Use of nofollow has been a hot topic last week, SEOmoz tentatively claimed that nofollow changes in their architecture may have been the reason that they saw an increase in search traffic over the last few months. Tempers flared in the comments and many people responded directly about PageRank sculpting and siloing some people responded about higher content standards or seo standards. I think that it is good that Rand brought up the topic of whether nofollow can be used to game Google’s link valuation.

The response seems to be varied. But the bottom line is that rel=nofollow probably is not doing what people think it does. Last June Bean Stalk claims they passed “BSISEOINC” to their homepage and it seems to have worked for them, searching “bsiseoinc -inanchor:bsiseoinc” doesn’t return the homepage.

But it has been know for a long time that search engines follow all readable links. So what happens when you put these links in? On outbound links it means that you are taking part in Google not fixing themselves. On internal links it means that you are taking advantage of Google being broken. But nofollow is a lazy way of accomplishing the effect of building a structurally sound architecture and it means that you are not getting full value from the other engines.

If You Are Going to NoFollow

If you feel that you can’t rank any other way you can drive visibility into the deeper sections of your site following this simple formula that you can see replicated on many sites:

Everyone using this scheme is betting on the link value that would have gone to administrative pages like contact pages will allow value to pass into deeper levels of the content sections. If this works it may bring the Google robots a level, perhaps two, deeper into your site if you have conserved sufficient link value. It is futile to guess if your home page has that kind of value because it is all dependent on your external links, which are difficult to pin down. If your website were a body this scheme is like binding one of your limbs to drive more blood to your brain. It might work but you are loosing a limb to do it.

Build Better Architecture

Building a strong architecture to take advantage of pages that naturally accumulate links will lead to better total results, unless you aren’t looking for long-term value.

I am going to use Xenite.org as an example of creating powerful pages. Michael Martinez, one of the biggest detractors of nofollow link schemes, follows a simple architectural rule with few exceptions: Everything links to the sitemap, the sitemap links to everything, at the very least, at the category level. Every internal link sends value to one of two pages and that page in turn distributes visibility equitably, the result is that Xenite ranks for a very diverse set of phrases. SEOmoz feels that they have gotten long-tail value out of forcing certain links to take no weight. I am inclined to believe them — but I doubt that it has significantly changed the the overall picture. SEOmoz is a site with diverse distribution of external links and employs a rather sparse category page structure. I suspect that SEOmoz would find a greater change from adjusting their handling of related posts or category pages than they saw from the nofollow experiment, because this would also give them some effect from other search engines.

Rel=nofollow likely does preserve more “link juice” through the follow links, on Google, but don’t think that it is as effective as actually changing your architecture to intentionally bring visibility to the content. Link schemes are not search optimization they are game theory, while they may work today they are a major liability during updates because of the high likelihood that link valuation will change.

What you should be doing is constructing sites that better distribute linkage to deep pages. This includes selectively restricting navigation through the site, use of robot.txt and meta robots tag to restrict indexing, and use of hub points. Also you should be focusing on your content — if you are having trouble with visibility you probably are not creating focused content.

Those administrative links that everyone is so quick to shut off do not actually need to be on every page, they can be given a category like any other content and not an individual site wide link. This will drastically decrease the total linkage to the section. Additionally contact pages, about us, terms of service, etc. don’t need to link to all areas of your site they can easily pass their value only to logical hub points – like category heads or site maps.

Content that is important should be linked to in as many ways as possible including creating featured categories that include a greater deep links bypassing the intermediate steps. Proper structure will employ deep page to pass value upstream in their hierarchy instead of relying on a trickle down to get value.

I will get into some structures that create link focus without being dependent on artificial crutches.