How to Maximize Your Internal ROL (Return on Links)
May 1st, 2008 by MarkThere’s been some debate in the SEO world lately over what’s known as pagerank sculpting. Basically pagerank sculpting is the practice of strategically placing no follow tags on certain links within your site as a way of concentrating your Google juice where you want it most. Let me show you this example:
If you’re wondering why those tabs in Court’s nav bar are red, it’s because I have SEO for Firefox enabled and one of its features is showing you all the links on a page that have the no follow tag in them. SEOQuake has the same feature - if you want this functionality on your browser you can read our post on installing SEOQuake. Incidentally, we get quite a few Google searchers on this site looking for how to identify no followed links. There you go, friendly searcher.
Why Would You No Follow Links Within Your Site?
So the question is why Court has put no follow tags on the About, Contact, Archives, and Advertise tabs in his navigation bar. Pretty simple really. Your site only has so much Google juice to share, and you want to make sure your channeling it to the right places. A few days ago we had a pretty solid discussion of backlinks (thanks everybody) and one of the main points was that anchor text matters.
The anchor text you use in linking to yourself is a message to Google about your site’s topic. Court doesn’t see any reason to tell Google his site is about….About. Make sense? Especially since your Google-juice-per-page is limited, and you have other links you really want to matter.
Concentrated Juice
Let’s say Court’s homepage has 100 units of Google authority. Every link he gives away on the homepage uses a little of that authority. So maybe if the tabs in the navigation bar weren’t no followed, they would eat up 20 units of Google juice he could be giving to his section on “The Basics” over in the sidebar.
Now before any snob SEOs pounce on me and say, “There’s no way to measure the authority of an individual page! It’s not that simple! You’re spreading false information!”, just calm down. I know there’s no such thing as 100 units of Google juice (not that I know of anyway). I’m just trying to give an illustration of when you would want to no follow certain links on your site.
Return On Links - The SEO’s ROI
You can put a financial spin on this. Would you rather put your money into a bank account earning 3%, or stock shares that earn 8%? You put your money wherever it gives you the highest ROI (return on investment) right? Well what about your “ROL” (return on links)? We may not know how to measure the authority of a page in specific terms, but we do know it’s finite.
Since Google juice is not unlimited, we need to wisely invest it wherever it will give the greatest return. Is Court’s business better off if people find him for the keyword “About” or if they find him by searching for “How to Make Money Blogging”? Obviously the second. So if he doesn’t hurt his business by depriving his “About” page of link power then the only logical thing is to no follow it and give a little extra oomph to “How to Make Money Blogging” and the others.
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May 1st, 2008 at 11:09 am
Court quick question. I can see your using wordpress. Can you point to the plugin that lets you no follow specific pages?
I have All in One SEO Pack and it lets you set nofollows on categories but not individual pages.
Much appreciated.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Those links are actually hard links that are included in the header file of my theme. I edited the theme and added the nofollows to the links.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:49 pm
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh brilliant
Thanks dude.
BTW I want to thank guys like you for helping me decide to quit my full time job. Last month I cleared 1k from affiliate/adsense/links/reviews etc and decided I have enough in my toolkit to go for the gold.
My goal is to build 30 sites in 90 days to replace the income I was making working full time. Keyword Sniping is a BIG component.
Thanks again.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Gutsy move! I love it. I’m going to pass along the advice of a wise Canadian Grizzly Bear:
“Spend 10% of your time creating content, and 90% of your time building links to your site with the right anchor text.”
And, since you’re basically following the Vic Franqui business model, I’m going to also advise that you become a crazy, brilliant Puerto Rican guy who sits at his computer 14-18 hours a day.
Seriously man, build those links and you can make it happen. Best of luck!
