Do you use <nofollow>and rel=nofollow?</nofollow>
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I just read http://www.thoughtmechanics.com/does-nofollow-attribute-work-google-says-yes-studies-say-otherwise/ .
Is it really better to avoid using nofollow for local links (from one site to itself)?
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Why do you want to include nofollow on internal links? Let that juice flow I say.
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We don't use it. If a site is worth linking to then give them the juice.
If you were google and you came to a site with a lot of nofollowed outgoing links you might think that they mean... "We Don't Trust This".... "They Paid Us"....
Don't want that odor on my site.
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Nofollowing links doesn't sculpt link juice, it burns it. Doing this to internal links is bad, as you're wasting your own link juice! If I don't want a page on my site on the SERPs, I'd much rather set a meta noindex, follow tag on the page I don't want indexed rather than nofollow links to it.
To explain burning vs. sculpting, here's an example. Say page A has 6 votes of link juice to pass, and links to 3 other pages, B, C, and D. If all the links are followed, it'll pass 2 votes to each page. However, if you nofollow the link to page D, it won't give 3 votes to B and C, it'll give the same 2 votes to B and C, and the 2 votes that should have gone to page D go nowhere. They're burned.
If instead you set a meta tag on page D to noindex, follow, the link juice will flow in and out of page D, so that would be much preferred.
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**This is a really good answer. ** The first two paragraphs are the best answer that I have seen to this type of question.
Nice work, John.