Why you shouldn't no-follow internal links!

soma56 said:

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

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Yes, but quite often I find that webmasters will no-follow Contact Us, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy pages. I did this study to clearly show that you NEVER want to no-follow internal links. Glad you are on top of things .

Dan Da Man said:

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?

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Internal PageRank is huge, especially for bigger website's. Take Wikipedia for example, it has pages with very little external backlinks outranking pages with a ton of external backlinks. Wikipedia's internal pagerank is stellar and contributes to why these page's can outrank others. If you removed all the internal links to the Wikipedia page, it wouldn't rank nearly as well.

The whole concept of building Parasite Pages on Web 2.0 properties is based on the headstart a parasite page gets from internal pagerank. To see this in action, build a new page on a website of yours and build a similar page on a Web 2.0 property. All things being equal, the Web 2.0 property will out rank the new page on your website. Why? The Web 2.0 property page will benefit from more internal PageRank than your website's page.

Large Database website's also use good website structure to pass PageRank throughout the website, helping it rank for long-tail terms.

PageRank is indeed one of many factors that determines how much search engine traffic your website receives, but it's one of the most important factors.

Hope this helps man! Thanks for asking such a great question.

Dan Da Man said:

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

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There are many other factors that Google uses to determine how to rank pages. Content and Link Relevancy are as important, if not more, than PageRank. You can outrank a page with more relevant content and relevant links, despite the competing page having more PR.

A PR 10 page about "How to Eat Apples" isn't going to outrank your PR 1 Page on "Different Types of Apples" if the search term is "Different Types of Apples". But if that PR 10 page is about "Different Types of Apples" too, you are almost always going to lose.

Hope this helps!