May 1st, 2008 at 11:16 am
Makes sense. I’m using nofollow in some places, like for affiliate links, but I’m probably bleeding Google juice on some unimportant internal links. Time to revisit this.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:16 am
Hmm very thought provoking article Mark! I hadn’t considered the idea of a finite amount of Google “Juice.” But what if Court isn’t using all of his Juice as his site stands right now? Then, by having no follow links he is missing out on some search engine traffic, even if they did happen to find his “About” page, or another similar page with no follow tags on it.
This is equivalent to having your money in a saving account that provides 3% returns, but, if you simply asked for 5% interest, they would give it to you. If there is extra interest (juice) out there that is not being utilized, then it is being wasted.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:49 am
It’s not wasted. Just focused. Any juice the about page might have is focused to the home page. The home page is just collecting that juice and sending it to specific no followed links.
Think of it as many rivers flowing into a lake and then the lake being able to control sending all the water to certain rivers flowing out.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:56 am
That’s a good point! I didn’t know that is how it works, but it sounds logical to me. Great analogy with the rivers btw.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:58 am
Feel the flow. The flow is circular. Circular: all good things. Feel the flow.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Thanks for the accurate, poetic contribution James. On the money.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:19 pm
excuse the noob question, but how exactly do you add no follow for a non-coder like me?
May 1st, 2008 at 1:32 pm
You edit the code that makes the link, adding rel=’nofollow’. I can’t really post the code here or WordPress will just make a link out of it but it basically goes right after the URL you’re linking to and before the > symbol.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Mark — very nice post.
Would you say that PageRank is the best method for estimating your Google juice? What would one look for in traffic stats to learn if a site’s juice is over- or under-utilized?
May 1st, 2008 at 1:40 pm
PageRank is a good indicator if you have enough to be able to tell. For example, the pages that I have nofollowed are PR0s. The pages in Court’s Best Work section are mostly PR4s. The SEO WordPress Themes page is also a PR4.
Since it happens on a scale Aaron, it would be hard to estimate by looking at stats. You might have a certain level of traffic to a page now, and it would increase if you passed more rank to the page. However, it’s hard to tell how much PR you’re passing by looking at stats. The best thing you can do is pass as much as you can to the most important URLs.
May 1st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I laughed out loud when I read this post. I’ve been trying for three days to figure out why some of my links on my site are read, but only on my desktop. I’ve checked other computers, shut down my browser, restated my system, examined my CSS file–the red just wouldn’t go away! Mark, thanks for saving what little sanity I have left.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I guess you never know how a post is going to help somebody.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Hey Mark, thanks for the lesson and fix your “installing SeoQuake” link in the beginning of the post, it doesn’t work.
May 1st, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Thanks Macnabclan. Fixed.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Is there a plugin that helps me make certain links a “no follow” ? Or do I need an HTML tutorial on it?
thanks for another great post!
AL
May 1st, 2008 at 2:15 pm
nevermind, i see the answer just above. sorry!
AL
May 1st, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Another helpful article and good advice on no follow, thanks Mark. I noticed those menu links with the red just a day ago when I visited Court’s blog, and now the full explanation arrives!
I don’t know if you noticed that ebay.com has their ebay logo in the upper left corner with “no follow” on it. Any idea why they would do that? What is the relevance of image links and Google juice if any? Thanks!
May 1st, 2008 at 7:39 pm
The SEO for Firefox at seobook.com will also highlight nofollow links in red. It also adds some helpful stuff to Google search results.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:18 pm
THANKS COURT,
I have SEO quake and have had no time to check out all the tools, NOW I know why I keep seeing those red marks all over the place!
May 1st, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Court, whats the benefit? Are you saying if more juice goes concentrated on particular subpages, then it will do better in the SERP’s than the not so important pages? Also wouldn’t all the subpages linking back to the home pages return the juice?
May 1st, 2008 at 10:17 pm
You got it - more concentrated link power is given to the subpage receiving the sitewide link, and it will do better in the SERPs.
As far as the subpages returning all the link power back to the homepage, you’re right in a sense. As a group they give it all back, but individually they are receiving a lot more than they’re giving.
