“Link Juice” is the cumulative effect of the link popularity that your site gains over time as more and more sites link to yours. If not managed properly, this link juice can be diluted unnecessarily within your site’s internal pages.
So how do you go about managing your internal link “link Juice”? Easy..Use the Nofollow link attribute wisely within your sites internal linking structure.
First of all, lets define the Nofollow attribute. The Wikipedia defines the Nofollow as:
“a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.”
Basically, the Nofollow is telling search engines not to attribute any “link juice” to the “nofollowed” link on the page. Here is what a nofollow link looks like:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”yoursite.com” mce_href=”yoursite.com”>this is a nofollowed link</a>
The Nofollow tag can also be implemented on a per page basis thereby instructing the search engines not to attribute any link juice to any of the links on the page. The Meta Nofollow Tag is placed in the <head> section of the page and looks like this:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOFOLLOW”>
Why would you want to use the nofollow on some of your internal links? Well in a nutshell, because some of your site’s pages do not require as much internal link popularity as your other strategic pages.
Some of the links that should have a nofollow link attribute include:
- Links in your breadcrumb leading to the copyright statement, the contact us page, etc…
- Links to external sites such as the designers, coders, etc…
- Duplicate links on the same page
By properly managing you site’s internal link juice, you’ll be well on your way to getting your important pages ranking better in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Good luck!
UPDATE: PageRank Sculpting as mentioned in this article no longer works (Thanks to Craig for reminding me to update this blog post)
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