SEO - Question about "no follow" attribute & navigation structure

[landshark]

Assume a 1-page (of content) website.

Is it considered "best practice" to add a "no follow" attribute to links in your navigation structure such as:

About Us
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Sitemap - (asssuming you already have a sitemap.xml in your root directory)

Will doing this ensure that you keep all of you linkjuice on the main page or do you somehow lose SEOpoints for not allowing the googlebot to crawl those pages?

Thanks.

[Mike Anthony]

I certainly wouldn't block the about us page but then I try to add relevance there too. To your question I have never seen or read of any negative impact of using nofollow (unless you are cutting off content you want to be indexed)

[jasonmorgan]

it's an old trick to funnel or direct link juice that has been squashed by google.

goolge looks at all of the links on a page and divides up the juice between all of them. If a link is nofollow then that juice is lost, not given to the remaining links.

It was a good idea... about a year ago.

[landshark]

Mike,

Makes sense. I mainly don't want the presence of any of those pages to reduce the indexability or SEO quality of the the main content page.

I have read on a number of forums that you need these pages for SEO purposes, but otherwise, for a simple one-page website that doesn't collect any information, or otherwise create a threat to a user, why bother?

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by landshark

Mike,
I have read on a number of forums that you need these pages for SEO purposes, but otherwise, for a simple one-page website that doesn't collect any information, or otherwise create a threat to a user, why bother?

Well actually I'd say why bother with the putting in a no-follow tag anyway (for internal links). As Jason pointed out its not all that useful. I wouldn't say it hurts you though. Hers a nice write up from Google's main man himself


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