Understanding No Follow

[impressem]

We manage a couple of sites with 100s of pages...

Most of the sites have content that is not helpful as landing pages but obviously has relevent content related to our desired search terms.

Some of links go off site to another domain.

I am trying to understand the issue of "link juice" and if I gain it or lose it by putting "nofollow" designation on some of the page links.

Specifically, do I increase the value of my pages if I put no follow tags on lower tier links off of these pages.

Here is a page in question - http://www.vahmarketing.com/product/ductless-hoods

Is there a best practice or SEO rule for using "no follow"?

Thanks,

Bob Nance

[sferrino]

Hello Bob,

The nofollow keeps your site from passing link juice through the link. We have this option for situations where we either don't want the link juice to flow to the other site, or we don't know who the other site is (ex. comment links). This does not mean that the link will not be followed by the search engine.

If it is a shady site, I would use a nofollow, but I would also question why I am linking to it. It does not hurt your site to have follow links unless they are questionable. I have seen many sites with decent PR that have link pages with 100's of links on them.

In your example I don't see where you are linking to other domains. Are they your other domains? Are they companies that don't need anything. I have not had an instance where linking to a good company has hurt anything.

Is there a best practice?

If it's a good link, let the juice flow, if not, question why you are linking to it.

Linking to a site that is considered an authority or brand in the niche will align your site with that site and could help you in the long run. Birds of a feather.

There are other ways to link to sites without using the a href such as by incorporating javascript, but in a situation like yours I would not even think about it.

[SEM-Freak]

Hi Bob,

I think you are asking about PageRank Sculpting. There was talk awhile ago about this no longer being practical and that the juice was lost due to changes in the algo. I think SEOmoz ran some tests on this that were inconclusive... so generally I think opinion is still PageRank Sculpting is dead.

Maybe look up some stuff on faceted navigation to deal with the issues you may be having with the site.

Hope this helps.

G