SEO Company

No Follow Tags On Internal Links: Pros vs Cons

When doing internal SEO for your site, it is important how you distribute your "Google juice" to all the links on your site.

After all, you don't want to pass most of your Google juice to all the other - non-important to rank but still very important - links on your site and leave your home page with no strength to rank well in the search engine result pages!

So the question then becomes: To "follow" or "nofollow"
Points to consider:

- Sometimes it is good to share the link juice on your site, but in a limited fashion. However, when it comes to social community sites or forums, the limited use of nofollow is extremely crucial. A very popular forum may have up to 150,000 member profiles, most of them with links to their own sites or affiliate pages. It is important that you not give away all your link love to these links.

- For a CMS (content management system) that comes with nofollow links in it by default, it's always a good idea to leave those links there otherwise Google might think you have something to hide.

- Should you absolutely use nofollow to guide the flow of the search engines' link juice through your site? Not absolutely. Use it only to cut down page rank love to pages like the “Contact” page or even the “About” page.

To summarize: Analyze your situation carefully. Does your website warrant the use of nofollow? Busy web sites like forums and social network communities should probably use nofollow on their sites. But most sites, generally, don’t need to implement the nofollow structure.

Does Google really penalize your site for using "nofollow"?

- Generally, any large changes to your site could cause a Google engineer to stop and take another look at your site. So if you add a lot of nofollows and make the site fluctuate in the rankings, Google might begin to wonder if the site is still trustworthy.

- But then also doing a lot of changes of any other kind to your site, could affect the search engine results in the same way. If you notice fluctuations in the way your site ranks, it may be caused by the site changes you did and not necessarily the nofollows.

- Google engineer, Matt Cutts says that there is no problem using nofollow on your site. However, since SEO can sometimes tend to be a bit complicated, there might be an instance where using it a lot on your site could be a red flag to Google. For instance, it might flag the owner of the site as someone who knows SEO. While this is not inherently bad, if there are signs that merit the attention of a Google engineer, it might increase the chance of a human review.

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Contact Adam at 480-677-1270 or awhite(at)websitebreakthrough.com.