Comments on: No Follow - Gaming A Broken System

By: Carlos del Rio

Carlos del Rio — Fri, 30 May 2008 04:00:14 +0000

@John - I agree with you, administrative pages are very important. There is a very particular reason that choking your admin pages is a gamble. I haven’t heard anyone really hit on one of the biggest issues that internal no-follow can cause. If I don’t see it soon I am just going to throw it out.

By: John H. Gohde

John H. Gohde — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:45:53 +0000

I disagree that administrative webpages are not important.

In a business with multiple locations, your contact information webpage, for example, can be used to target each of your different geographic locations. And, can in fact function as a backup webpage that targets a number of your major keywords.

In a natural organic search engine optimized website your contact information webpage can be delivering to Google a one two knock out punch.on some of your important keywords. All it takes is a little imagination and a little bit of work.

By: Carlos del Rio

Carlos del Rio — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:10:12 +0000

Thanks Chris.
There are other ways to solve the problem of legacy architecture that can take advantage of those kinds of pages without nofollow. Maybe I will write post on link pool pages.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:48:01 +0000

Good article. I agree that nofollow shouldn’t be used as a band aid and you should look at the architecture of your site but sometimes this isn’t possible to re-design portions of your site, particularly in larger companies.

As a temporary fix or at least until you have time to look at the site, adding nofollow to anchor tags in a global footer is a very easy way to sort the problem out.

For example if we have a code of conduct and privacy policy linked to on every page, it’s very easy to rule them out of the equation by putting a nofollow attribute on them until there is scope to be able to change the architecture of your site.

By: Carlos del Rio

Carlos del Rio — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:06:49 +0000

Thanks for the feedback Randy! I’m glad to know that people are getting value from my posts.

By: Randy Ray

Randy Ray — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:04:29 +0000

Nice post. I rank for several competitive one and two word phrases with some reasonably size (for my niche) sites, and I’ve never felt the need to nofollow a link anywhere on any of my sites. (Not to internal links or external links.) The whole nofollow thing just seems kinda bogus to me.

I link to stuff that’s relevant to my readers, that’s worth reading, whether it’s on my site or someone else’s site. The search engines can decide what to do with my links. So far this has worked pretty well for me.

Using nofollow to help rank a site seems like much ado about nothing.