Are You Still using NOFOLLOW on your internal links? Don't!

• I've been hearing conflicting reports about the use of the nofollow tag to sculpt PageRank on my site. What's the latest theory?

Answer: Google's Matt Cutts recently posted video on this very topic and outlines Google's official policy on the subject. He doesn't get into detail about how nofollow can still cost you link juice, but makes it pretty clear they don't advise it.

As we detailed in our July 2009 Search Engine Strategies update, at the June 2009 SMX Advanced Conference, Google's Matt Cutts informed the audience that Google changed the way the rel=nofollow tag works in their algorithm. He noted that as of some time last year they've treated links with the nofollow tag the same way as regular links in the PageRank distribution of a page. Which means, instead of being able to save link juice (PageRank) to pass along to only links without the nofollow tag on the page, that valuable link juice just "evaporates".

This is likely the reason Google doesn't recommend use of the nofollow tag for internal links. However, there are methods that do work, which of course Google doesn't comment on, but we will!

To get around the controversy on the nofollow tag we do have an alternative that has stood up to our testing. Again, this is something that we covered in detail in the