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:09 am
Hi Mark and Court
Are you sure it’s better to use no-follow rather than robots text?
I still feel that there’s a lot of misinformation about no-follow; essentially no-followed links do not pass PageRank but they still carry anchor text/SERP juice.
If you think about it from Google’s point of view they were paying some people more for AdSense because some people had artificially increased their PageRank.
No-follow works as a solution, for Google, but I’m not convinced it was ever intended to use in sculpting PageRank within a site.
Call me old fashioned but I think robots text is the less risky way of achieving a better ratio of content to pages and therefore greater Goog love…
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:25 am
I looked at the SEO quake post. I don’t see anything about how one identifies nofollow links.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:40 am
cool article. but you know…with so much seo going on, why don’t you have an H1 tag on your home page!?! isn’t that SEO 101?
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
New design hobbies - still working on a lot of things… Come back in a week my friend.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:24 am
Will do! For articles like these
What gets me is John Chow and Darren Rose don’t have h1 tags either. I just don’t get it. Thats gotta be the #1 SEO fundamental, so why aren’t these guys using it. Hell, you may have picked another spot or two for ‘internet marketing’ had it been incorporated with the new design.
In fact doesn’t this say something about Unique Blog Designs? They did to your redesign as well as Johns?
May 3rd, 2008 at 4:56 am
Boy do I have a lot of questions:
1 - If the mentioned pages are not worthy of a link, why are they listed in the nav bar? Pretty important location to be wasting unimportant pages on.
2 - If anchor text is matters so much why would you have a link named “home” on every page in the blog? I would think “Internet School Home” would do the trick.
3 - I like your 100 points as a reference. It gives a good reference point for discussion.
4 - I have not seen proof that Google actually distributes the juice to the links that are do follow. Your assuming the page value gets split up by the 80 points of do follow. Or, is it the value of the 80 do follow points remain the same! You have to admit it would take a major change to the algorithm to accomplish what you assumes happens. I hope your correct by the way.
5 - If you want return on investment I would remove “reply to this comment” link on every comment. If you get 100 comments, you just cut your link juice in half for every good link on the page.
6 - Hate to toot my own horn, but my entry in Courtneys writing project is interesting. To thank him, I created a page that gives him 50 points! It would take this blog 100 pages to duplicate that juice! The name of the page is Why backlinks work. You must admit that 50 points is a lot of juice with one page. It would be to both parties involved to market a page like that. Just getting the page to PR3 would be a big boost!
…..and finally, remember every improvement you make to a blog is multiplied times the amount of pages on the blog!
Thanks to both of you guys. I hope you take this as constructive comments.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:48 am
2 - If anchor text is matters so much why would you have a link named “home” on every page in the blog? I would think “Internet School Home” would do the trick.
Great point. That’s a tactic I actually use myself. I leave the word “home” for user friendliness - It tells actual visitors what to expect from the link - But I use my main keyword with it.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:50 am
On a different note, I have tried both the SEO Quake and SEO for Firefox plugins, and I can’t make either one highlight the nofollow links. What’s the magic incantation I must utter?
May 5th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Fiar -
In SEO for Firefox this is how you do it:
Go to Tools > SEO for Firefox > Options then look for ‘nofollow’ links. Either check or uncheck the box depending on whether you want the nofollowed links highlighted or not.
As far as SEOQuake is concerned, I can’t seem to find a way to turn the feature off. For me, when the tool is enabled, nofollowed links are red. When it’s disabled, they’re not red. Sorry I’m not more help than that.
May 4th, 2008 at 2:11 am
This article is informative. Thank you. I will take what I learned and quickly apply it to my sites.
May 5th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Court-
I’m a fairly new reader but I’ve been devouring your posts like a man who hasn’t eaten for weeks - what’s your advice for us who’ve maybe got just a few sites at the moment, carry on building or go back and and start tweaking the links we’ve already got to “no follow”?
Keep up the great work.
Ray
May 28th, 2008 at 9:11 am
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