Using Nofollow to Sculpt Internal Link Equity
Some links need to be seen by users to aid your site's credibility. Users expect to see a link to an about page, privacy policy page, customer support page, etc.
Sending a lot of link equity to these pages means that link equity is being wasted. Instead of wating it, you can block the ability of these sitewide links to pass link equity by using rel=nofollow in those links.
<a href="http://www.seotier.com/contact/" rel="nofollow">Contact</a>
Nofollow can also be used on secondary navigation schemes that make no sense to emphasise to search engines. Some content management systems have category based archives AND date based archives. If you structure your categories well the names of those categories should be well aligned with some of your target keywords. The date based archives are not going to be optimized for search though, so you could use rel="nofollow" on links to date based archives.
If you block link equity from flowing into low value pages on your site, you are causing a greater amount of link equity to flow into other important pages on your site.
If you have a thin affiliate site and you are pushing some boundaries you probably do not want to be too aggressive with using nofollow, because use of this tag basically lets search engineers know that you understand SEO. If what you were doing was borderline spammy and they see you are using nofollow then they might be more likely to edit your site.
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February 15th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
I do hope that nofollow attribute of the link will be develop more so that Google will finally decide to dump PageRank…I'm not a hater of PR but for some reasons that we all know, PR is massively used for making a profit out of it. With that, I think I just found out a synonym for the word "greed", its "page rank".