Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages

[jonigunneweg]

Hello there!

Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages.

I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO.

What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this?

• Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links?
• Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages?
• Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file?
• Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)

[BlastAM]

It depends on what your purpose is.

If you want them totally block from being index then putting the page in the robots.tx fil or using a robots meta tag would work fine.

If you just want to de-emphasize the page to the search engines you can use nofollows or javascript links on footer/header links.

One thing that we have done is to combine some of these pages (terms and privacy) into one page to cut down on the number of total links on each page.

You could also not include the privacy page link on every page (depending on your site) but just link it from certain pages that collect sensitive data (near the form).

I hope this helps. The main thing to remember is that each site is different so you will have to adjust your tactics depending on precisely what you are trying to accomplish.

[vforvinnie]

Great suggestions.  I've recently combined some pages (login/register, about/contact/ToS/privacy, and a few others) and have been very happy with the results.  I removed 8 links from every page.

I am also thinking about removing some more links from my product pages, to try and keep the most juice on those pages.  Those pages don't need the same navigation as the homepage.

[BlinkWeb]

As I understand it nofollow still dilutes your link juice even though it does not pass PR (theoretically).

Google made this announcement to combat PR sculpting in 2009. Here is a post from Rand about it.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

Unlsee something has changed that I am not aware of you could link in an iFrame and Google will not see it, nor will it dilute your PR passed out.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Exactly, and what I also try to explain to people is that privacy policy type page is additional signal for Google when they try to understand the type of site you are and how trustworthy it is. Why in the world would you noindex something like that?

[jonigunneweg]

Mmh, good point. Never heard that "privacy policy page" could be a trust signal. Is there an article somewhere that talks about this?

Well, I took those two pages as an example... but my question was about avoiding link juice to flow on non-SEO pages in general.

Thanks a lot for your answers!