"Equity sculpting" with internal nofollow links

[Warren_Vick]

I’ve been trying a couple of new site auditor services this week and they have both flagged the fact that I have some nofollow links to internal pages.

I see this subject has popped up from time to time in this community. I also found a 2013 Matt Cutts video on the subject:

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links

At a couple of SEO conferences I’ve attended this year, I was advised that nofollow on internal links can be useful so as not to squander link juice on secondary (but necessary) pages. I suspect many websites have a lot of internal links in their footers and are sharing the love with pages which don’t really need to be boosted. These pages can still be indexed but not given a helping hand to rank by strong pages. This “equity sculpting” (I made that up) seems to make sense to me, but am I missing something?

Examples of these secondary pages include login pages, site maps (human readable), policies – arguably even the general contact page.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Warren

[MikeRoberts]

Adding Nofollow to a handful of links on your site will not magically sculpt link equity in such a way as to create a noticeable improvement like that. If anything, you could just use robots.txt to remove those pages from being crawled. The bots don't necessarily need to index your login page, your human sitemap (if they already have their own), policies (which can change and cause legal issues if an older version is cached), and a few others.

And just a few months ago Gary Illyes stated that there's no good reason to nofollow internal links:

http://www.thesempost.com/google-dont-ever-nofollow-your-own-internal-links/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVKcMU7YNOQ

[Warren_Vick]

Thanks, Mike.

Just to be clear, I still want those non-primary internal pages (maybe not human sitemap and login) to be indexed so a robots.txt approach will not completely solve the problem. I just don't want to potentially squander link juice on secondary pages. Footers tend to have quite a bulk of link so there is a lot of dilution there. I had hoped that by halving my links, I'd be doubling the outbound link equity.

The first reference was useful, but only mentions my sculpting goal in the very last sentence without elaborating. The thing I found most interesting was the first comment from Mark Traphagen:

"Eric Enge clarified with Gary that the PageRank (and any other authority signal not passed by the no-followed link) is NOT redistributed to the other links on the page."

So, if this is true, there's absolutely no equity saving to be had from nofollow'ing internal links to my non-primary pages. But... is it true?! Any experiment results out there?

Finally, with regards to old versions of policies being published, I can't see how that would cause any legal problems. It's the version that is published that is important and, while I can set directives on cache expiry, nobody can be responsible for out-of-date information stored in a third-party cache (unless, of course, it was unlawful at the time of publishing).

[MikeRoberts]

Here's a bit more on the subject.

Matt Cutts PageRank Sculpting 2009

TheSEMPost 2015 - Pagerank sculpting

The SEOBlog Pagerank Sculpting 2014

It just feels like every other year or so, this concept starts coming back up. Except as much as it does work, it also doesn't. Personally I think its a better use of time and effort to look at your site navigation & see if it's user friendly, intuitive, and natural in order to direct flow better and also to work on linkbuilding efforts to increase authority.

[Warren_Vick]

Useful reference links. Many thanks, Mike.