SEO – No Follow and Structuring Your Site

If you are a regular reader of SEO blogs you will have no doubt of heard the recent news that using the no follow attribute within links on your page no longer increases optimisation efforts. The no follow was historically introduced by Google as a means of allowing webmasters to block Google following links from their site which they had little or no control over.

Blog comments were a common area where this kind of attribute came in handy as it allowed webmasters to let people comment without checking the site the comment link was pointing to.

Webmasters then decided to use the no follow to stop PageRank flowing through links that held little value to their site, like a privacy policy or login page, this helped them focus the flow of their PageRank to more important pages. Where a link is no followed no PageRank is passed, the surplus PageRank juice then flows through the remaining.

Well, this was the case up until a recent Google announcement which stated that if a link is no followed the surplus PageRank simply evaporates leaving no benefit for the followed links on a page. If these links are pointing to your external pages this basically means less PageRank is being passed through your site.

So now the no follow structuring works how can we ensure the most PageRank is being passed to our most important pages? Well there are a few ways of doing this and it’s all about letting Google know how important pages on your site are or more specifically how important links are.

If you have deep pages which you would like to place some importance on, it is a good idea to link to these pages from your homepage, preferably towards the top of the page. Why is this important? It let’s Google know you want users to find these pages, therefore these pages become important to Google as well, hence more PageRank will flow to them.

On top of this you could simply remove any no follows you have and let PageRank flow from your page naturally, the problem with this comes if you’re not sure about the quality of the sites you are linking to, if they are sites already marked by Google as being spam, your site will no doubt find itself penalised.