Sculpting Page Rank with the NoFollow Tag

The nofollow tag was created to help fight spam, but then SEOs found a way to exploit it to their advantage. Until about a year ago, it was actually being used to sculpt Page Rank (PR). Even though you can’t use it to outright sculpt PR anymore, it still plays a role in your on-page SEO. Not only can it help you avoid being penalized by Google for a violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, it can also be used to kind of “shore up” the PR you’ve already managed to build.

How NoFollow Has Changed

The way that webmasters used the nofollow tag to actually sculpt PR was by putting it on links to pages that they weren’t trying to rank for — such as their “terms and conditions” and “privacy policy” pages. This kept the “link juice” of their higher profile pages (such as their index page) from flowing to less important pages. This way, they could strategically redistribute what pages their “link juice” flowed to.

Then, at a recent Search Marketing Expo, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam Team, announced that nofollow tags can no longer be used to sculpt Page Rank (PR) anymore. Although this change has been in effect for over a year, this announcement was the first clear indication that the nofollow tag could no longer be used this way.

What changed was that Google stopped indexing internally tagged nofollow links as “link juice dams.” In other words, trying to use it as internal SEO tactic to sculpt your PR isn’t going to work. As SEO expert, Danny Sullivan put it:

Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).
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[Now] if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

So as far as PR sculpting goes, you should now let your link juice flow freely throughout your site. This means removing the nofollow tag from your internal links. If you don’t, you’ll run the risk that some of PR that you can share among your pages will just end up going to waste.

Where to Put the NoFollow

Despite this, there are still two places you might want to still include the nofollow tag. The first (and more obvious) is on paid links. Google frowns on letting links juice flow out through paid links, and if they catch you, they’ll penalize your site.

The other place you might want to consider using the nofollow tag is when linking to outsides sites in general. The reason that a link from another site boosts your own PR is because when that site links to you, some its PR gets passed on to you. So if you’re linking out to another site, you might choose to hoard your PR all to yourself.

This last option, of course, isn’t exactly a “social” or “bloggy” thing to do. It’s just a way to cover all your bases. But if you’re really that caught up in hoarding all of your traffic, you might want to ask why you’re linking out at all in the first place.