Nofollow worth using for internal links?

[Maslins]

Inevitably for most businesses there will be some web pages where it's more important for it to rank well than others.

Is it worth putting nofollow to internal links to the less important pages, potentially meaning a bit more juice goes to the key ones?

Or is this more effort than it's worth and/or likely to cause harm as by using nofollow you're suggesting some pages on your own website shouldn't be trusted?

 

[Websitehandyman]

To restrict access tor search engines for internal pages you should use your robots.txt file.

If you nofollow too many internal links Google will shout at you but I don't think they'll punish you. So it depends on how close you want to dance with the devil.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

If you use nofollow on internal links it reduces the overall pagerank volume of your site due to the restriction in flow.

Why are you telling google not to trust internal pages? what are you hoping to achieve as that is a far bigger question

 

[Dany87]

what are you hoping to achieve as that is a far bigger question

He want to give more juice to the most important page on his website. The idea is interesting, but I don't think that "nofollow" links are the best things to use for this. Sadly, I don't know the answer!

 

[Maslins]

Why are you telling google not to trust internal pages? what are you hoping to achieve as that is a far bigger question

The (possibly very naive) goal was to minimise juice flow from the more important pages.

My understanding is that a link to another page (internal or external) passes a little bit of SEO benefit (page rank, juice, whatever you want to call it) from the page with the link, to the page the link goes to.

Theory was you wouldn't want your main pages (eg homepage/key articles) passing this benefit to less important pages (eg Ts&Cs/contact).

 

[nitro23456]

This approach may have worked about 5 years ago but I am afraid you're a little late.

Basically what you're describing is pagerank sculpting (Google it).

At best it will prove ineffective, at worst it looks a little suspect in my opinion.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Nitro has answered it. I guessed that is whay you wanted.

read the google guidelines. 'don't take part in schemes designed to increase page rank' (paraphrased) PR Sculpting was a classic case of Google telling you how to do something, and then penalising you for doing it. Matt Cutts actuall did a video on how to do it. Then a few months later, they started lowering the trus of sites that were doing it.

 

[Kevin H]

PageRank sculpting may or may not work as it used to - personally I think of it less in terms of 'sculpting' per se and more that I like to ensure that I am promoting my 'important' pages from other pages (not sitewide links) ,AND to cross sell / up sell etc, by internally linking one page to other relevant pages from the copy.

The one thing not to do is 'nofollow' your internal links. As previously mentioned, why would you tell Google not to pay attention to an internal link?

On the specific of using 'nofollow' to 'sculpt' your PR this hasn't worked for a long time now since the link still counts as link from the page even if no 'juice' is passed.

 

[greenspirit]

There is no point in nofollow for internal links.