Increase Website Rank By Nofollowing Key Internal Navigation Links
Yes I know, sounds like a boring subject, but if everything in business had to be fun to do it we'd all be competing to own bars. Any real estate professional would agree a website is a fundamental marketing strategy in this day and age. Anything you can do to increase the page rank and get it to the front page of Google is a necessity. Nofollowing specific non-landing pages on your website can help you raise the page rank value of the landing pages you do want to rank for.
In my general region, my real estate investment landing page (home page) currently ranks on the front page of Google for "We Buy Houses"
and "We Buy Houses Houston"
and that's while being logged out of Gmail. Being logged into Gmail measures your search habits and provides search results based upon that knowledge. While there are multitudes of SEO factors that play into me getting there (and 6 years of intense study on the subject), today I will show you a key ingredient to a little piece of that success in "How to Increase Website Rank by Nofollowing Key Internal Navigation Links," like I did for my "we buy houses" business.
First the Nofollow Link Basics
What is a nofollow link and how does it work? Simply put, a nofollow link simply tells Google not to follow those links when it crawls your page content. An average dofollow anchor link looks as follows:
<a href="http://www.lindseyinvestments.com">We Buy Houses</a>
In order to nofollow these anchor links you would do as follows:
<a href="http://www.lindseyinvestments.com" rel="nofollow">We Buy Houses</a>
How Dofollow Links Affect Your Page Rank
Every page on the entire web has a set amount of page value to Google unless it's been banned, de-indexxed, or specifically told not to by the site owner. For every dofollow/ crawlable link on the page, a bit of that page value is transferred to those pages that have been linked to, whether they are internal or external links.
These types of links will share a bit of the page rank and value that this article receives, because in the eyes of Google, these pages are relevant to the overall success of the page in the eyes of web traffic who like and share it. This is a rule you may want to keep in mind when deciding how many external referencing anchor links you will use to cite sources. The more you use, the more of that pages value you share with all of those external sources.
Nofollowing All External Links Isn't the Answer
First of all, aside from being greedy, it's just ethically bad. If you are citing someone as a source for your content, give them the credit. Obviously they were important enough in the first place when you cited them.
Second, Google is all about user experience. If you are citing high quality source on some breaking news to back up what you say, you will be given more credit by Google for providing that relevant source to your material. They will be able to crawl the link and say "AH HA, I see clearly what you are writing about!"
So Why Nofollow Internal Links?
Though Google measures site authority as a whole when referencing its' authority within its' search ranking, it also measures value on a page by page basis within the website itself. Your landing pages with their internal links within the content, navigation bar, and footer share some of that page value with all of those internal links. What you want to do is keep the juice on the landing page as opposed to splitting it with pages of less value in the great scheme of things.
Which Pages Should I Nofollow?
I generally nofollow (but never noindex) pages like my About Us, Contact Us, and subpages of an overall topic within a dropdown menu. Of the 18 pages on my site (both visible and hidden) 10 of them are nofollow, and 2 of those are noindex.
The point is pages like About Us, Contact Us, and even pages that are extremely important hook pages are not as important as the initial landing page I need to get visitors to in the first place. So why split the power of that landing page with them and dilute the overall power between all of those pages. I'd much rather have 1 powerful page on Page 1 of Google than 10 pages on Page 8.
How to Nofollow an Entire Page
So now we arrive at the pièce de résistance. Why spend hours going through and nofollowing every individual tag on all of your landing pages. Nofollow the whole page of the less significant pages. Stick this piece of code into the head of the page in question:
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
A whole lot of jabber to execute that point wasn't it :)
If You Enjoyed that Tip...
Please do me a solid and share it with your friends and colleagues (top of the page just under the title). This blog post took me over an hour to write. A share takes you less than a second to click and means the world to a blogger. It's a huge motivation to keep coming back and sharing more trade secrets in the future.
Also, consider following my blog feed "We Blog Houses" for more great tips like this. Last, if you enjoyed this post check out my last Biggerpockets post "Google+ and REI Professionals: How Are You Not On Board? Seriously?!"
Cheerio mates!
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