Follow or nofollow to subdomain

[vmotuz]

Hi,

I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
 The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt

Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts?

Thanks!

[MichaelYork]

There is no point diluting your authority by having dofollow links to the subdomain if it isn't going to rank, so by all means "nofollow" the links.

[PaddyDisplays]

"diluting your authority by having dofollow links"  I thought it was not possible to link sclupt in this way, I'm I missing something?

My understanding is that all no follow does is not pass authority and does not help retain authority ( basicly it just throws it out the window the authority it would have passed to that link)

[vmotuz]

Thanks for your reply.

An article I read recently suggested that using nofollow on links on the same website may not be a good idea as "if the website doesn't trust its own pages by having a nofollow, then why would Google want to put trust in it." Does this make sense? Would a subdomain be considered as a completely different site?

My other concern is using nofollow extensively may raise a flag to Google as a site that is heavily seo optimized or tries to manipulate its linking strategy.

Any more thoughts? The website is done 100% for users. All I am looking for is the best practice to follow to maximize the seo efforts in this area.

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, internally, "nofollow" still dilutes PageRank, so it doesn't really have a big impact. Practically speaking, I don't think there would be much difference. The links have a customer-facing purposes, I assume, and you just don't want the end result indexed. That should be fine. The only advantage to nofollow might be that it would waste a little less crawl bandwidth (instead of bots visiting the page and then seeing it's blocked, they wouldn't bother). I've tried it both ways in the past (after Google changed the PR-sculpting rules), and could never really measure much difference.