Tim did you read any of the articles Dan Thies has written about this? They're on SEO Fast Start. I think if you search for nofollow they'll all show up.

So ... what would be the expected difference between a nofollow link, and an anchor tag that you use javascript to set an href attribute for?

Both methods should prevent the link from passing anything of value. Neither by themselves will prevent a page from being indexed. I don't think either one carries a stigma, at least in the major search engines' eyes ... but human visitors who know about seo might have different opinions: "You might as well stamp them as 'SPAMMY, CRUMBY, AND NOT WORTH INDEXING' because that is what you are telling the search engines who honor REL=NOFOLLOW."

My blog's login page is there in Google's index. There's no reason for it to be there, and it's never once brought me a visitor from the serps. I'd rather have them devote whatever resources they're willing to spend on me to my real pages. I think that's Chris's point, though: Google doesn't give me 100 slots in their index and let me fill them in with whatever urls I choose. So removing one page doesn't make room for another...

Originally Posted by vangogh

Tim did you read any of the articles Dan Thies has written about this?

No I have not yet.

I think that's Chris's point, though: Google doesn't give me 100 slots in their index and let me fill them in with whatever urls I choose. So removing one page doesn't make room for another...

That's true. Google does not give you a set number of slots but you actually can choose which pages you may not want to have indexed. For example, why would Google (or yourself for that matter) want a search engine filled with privacy policies, disclaimers and log-in pages in the first place?

I think Google would be just as happy with you adding noindex to those pages (and/or blocking them in your robots.txt). If you have a page on your website that's not worth indexing (such as a log-in page or shopping cart link) then why would you want to flow juice to that page?

The overall benefit your website gets from using nofollow to those pages might be minimal but any little edge you can get helps.

Again, just my opinions.

Forrest SEOs are not going to see the nofollow and think you're saying your own pages aren't to be trusted. I think the SEO community would be aware what you're trying to do.

As far as you login page example it's not so much about the page being dropped from the index in favor of another. Links are a big part of where pages rank. A page on your site acquires a certain amount of link juice as links point to it. Your entire site also acquires a certain amount of link juice into it through all the links pointing into the different pages of the site.

Your site has all this link juice, which you start to distribute both in and out of your site.

For the sake of discussion I'm going to make up an arbitrary number to represent the juice your site has. Image your site has 100 LJ. It all flows into your home page. Your home page links to each of your other 10 pages and distributes 10 LJ to each page.

Suppose you only want 5 of those 10 pages to rank. Maybe one's a login page, another is a privacy policy, etc. You don't expect either to do much good if someone visits them from a search engine. So you nofollow the links into those pages. Your home page still has 100 LJ to distribute, but now each of your other 5 pages is getting 20 LJ instead of 10. Those 5 pages should be able to rank better than they were before because they have more LJ flowing into them.

It doesn't really matter whether the 5 pages you nofollowed are or aren't in the index, but you could block them from being indexed if you want. This is all about redistributing the the value of the links you get so they help the pages you prefer to rank.

I just wanted to thank everybody for taking part in the discussion. By following discussions and links I've cleared up lots of smog in the "link juice" department.

gm

Glad we could help. It's an interesting discussion.