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Should one apply rel="nofollow" attribute to site links that are bound for secure/login required pages?

We have a URI date based link structure where the previous year's news content is free, while the current year, and any year prior to the last, are paid, login required content.

The net effect is that when doing a search for our company name in google, what comes up first is Contact, About, Login, etc., standard non-login required content. That's fine, but ideally we have our free content, the pages we want to promote, shown first in the search engine results.

Toward this end, the link structure now generates rel="follow" for the free content we want to promote, and rel="nofollow" for all paid content and Contact, About, Login, etc. screens that we want at the bottom of the SEO search result ladder.

I have yet to deploy the new linking scheme for fear of, you know, blowing up the site SEO-wise ;-) It's not in great shape to begin with, despite our decent ranking, but I don't want us to disappear either.

Anyway, words of wisdom appreciated.

Thanks

virtualeyes
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2 Answers2

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nofollow

I think Emil Vikström is wrong about nofollow. You can use the rel value nofollow for internal links. The microformats spec and the HTML5 spec don't say the opposite.

Google even gives such an example:

Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.

This does apply to your use case. So you could nofollow the links to your login page. Note however, if you also meta-noindex them, people that search for "YourSiteName login" probably won't get the desired page in their search results, then.

follow

There is no rel value "follow". It's not defined in the HTML5 spec nor in the HTML5 Link Type extensions. It isn't even mentioned in http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values at all. A link without the rel value nofollow is automatically a "follow link". You can't overwrite a meta-nofollow for certain links (the two nofollow values even have a different semantic).

Your case

I'd use nofollow for all links to restricted/paid content. I wouldn't nofollow the links to the informational pages about the site (About, Contact, Login), because they are useful, people might search especially for them, and they give information about your site, while all the content pages give information about the various topics.

Community
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unor
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  • +1 yah, I just gave @Emil the nod since, well, very few views, did not think anyone else would reply ;-) The idea of using nofollow links for secure/login require pages may not be necessary in my case. Given "/some-secure-page", the URI remains the same, but the generated HTML is the login screen, which has meta noindex, nofollow tag, so search engines already know to go away. Applying nofollow on the secure links just makes for more work, calculating which links are free vs. not free based on given URI yyyymmdd date param -- in other words, likely a pointless hassle ;-) – virtualeyes Nov 18 '12 at 17:48
  • Giving you the nod unor, google webmaster tools paragraph has me thinking, meh, I did already go to the trouble of differentiating login from non-login required links, might as well pop it back in. On the fence though, not sure if it will make that much of a difference – virtualeyes Nov 18 '12 at 19:18
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Nofollow is only for external links, it does not apply to links within your own domain. Search engines will try to give the most relevant content for the query asked, and they generally actively avoid taking the website owners wishes into account. Thus, nofollow will not help you here.

What you really want to do is make the news content the best choice for a search on your company name. A user searching for your company name may do this for two reasons: They want your homepage (the first page) or they more specifically want to know more about your company. This means that your homepage as well as "About", "Contact", etc, are generally actually what the user is looking for and the search engines will show them at the top of their results pages.

If you don't want this you must make those pages useless for one wanting to know more about your company. This may sound really silly. To make your "About" and "Contact" pages useless to one searching for your company you should remove your company name from those pages, as well as any information about what your company does. Put that info on the news pages instead and the search engines may start to rank the news higher.

Another option is to not let the search engine index those other pages at all by adding them to a robots.txt file.

Emil Vikström
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  • +1, good info. Hmmmm, really, nofollow is only for external links?? And here I went through the trouble to code up an elaborate follow/nofollow linking scheme for internal links ;-) Well, I just deployed, sounds like what I have done is added a couple more KB in html, great, lol. – virtualeyes Nov 17 '12 at 19:23
  • I removed the nofollows, realized that secure login screen already has meta noindex, nofollow tag, so was pointless having them on the links. Need to create a site map to clue in Google et al as to where the publicly accessible content is... – virtualeyes Nov 18 '12 at 13:21
  • sorry, @unor found google's own stance on the subject, published in webmaster tools "http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569&topic=2371375&ctx=topic" – virtualeyes Nov 18 '12 at 19:16