MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Our office is a fun and diverse place where you can witness a debate of great minds in just about every room you walk by or outside while having coffee or in the boardroom or in the games room or…well, you get the point. We all have our own opinions and most will share them whether the rest of us want to hear it or not. I like to think everyone wants to hear my opinion and that is why I’m going to write a post about one of the more talked about (unresolved) arguments we have in the office.

It all started when Caitlin did her presentation on siloing, all agreed it was a great presentation, but it was far from being a unanimous decision on whether or not using nofollow tags would work in favor or against your site when it came to rankings. There was the argument that using nofollows to silo PR to only the important pages would just close doorways for potential users to enter the site. It is a valid point, if you’re going to have pages that won’t be crawled or indexed then why bother with having them on the site at all? I agree with this to a certain extent. I acknowledge that you shouldn’t put up a page if it’s not going to be seen by the search engines, but on the other hand, why waste page rank on unimportant pages?

I think most are in agreement with Matt Cutts when he said the following:

“Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect.

My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.

Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.”

It all comes down to what you have at your disposal and how you choose to use it. If you are one of the $100 guys then I found a good post on SEOmoz on nofollow sculpting that should help you out.

This topic unfortunately doesn’t offer itself to a definite, conclusive answer; it’s one of those few disagreements that can’t be proven… yet. In my opinion though, argue on!