No Following Existing Non-SEO Pages A Good Idea?

[94501]

Greetings!

Is there an advantage in no-following links to pages like "Terms Of Use" and "Privacy Policy"... pages one isn't trying to rank for? Of course, the idea would be to not waste link juice on unimportant pages. Your thoughts? Thanks!

[EGOL]

According to Matt Cutts, when you nofollow a link the pagerank that would have flowed through that link dies.  So, it does not make sense to nofollow an internal link anymore, instead you should let the pagerank flow in and distribute on to pages that the receiving page links to.

Note.... Originally google said that the pagerank that would have flowed into a nofollowed  page would not die. Instead it would remain within the larger part of your site.  Google later changed their mind on this, started killing the pagerank and Matt Cutts then told webmasters about it in a YouTube video.

So, the advice that I give you, I believe is correct for today, but Google can change their mind again, who knows?

[RyanKent]

I block my Terms of Use and Privacy pages with robots.txt.

I use a tool on my site which ads any search terms a user entered in to a search engine to reach the page. "Users found this page by searching for..." and then the box will fill up with search terms if the page is selected from SERPs.

I noticed my Terms and Privacy pages were getting hits. I don't want those pages competing with the rest of my site content in Google. If you allow those pages to be indexed, you run the risk of those pages appearing instead of a more relevant page. This can cause searchers to skip over your result, or click on the result and bounce off your site.