To nofollow or follow internal links, that is the question...

[94501]

"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff.

I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what?

Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages.

Thanks! Best... Darcy

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Darcy

Do not "nofollow" internal links to these pages - you want link equity to continue to move through your site. If you must noindex profile pages, leave the pages at least "noindex,follow" so that link equity can pass through those profile pages and continue to move through the site. Also, some members may have links from their site pointed at their profiles, I would check backlinks pointing to those pages if you get the opportunity.

You can do so through:
Majestic
OSE

Out of curiosity, why did you noindex member profile pages if I may ask? Did you check and see if any of those pages get search traffic before noindexing? You might be missing an opportunity there. Hope this helps, good luck!

[MattAntonino]

What you're talking about is generally called Pagerank Sculpting and it's generally a bad idea:

http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/

The way it works, at least for distribution, is that the # of links is counted as a whole, not "number of followed links."  That means you can't really help yourself this way. The article says it fairly clearly:

"Google has changed the way PageRank considers nofollowed links. Now, nofollowed links still count towards the distribution of PageRank, except the PageRank they would pass is reduced to zero. So your page A with 10 PR and five links, with four of them nofollowed, would pass 2 PR to the one followed link and 0 to the other four links."

So while you can, as Patrick pointed out, noindex them, let the juice flow everywhere.

[94501]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for the info. To answer your question, the member profile pages are noindexed because there are 80,000 and most have little to no non-duplicate info. Some members fill in something. Most do not. Of the ones that do, they often pull the text from LinkedIn. Rather than have 80,000 duplicate or nearly duplicate pages in the index, we noindexed them.

Best... Darcy