Optimizing Your Website - Using No Follow to Sculpt Page Rank
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Many links have no ranking value. These include pages that cover privacy policies, terms of use, contact information, about us and more, but those pages are expected on each website by visitors, so you can’t avoid them.
As you link internally from page A to page B, C, D and F, link power from page A is distributed equally between B, C, D and F. If, for example, page F is a privacy policy page that has no ranking potential, you can apply a “nofollow” attribute to the link from page A to page F. This blocks search engines from passing link juice to page F and as a result, more link power is now distributed between pages B, C and D.
Here’s how a nofollow link looks:
<a rel=”nofollow” href="example.html">example link</a>
You have to understand the basics of page rank, so if the above sounds confusing, you can learn about pagerank.
Be careful with page rank sculpting. Once you use “nofollow,” you indicate to the search engines that you understand SEO.
I wouldn’t worry about PR sculpting on a 20-page site. This tactic is for larger websites.
Site maps
A site map is a page that has links to all of the other pages of your website. The idea of a site map is to give a quick route for search engines to find all of your internal pages and to help users get quickly to the content they want.
Make your site map simple and easy to use. Don’t worry about graphics. A good example is the site map used by WebEx.
There’s another kind of site map known as an XML site map, exclusively for search engines. It alerts the search engine each time a new page is added to your website. Do not overly rely on this. Though the idea is good, you still need to make sure that you integrate each new page within its context, and give it some internal links. Nothing is more effective than the “old-fashioned” structure, so be sure to integrate you new pages. If you do not, it’s hard for search engine to know the importance new pages.
Google has a free XML site map generator in Webmaster Central.
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