NoFollow Links

A nofollow link is a link that is included on a webpage using standard html markup but includes an attribute to prevent passing link juice or reputation to the destination page. This type of link does not improve the link target search engine ranking.

Here is a hyperlink to Google followed by the same link with the nofollow attribute added.




Google, Yahoo, and MSN all include nofollow links in site backlink counts. Google only shows a select few backlinks for each domain when using the link operator from the web interface. Google webmaster tools record of backlinks includes nofollow links even though they are absent using the link operator.

Interesting that in Google information for webmasters question number fourteen indicates that the nofollow attribute is a way to prevent Google from "crawling" an individual link on a page as well. This tells me that rel=nofollow does the following with Google:

♦ Prevents passing PageRank to the destination link
♦ Prevents the destination link from being crawled
♦ Does not prevent the link from being recorded as a backlink


NOFOLLOW AN ENTIRE PAGE
If you want to nofollow all links on a page, but do want the page indexed, use this meta tag :



To prevent indexing and nofollow all links :




NOFOLLOW ON INTERNAL LINKS
Within your domain any page that does not need to be indexed can be linked using rel=nofollow. This is acceptable for contact pages, about us, privacy policies, and any page that you want to prevent indexing and passing reputation.

The combination of the noindex, nofollow meta tags on the page, and rel=nofollow links to the page within your domain will keep them from being indexed and also does not leach PageRank to pages that have no purpose as it relates to organic search.

I don't think this technique has much value with the exception of large sites with duplicate content concerns.

ROBOTS.TXT
The easiest way to prevent indexing pages is simply to include the page in the robots.txt file using disallow. This can create a dangling page if the page accumulates inbound links from other sites. This article explains the best way to handle nofollow on internal links.