Nofollowed internal links from the home page

[Bush_JSM]

Hi,

I'm conducting an on-page review for someone and have noticed something I've not seen before.

Some of the major internal links from the home page are marked as no follow. For example:

<a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>/customer-services" rel="nofollow">Customer Services

This is on the top navigation bar and the content in this and all other sections are marked as no-follow but they should all be crawled. Is this an error or am I missing something?

Any ideas guys?

Thanks

Bush

[rickdronkers]

Some SEO's try to minimize the internal link-juice-exchange by using internal no-follow as well.

I personally doubt if it will help, but I think the intention is to focus all PageRank on the homepage and not distribute it to subpages such as 'customer services'.

[Bush_JSM]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for your help on this. I thought it was something to do with retaining page rank but I've not seen internally nofollowed links before. Whats really puzzling is the 'about us' and 'contact us' pages have nofollowed as well but from a local search point of view this is a bit of an own goal as they want to rank as a local business. The pages that they have nofollowed are in G's index so I assume they are reaching them either by ignoring the nofollow or from other internal linking.

cheers for your help

bush

[Theo-NL]

This is called 'pagerank sculpting'. It was used in the past to make sure the links that didn't have nofollow received a larger amount of link juice (as the link juice that was passed by a page was split by the number of links back then).

There was a 'recent' change in the way internal nofollow links are treated, that renders this practice pretty much useless nowadays. Read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting