Why you shouldn't no-follow internal links!

[Falian]

No-following Internal Links can actually harm your website. Why? No-following internal links kills off some of your website?s PageRank. Let?s see this in action on a sample site (below).

Let?s see how the PageRank flow normally looks on this website:

Now, let?s see what happens when we no-follow an internal link:

What Happened?


The Yellow Page has a PageRank of 1.0. After applying the Dampening Factor of 15%, the Yellow Page passes 0.85 Pagerank to outbound links. The PageRank is divided up evenly between outbound links. In this case, Pagerank is divided by 2.


Without the No-Follow, the Yellow Page passes:


0.425 PageRank to Red Page
0.425 PageRank to Green Page


With the No-Follow, the Yellow Page passes:


Zero PageRank to Red Page
0.425 PageRank to Green Page


Wait! Shouldn?t the no-follow send all 0.85 PageRank to the Green Page? No, over three years ago, Google changed the no-follow attribute so that it doesn?t pass more PageRank to do-follow links. More about this change on Matt Cutt?s Blog.
Where does the PageRank go? The no-followed link is probably treated like a ?sink page?, so the PageRank is re-distributed throughout every page on the internet. So, when you no-follow internal links, you hurt your website and help everyone else!


How bad did the no-follow link hurt?


By no-following an internal link, our sample site went from a total PageRank of 3.0 to a total Pagerank of 2.575. That?s almost a 15% loss of PageRank.


TLDR; Don?t no-follow internal links, especially sitewide links (like Contact Us), as you can lose a lot of PageRank!

About the Author: Nick Kneuper, co-founder of Bold Formula, frequently blogs and spins up SEO videos. Nick and his partner, David Titarenco, recently launched their first product, SiteFlow. SiteFlow helps you increase your search engine traffic by recommending ways to improve your website?s internal link structure. Signup to the newsletter for blog and product updates!

 

[Falian]

I hope yall found this usefull. If you have any questions or comments, please respond!

 

[Execute]

Very well explained there, definitely worth considering, all my sites are do-follow as I only really link to authority sites and the odd sales page, I knew that no-follow wasn't great for your site but that shows quite a lot of negativity, thanks!

 

[vinniffa]

ok, so based on this theory, no following ANY link is going to do no good for you. if the PR is not redistributed to other do follow, there's no point on no-following outbound links.

 

[hawgbert]

Thanks for providing the example and making it easy to understand!

 

[manny521]

Why would you ever even think about adding the no-follow attribute to internal links within your site?

I agree with what you are saying and I will go a step further and say you shouldn't put the no-follow attribute to outbound links to other sites. I call this link love and google will love your site back when you link out.

 

[seosss]

some guys said,no-follow internal links can speed GG crowl,just no matter with pr,right?wrong? confused....

 

[ezines]

some guys said,no-follow internal links can speed GG crowl,just no matter with pr,right?wrong? confused....

Do you have any source on that? If you understand the flow of pagerank, you will not put nofollow tag for your internal links. Google will crawl the site if there is a constant update of fresh contents, making the page/posts get index in a matter of minutes, sometimes even less.

Why would you ever even think about adding the no-follow attribute to internal links within your site?

I agree with what you are saying and I will go a step further and say you shouldn't put the no-follow attribute to outbound links to other sites. I call this link love and google will love your site back when you link out.

I agree with you manny, but putting no-follow tag for affiliate links is a good idea.

 

[Dan Da Man]

Do you have any case studies of how page rank on your site actually affects rankings in a positive manner?

Say for example I have a page rank 8 website with very few links (there are ways to manipulate page rank as I am sure you know), just because your homepage is page rank 8 are internal pages going to rank simply because that page rank passes on to those pages?

What I have come to learn is that page rank only matters from the page you are getting the link from not the page rank of your website.

Can you explain this?

 

[manny521]

I agree with you manny, but putting no-follow tag for affiliate links is a good idea.

I was referring to just a regular link out. I'm not in the affiliate game so not sure about affiliate links, but what your saying makes sense.

 

[imperial444]

Very nice theory. I usually use only do-follow within internal pages, so never was affected badly by no-follow internal linking

 

[notty03]

looks good...

 

[toptoptop]

I never even thought of no-following them

 

[cloakme]

OP I understand what you are saying but the benefits of no following and no indexing pages that have duplicate content on them outweigh having pagerank. You ask why would you have such stuff on your website? Easy, If you have distributor offers that come in daily that cannot be changed because there is to many on a daily basis to keep up with etc. It is easier to have these pages on your site advertising (no follow/no index) but your juice comes from other pages that our ranked well in the serps. You can have better search results in the serps then people with higher pagerank. MC has said it time and time again, if it is not yours, original content make sure it is a no follow and no index. These steps will actually help you rank better in the serps. People should not really put emphasis or much worry into pagerank. I have a site PR 2 that is outranking PR 6 sites. Why because onsite and offsite SEO is better than theirs. They even have 1000's of more pages than me but if your meta data etc is not set up correctly then you lose. If it is guess what! You win...

One more caveat: BHW is only PR 3. Ask the owner if he cares about the pagerank. He has a whole section of no index pages such as JR VIP and Exec. It doesn't effect his traffic flow.

 

[Dan Da Man]

OP I understand what you are saying but the benefits of no following and no indexing pages that have duplicate content on them outweigh having pagerank. You ask why would you have such stuff on your website? Easy, If you have distributor offers that come in daily that cannot be changed because there is to many on a daily basis to keep up with etc. It is easier to have these pages on your site advertising (no follow/no index) but your juice comes from other pages that our ranked well in the serps. You can have better search results in the serps then people with higher pagerank. MC has said it time and time again, if it is not yours, original content make sure it is a no follow and no index. These steps will actually help you rank better in the serps. People should not really put emphasis or much worry into pagerank. I have a site PG 2 that is outranking PG 6 sites. Why because onsite and offsite SEO is better than theirs. They even have 1000's of more pages than me but if your meta data etc is not set up correctly then you lose. If it is guess what! You win...

One more caveat: BHW is only PR 3. Ask the owner if he cares about the pagerank. He has a whole section of no index pages such as JR VIP and Exec. It doesn't effect his traffic flow.

Totally agree. I have page rank 0 sites beating page rank 5-6 sites time again and again.

Page rank gives a false metric of competition and clearly does not give us an idea of how powerful our site is or how powerful a competitors site is. Without backlinks page rank just looks cool

 

[LBrown]

I didn't even know there was a debate on this one...

Good visuals Falian.

 

[soma56]

Why would you ever even think about adding the no-follow attribute to internal links within your site?

That's exactly what I would thinking. Wouldn't you automatically want all your internally links to follow each other anyways?

 

[cloakme]

Exactly, Page Rank just looks cool! There is an article that MC actually talked about pagerank. He said that is only one piece out of hundreds of factors they look for to rank a page in the serps. I will try to find it.

Cliffnote: Regular Joes that search the net have no clue about page rank of a site. They do care how the website looks (good information) and if it is easy to navigate. After that it's all down hill. They might see if your product or company has any reviews and that is pretty much it in a nutshell.

Totally agree. I have page rank 0 sites beating page rank 5-6 sites time again and again.

Page rank gives a false metric of competition and clearly does not give us an idea of how powerful our site is or how powerful a competitors site is. Without backlinks page rank just looks cool

 

[Falian]

ok, so based on this theory, no following ANY link is going to do no good for you. if the PR is not redistributed to other do follow, there's no point on no-following outbound links.

Yes, this is correct. Your website isn't going to benefit from no-following external links either. Google originally released no-follow so that websites, especially those with user-generated content, didn't have to worry about linking out to "bad neighborhoods". The no-follow was basically supposed to say to the search engines that you weren't endorsing the website you linked to. Of course, the no-follow attribute was quickly used to manipulate PageRank (before Google tweaked the algorithm to prevent this tactic).

 

[Falian]

some guys said,no-follow internal links can speed GG crowl,just no matter with pr,right?wrong? confused....

Yeah, so there was apparently some talk about this in Google's Webmaster Forum. The theory was that Google will crawl do-follow links before no-follow links, so you could no-follow less important pages so that more important pages would be crawled faster and more frequently.

I don't think this is a good idea, as the harm of no-following internal links will greatly outweigh any benefit from faster crawling of more important pages.