Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable calls attention to a WebmasterWorld thread in which a web publisher used the NoFollow attribute to link to some of their internal pages such as privacy policy, contact us, user agreement and terms of service; then, their ranking in Google dropped.
Here is my opinion on using the NoFollow for linking to such internal pages; doing so is idiotic.
Internal company information pages such as About Us, Contact Us, and a site’s Privacy Policy are important factors for establishing the Authority of a site.
These pages are internal proofs that a site is the representation of a real world business or company and the existence of phone numbers, addresses, and privacy information are vital to search results.
By using a NoFollow attribute to link to these pages, you’re basically telling Google that you do not trust yourself, you are not real, and you do not honor user privacy. Hence, the drop in ranking.
A WebmasterWorld member replies:
Let’s take a very naive look at this. The rel=nofollow attribute was introduced to combat blog comment spam. It was supposed to mean “I don’t vouch for this link.”
What message does that send if the link goes to one of the pages on your own site – especially to contact information which certainly you would “vouch for”? I think the message is very clear: “I’m trying to manipulate Google’s rankings for my urls.”
Barry adds a little explanation on how Google treats NoFollow:
Google will not crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute on it. Adam Lasnik of Google specifically said that. But of course, Google will crawl the same URL if it is linked to elsewhere, without the nofollow attribute.
So, if Google won’t crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute associated. And if these pages are not linked to from other sources (typically a privacy policy, contact us page, user agreement, terms of service type of page), then they won’t do well in the search results. Plus, those pages (the ones that are linked to using the nofollow tag) will not benefit your other pages on the site.
I’d go even further than this and say you should *never* use nofollow:
http://www.avivadirectory.com/internet-marketing/2007/03/30/dont-use-nofollow/
Seriously, the no-follow tag is for lazy webmasters who do not spend any time moderating comments that may slip by Akismet filters and such. Blogs should reward commentators who read and contribute to user generated content with relevant comment response to interesting blog entries. You will be surprised that people will spend the time to respond to interesting blog entries, especially when they know that the no-follow tag has been removed. Wikipedia is another story where I think the no-follow tag is in good use because their universe is too large to moderate when unethical individuals stick in links to every entry.
Why would you do such a thing to your own pages! If you don’t want them spydered ROBOTS.TXT hello!
What about links like “print”, which essential have the same content on the page – resulting in the duplicate content issue.
Google is really playing the fool here telling webmasters to use Nofollow in places where it should never be used. Google creates all the confusion and is a now a confused search engine itself. nofollow only looked good when it was used to stop bots from accessing databases with private information. The present use of nofollow as advocated by google sucks. It’s high time google, stops propogating nofollow to webmasters.
“Seriously, the no-follow tag is for lazy webmasters who do not spend any time moderating comments that may slip by Akismet filters and such. ”
Exactly!!
“then, their ranking in Google dropped.”
Another ridiculous thread that mistakes correlation for causation.
I fully agree with Your words :
“doing so is idiotic”
Greetings
Man I was myself going to implement it, had other priorities and didn’t got the time otherwise would have done it.
I was of the belief that it would simply mean that few of the own site’s pages not be indexed.
Never thought of the negative effect in the wildest of my dreams. U just saved me Loren.
Couldn’t resist to post. Thanks.
I don’t like to add any NoFollow for my internal pages but i did that for RSS feed result. What do you think about it?
Thanks for the info. I find it strange that google would recommend doing something that could hurt your ranking, but I will definitely avoid doing this.
Rel=nofollow doesn’t mean “do not follow” — it means “do not vouch”. Never use it on internal links
Three resources about how it really means “novouch” and not “nofollow”:
http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
http://www.seo-blog.com/rel-nofollow.php
“Google will not crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute on it.”
As i see Google is crawling them very well, and if you wont get the PR so what? you got the backlink
This is just so confusing – what about recent posts or sidebar archives?
It is good to be smart but don’t overdo it. Nofollow attribute is known to be a link to “untrusted site”. So why are webmasters using nofollow links to point to their internal pages like privacy information?
I believe most of the experienced webmasters will not have such problems. Internal pages linking are as important as getting external backlinks.
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good article…
very good site…thanks
nofollow links are often crawled no matter what. don’t be panic. spiders like yahoo do crawl through nofollow links.