your unimportant pages and send more link juice to the pages you want to rank higher.

Understand Your Goals

Although nofollow can be highly effective, using nofollow should NOT be your first choice when structuring your site for optimal PageRank flow. Before you put the first nofollow on your site, you need to determine if you can accomplish the same goal by making changes to the site architecture and direct link juice in a more natural way.

A complete discussion of optimal site architecture is outside the scope of this article, but here’s a few quick guidelines…

• Be sure to link to your more profitable pages from your pages with the most PageRank (usually your homepage).
• Be sure to keep the number of links on a page under 100 to ensure they all get crawled.
• Be sure to link to your pages with the anchor text you want those pages to rank for.

By adjusting your linking so that you point more of your site’s links towards your most important pages, you can effectively channel PageRank without needing to use nofollow.

However, since some sites have been around a long time or may have a large number of pages, selective use of nofollow to direct the flow of link juice can be more realistic than a major site architecture redesign.

When undertaking PageRank sculpting, the first goal is to get more of your important pages indexed. The second goal is to influence the flow of link juice through the site to help push your important pages up in the rankings. Both goals are accomplished by redirecting PageRank away from less important pages and towards your important pages.

Let’s look at the concepts behind each…

1. Getting More of Your Important Pages Indexed

Pages on your site are structured by levels. Your homepage is your top-level page. It will almost always have the highest PageRank on your site, because the homepage naturally accrues the most incoming links. Every page your homepage links to is considered a second-level page.

Ideally, these second-level pages are the ones most important to your customers or readers. Many times, these second-level pages are in your navigation and linked to from virtually every page on your site.

On your homepage, as well as in the footer of every other page, you’ll also often find links to overhead pages, which include pages like your contact us, terms of service, and return policy pages. These are useful pages for users, but are not pages you need to rank well.

This is where many sites get it wrong. By linking to these overhead pages from every page on your site, you’re telling search engines these pages are far more important than they actually are. With a site that sells shoes, for instance, this type of linking tells search engines that your return policy page is just as important as your main basketball shoes page.

This is where putting the nofollow attribute on links to your overhead pages from everywhere except your sitemap (and perhaps your homepage) is a huge benefit. It ensures that those overhead pages still get crawled, but no longer absorb large amounts of PageRank.

That PageRank can now be sent to your more important pages, while continuing to ensure that links to those overhead pages are still visible to your users.

2. Pushing Second-Level Pages Up in the Rankings

By putting nofollow attributes on the links to those overhead pages, you send more link juice flowing to your second-level pages. Typically those will be your category pages, which then flow PageRank to your product pages. This will boost the rankings of your money-making pages—the ones you want to be indexed and positioned as well as possible in the search results.

Also, because those pages are now more visible, they are in a better position to start accruing more incoming links due to people finding them in the search engines. That can further increase rankings, resulting in a virtuous cycle where higher rankings build more links, which result in higher rankings, and so on.

The Dangers Involved with PageRank Sculpting

Before you start sculpting your PageRank, you should have a keen awareness of how your visitors are using your site and how customers are finding you in the first place. If, for some reason, you have customers who regularly come into your site through your About Us page, then you don’t want to make changes to that page in an attempt to help boost another page you think is a better page for potential customers to come in through.

Understanding your site analytics is critical before starting a PageRank sculpting campaign. You need to be sure you really are emphasizing the right pages.

Keyword research is also critical when using nofollow to sculpt PageRank. For example, an online shoe retailer’s keyword research may show a sweet spot in terms of traffic and competition for the term soccer cleats. What they may overlook, however, is that even though the term pronation control gets little traffic, their site is positioned number one for it already and snares the vast majority of the traffic on that term, and that traffic leads to regular sales.

If they start using nofollow to limit the importance that search engines place on the page positioned well for pronation control , they would unknowingly sacrifice existing sales for hopes in snagging sales from somewhere else. The worst case scenario, obviously, is that they lose out on both terms. Knowing this information about your own site beforehand allows you to be in the best position to build on the sales you already have with the possibility of new sales.

With that in mind, be sure to follow these…

5 critical steps to take when beginning to use nofollow…

1. Observe how your users are interacting with your site.

2. Identify which pages are actually making you money.

3. Determine if simply changing your site architecture is a better solution.

If not…

4. Make (and document) small changes using the nofollow attribute.

5. Monitor your changes closely.

Can NoFollow Get Your Site Penalized?

There’s an ongoing debate over whether excessive use of nofollow can make your site look over-optimized and result in a search engine penalty.

The initial role of the nofollow was as a measure to prevent spam in forums and blogs. It gave webmasters the ability to say…

“I will leave this comment and link here, but I will not allow any link juice to pass through to it, because I just don’t know enough about the site at the other end of the link.”

This was supposed to reduce the incentive towards comment spam. And to some degree, it has. The logical extension of this idea is that the nofollow attribute sends up a red flag that says untrusted link here. So you must ask yourself, if you’re using nofollow on links to internal pages on your own site, doesn’t that tell the search engines that you don’t trust your own pages?

At one time, that may have been the case. Recently, though, Google’s Matt Cutts has gone on record saying…

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link–level granularity…. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollowed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery.”

Of course, just because Google says something is fine now, doesn’t mean they won’t decide to penalized you for it later. But, personally, we’ve used nofollow on many sites we work with and have only seen positive results.

If you’re still uncomfortable using the nofollow attribute, there are a number of other ways to help optimize PageRank flow around your site. As mentioned, you could change your site architecture so that your site naturally links more often to your more important pages and less often to your less important pages.

You could also prevent search engines from crawling links to some pages by using JavaScript links with the link URL broken up so that search engines can’t read it, or by passing your links through a page that is blocked via the robots.txt file.

We wouldn’t worry too much about a Google penalty, however. In practice, the real danger PageRank sculpting poses is not from being penalized. The real danger comes from being overzealous, doing too much too quickly and inadvertently messing up the way PageRank flows through your site.

We’ve seen high-ranking sites knock most of their pages right out of the search results by using poorly-implemented, overly-aggressive PageRank sculpting.

There are many advanced PageRank sculpting techniques, and some SEOs have even made a science out of it. But unless you possess a very advanced understanding of how PageRank flows around your site, you’re better off limiting your PageRank sculpting efforts, because it’s much easier to harm your site than help it using this technique.

However, the strategy of placing nofollow on your sitewide links to your overhead pages is something that every site can easily do without worrying about harming their PageRank flow. Just remember you still want your overhead pages indexed, so be sure to link to them from your sitemap, and perhaps your homepage. But nofollow the rest of your links to them.

Sculpt On, You Crazy Diamond

It is important to remember that using nofollow to sculpt PageRank is not the perfect SEO solution and is just one of the many tools available.

For success with this specific tool, and all the rest, you need to keep your goals clear in your mind, know your site analytics, temper your desire for higher search engine rankings with optimum site usability for your visitors and finally – document and measure everything (sometimes the smallest changes bring about the biggest results)!

Now grab your hammer and chisel, because it’s time to get to sculpting!

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