Link juice and no follow?

[BobAnderson]

I was just reading a post on link flow and wondered if we have links at the top of our site such as contact us, how to order, gallery, delivery and about us if we are not trying to rank these pages would it be a good idea to no follow the links to retain all link juice for the pages we want to rank?

[Branagan]

It's called PageRank sculpting, it seemed to work fine for a while long ago, but Google keeps changing it's interpretation of 'nofollow' links (PR just vanishes at the link or goes through anyway before disappearing, in any case not helpful for sculpting PR),

Probably the best way to sculpt your site would be linking to non essential pages only when strictly necessary or using the 'noindex' tag for those pages, you can read more about it on the following links:

Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can't Do It With Nofollow

Link Consolidation: The New PageRank Sculpting

[Doc_Sheldon]

Matt Cutts has said on a couple of occasions, that nofollow on internal links is generally not a good practice. In the same breath, though, he did say that adding a nofollow on internal navigational links to things like Contact us or Privacy Policy is probably nothing to worry about.

[simon_realbuzz]

No following those links such as contact us does not mean that link juice is retained for the other pages you want to rank for. It is now the case that if you nofollow those links that that link juice is effectively wasted, i.e. not passed to the other followed links.

By all means, if you don't want to rank for pages such as contact, how to order etc then do so, but this does not mean you'll save the juice for other pages you want to rank for

I think this piece sums up the position nicely http://www.uk-small-business-seo.co.uk/seo-tip-rel-follow-internal-links

[kimmiedawn]

Let's assume my motivation isn't to increase link juice, but to avoid pointing at my contact page shouting 'this is the most important page on my site!' I'm currently facing a situation where the most linked to page (internally) is a consultation page (essentially a contact form).

So, instead of nofollowing site-wide links to a contact page and a consultation page, should I no-index, follow the pages?

[KristinaKledzik]

Well, do you really want to hide your contact page? If someone's looking to contact you, don't you want your contact page to rank?

If you noindex, follow links to your contact page, you won't retain the link juice flowing out from that link. You'll just lose it entirely.

Google understands that your conversion page will often be the most linked-to page on your site. It's fine to do that, and it shouldn't throw off the perceived structure at all.

Hope this helps!