Noindex,follow is a waste of link juice?

[SamBuck]

On my wordpress shopping cart plugin, I have three pages /account, /checkout and /terms on which I have added “noindex,follow” attribute.   But I think I may be wasting link juice on these pages as they are not to be indexed anyway, so is there any point giving them any link juice? I can add “noindex,nofollow” on to the page itself. However, the actual text/anchor link to these pages on the site header will remain “follow” as I have no means of amending that right now. So this presents the following two scenarios –   No juice flows from homepage to these 3 pages (GOOD) – This would be perfect then, as the pages themselves have nofollow attribute.   Juice flows from homepage to these pages (BAD) - This may mean that the juice flows from homepage anchor text links to these 3 pages BUT then STOPS there as they have “nofollow” attribute on that page. This will be a bigger problem and if this is the case and I cant stop the juice from flowing in, then ill rather let it flow out to other pages.   Hope you understand my question, any input is very much appreciated. Thanks

[EGOL]

I am going to explain how I understand this.  I could be wrong on some of the details because of two different reasons.... 1) I simply am wrong... or .... 2) I am correct according to what search engines have said in public but they are doing something different in practice.

When nofollow was first introduced a lot of people used it to "sculpt" the flow of pagerank.  They were told at that time by some search engine employees that pagerank did not flow into nofollowed pages.  That is how search engines who made public statements about it were supposed to be treating it in the beginning.

Later we learned that google (and maybe other) search engines changed their mind on how they handle nofollow and that change was to evaporate ALL pagerank that would have flowed into a nofollow link.  In that situation it would be a bad idea to use nofollow because the pagerank was permanently lost.

Do they still handle nofollow links that way?  I don't know.

However......  how I currently understand it is that if you designate a page as noindex / follow then pagerank flows into that page and through the links on that page.  This would conserve any pass-through pagerank but would result in a loss of any pagerank that is retained in that page (or maybe it all passes through since the page is no index - I don't know).

So, if I had pages that I wanted to link to on my site but didn't want in the index I would use noindex / follow to allow the pagerank that flows into those pages to pass through to other pages on my site.  But I would never be  sure that it really works that way.  Also, keep in mind that there are numerous search engines and there could be many different ways of treating these links - and pagerank is a substance unique to google.

If anyone understands this differently or suspect that it does not work as explained, please let us know.

[SamBuck]

EGOL, thank you so much for your input, i really value your opinion. However, i have a follow up question, and i maybe muddled up with things here, but here it is -

Many of my successful competitors in various niches have added rel=nofollow to certain internal pages.

For example -

1. On homepage of this wordpress site, the anchor text link to wp tag pages have rel=nofollow. The tag pages themselves are "noindex,follow".

2. Also all links in the header are rel=nofollow. The only follow links are post pages, and post pages are being used for navigation.

Any page that has a rel=nofollow anchor text is "noindex,follow" itself. Nowhere a "noindex" has been added to a wholepage, its only on certain anchor text links.

Is that slightly different from making the whole page nofollow? because here only pages are being stopped from getting any link juice.

[EGOL]

Here is a philosophy that I have... (I am not trying to be a wise guy... just sayin'....)

I don't pay a lot of attention to the methods used by my competitors.  Instead I decide what I think will work best for me and then do it.

Right now I have pages on my site that I don't want in the search engines index.  So I have code on them as follows....

name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

I believe that code keeps them out of the index but allows pagerank to flow through them to other pages.  I offer that here so that anyone can tell me if it is wrong.

I welcome anyone who can set me straight or anyone who can suggest a better method.

However, I am not going to look at my competitors and try to figure out what they are doing because there is a very good chance that they don't know what they are doing.  (I think your competitors don't know what they are doing.)

I have absolutely no problem with doing things differently from my competitors.  In fact I think that mimicking them is the best way to finish behind them.

[SamBuck]

Great answer, and in this specific case, i have "noindex, follow" attribute on my pages too that i do not want to be indexed.

Regarding competitors - I study them, onsite and link profiles, specially the successful ones to learn from it. Most of the SEO strategies ive learned have been by reading forums / blogs etc. Quite often people have conflicting views there. So i try to find real life examples of stuff that is quite likely working for a successful site, try to see a pattern in there, and where i spot one, i try to implement that on my sites.

You on the other hand - have experience and proven philosophies :), something i am dying to acquire.

Thanks

[RyanKent]

I just wanted to share I completely agree with EGOL and the understanding he shared. I skipped responding to this question because I didn't want to respond with all the explanation of the disclaimers, where EGOL tackled the question anyway and offered great details in both the original reply and follow up.

[AlanMosley]

If you no index a page, link juice will flow to that page still. if you no follow it, it will still flow but will not flow out of it again.

you should always add noindex,follow if you want the link juice to return to your index pages. Even then some link juice will be lost that stays on that noindex page

I tried also could not find it. but here is a quote from Matt Cutts "Eric Enge:  Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts:  A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge:  So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts:  Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index.  So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end.  You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

Eric Enge:  Another example is if you have pages on a site with content that from a user point of view you recognize that it's valuable to have the page, but you feel that is too duplicative of content on another page on the site

That page might still get links, but you don't want it in the Index and you want the crawler to follow the paths into the rest of the site.

Matt Cutts:  That's right.  Another good example is, maybe you have a login page, and everybody ends up linking to that login page.  That provides very little content value, so you could NoIndex that page, but then the outgoing links would still have PageRank.

Now, if you want to you can also add a NoFollow metatag, and that will say don't show this page at all in Google's Index, and don't follow any outgoing links, and no PageRank flows from that page.  We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention."

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml