Nofollow images to sculpt internal anchor tags

[Sebes]

One of my client tags image-links with nofollow if those links are before a regular HTML link in the source code, e.g.:

.
.
.
Check our page aboutreally cool shoes.

They do this to "better pass anchor tags" to the page /page-about-shoes.html.

My question: Is this a good practice to do?

Thanks

Sebes

[BenFox]

I really want to answer this question but I don't actually have any proof either way.

I am however fairly confident that it's total junk.

[NakulGoyal]

Sebes

Are you saying there's an image "alt" tag, but no src="something.jpg"  ? That is a the darkest shade of gray if not completely black hat. I would definitely avoid it. This is a classic, simple, easy to detect case of over optimization, whatever else you may want to call it.

I would strongly suggest not to do it. We are in 2012. This might have worked in 1997 when Google was just born and it was primarily Dogpile.com and Altavista.com

Get them cleaned.

[softclick]

This "practices" does not work. There were several experiments published, that lead to this conclusion.

Google always takes the first alt / anchor text, no matter if it is nofollow / dofollow.

A workaround is to switch the positions in the source code. (first the textlink and than the imagelink). In most cases this is possible (css -> float) without changing the "optical" order on the page.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Sebes,

Good question. There's a lot of outdated information around the "only the first anchor text" count rules. In general, this is to believed true for text links. A couple years back a smart SEO specifically tested if the rule holds true when the first link is an image alt, and he found that the rule did not apply to images when the image was the first link. Unfortunately, this was quite awhile ago and I can no longer find the research.

To my knowledge, it's high time for another experiment in this area, so I wouldn't say for certain whether this rule is true today or not.

What I can say is that anchor text sculpting using the technique you described probably doesn't help much. In fact, by making the image link followed, you have the opportunity to vary your anchor text to your target page (if indeed Google does count both anchors when the first is an image).

Like I said, we need more experimentation. But I would wager your clients traffic and rankings will not drop if they make those links followed.

Keep us posted!