How to structure your site correctly for optimal juice flow?

[rightmove]

Hello fellow mozzers.

I have a question regarding structuring a site for optimal link juice flow.

If you have an existing website that has for instance a contact page, we know its pointless for that page to have any juice at all. In a hypothetical scenario would it be ok to no index, no follow that page?

What happens to existing pagerank on such a page? for instance if you have a contact page with pr 4 and you no index, no follow it, I understand the pagerank will disappear from that page but will it be distributed to other pages on your site?

What would be the correct way of handling this scenario?

[bfrl]

Hi Rightmove,

In my opinion and experience there have been links from pages to others on my site which I have added a nofollow tag to. To be honest I didn't see any strong benefits to this approach.

With respect to a page such as the "contact" page I would really be hesitant to noindex this. Keep in mind that sitelinks which appear for your brand search terms are really useful for visitors to navigate directly to this section of your site from the search results. Noindexing these pages makes this impossible for people to find within the search results and I wouldn't see much value in this approach from a SEO perspective.

Personally I don't get hung up on pagerank and focus largely on user experience from an onsite navigation and SEO perspective. It works well for me as only the core pages that offer people benefit on my site are linked from respective pages. There are a lot of other onsite approaches which will offer you much better value versus the time you would spend.

Hope that helps.

[stevefidelity]

You're talking about the idea of page rank sculpting which became all that rage after 2005 when the rel = nofollow attribute was introduced.

In 2009, Matt Cutts addressed the issue and clarified that if you do something link nofollow links to a 'less important' page like a Contact Us page that the the link juice that would have flowed to that page is lost rather than reallocated to the rest of the site.

[DigitalDiameter]

Go with a flat structure.

Cross link your pages, but don't have too many links on each page.

Make links to pages with 'boiler plate' content rel=nofollow.

[rightmove]

I'll go with the idea that less is more.

Less links on a page means more juice to distribute.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Adding "noindex" to your page doesn't just keep link juice from flowing to it - it also means that it won't appear in the SERPs at all - what about your users who are actually trying to find your page? I wouldn't noindex anything unless you're sure that you don't want anyone to be able to find that page via organic search.

When you're structuring your site, it's better to focus on having a structure that allows search engines to crawl and find every page (no orphan pages, no content that search engines can't crawl, no duplicate content) and that allows users (you know, the people who give you money!) to easily find content.  If you want to conserve link juice on your pages, try to make sure you don't have a ton of links on every page, but don't try to nofollow/noindex content based solely on the idea of link juice - it won't work.