How and where to use “nofollow” tag on your Blog

Keeping the PageRank of your blog is crucial. You can keep your blog’s PageRank by managing all the links come into and out of your blog. By reducing the number of outgoing links on a blog page will increase the value of each link available on a page. By adding links will reduce the value of every other link on the page. It sounds simple, right? No, if you just take away an important links resources for your visitors from your blog, you may lost your visitors.

So, for the sake of SEO purpose, how do we eliminate links without taking them away from our human visitors? By using so called “nofollow” attribute on your links. This is a great thing in usability and SEO point of view, because it removes the main conflict between human visibility and search engine optimization purpose.

Here is how use it on a link:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/contact.html” rel=”nofollow”>Contact</a>

That’s it. Just simply adding rel=”nofollow” to the link tells the spider not to follow that link and keeping your page PageRank remains. So, where to use it, you ask.

You can use it on your blog’s home page because so much of the PageRank in your site will flow into and from. For the basic linking strategy, here’s what you want do on your blog home page:

• Add nofollow on all of the links to your overhead pages. Overhead pages are such Contact, Privacy Policy, Shopping Cart pages or other unimportant pages that search engine need not to be crawled.

• Add nofollow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have a logical reason to give a direct link.

• Do not use nofollow on the link to your site map page, if you have one.

• Do not use nofollow on the link to your “Resources/Links” page, if you are exchanging links.

• Do not use nofollow on the links to your deep pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results for some reason.

Additionally, beside your home page, do the followings as well on each single post page of your blog :

• Add nofollow on all the links to your “overhead” pages, as above, unless you want some of them to get indexed.

• Add nofollow on outbound links to other blog/sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link, or want to pass some “link love” along to that site.

• Add nofollow on all links to the site map. From the spider’s perspective, the site map is only linked from your blog’s home page.

• Add nofollow on the link to your “Resources/Links” page, if you are exchanging links. The Resources/Links page is only directly linked from your home page.

• Do not use nofollow on links to your deep pages, unless you don’t want them to show up in search results.