PageRank Sculpting
I'm curious what everyone is for pagerank sculpting overall. There doesn't seem to be a clear, straightforward way to add nofollow attributes to links in primary/secondary links to such pages as /contact et cetera... What's everyone doing?
-=- christopher
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nofollow
The best option I've found is just using the input filter to nofollow links within nodes. As far as menus...if you've created your contact page as a webform, and you have the meta tags (nodewords) module installed, you should be able to set the robots.txt file to nofollow that page. I'm not sure how that would work with Drupal's default contact system.
My "day job" - Internet Marketing Specialist, at a Drupal Design and Internet Marketing agency.
Twitter: LevelTen_Colin
internal nofollow
A danger with using nofollow on a Drupal input filter is that search engines won't follow internal links inside of nodes. Internal links inside of nodes are great for SEO. I often set nofollow with the input filter so that search engines don't follow spam links from user-generated content, but then I change the input filter to full HTML when I post so that search engines will follow my internal links.
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that's a good way to go
It's also what I do. For UG content, set the permissions so that the filtered HTML is the default, give admin users full html by defualt, or at least provide it as an option.
My "day job" - Internet Marketing Specialist, at a Drupal Design and Internet Marketing agency.
Twitter: LevelTen_Colin
When you restrict pages
When you restrict pages through robots.txt but link these pages without the nofollow attribute from pages that are indexed by search engines, these links flow PageRank. Aaron Wall has a good writeup called Robots.txt vs Rel=Nofollow vs Meta Robots Nofollow (http://www.seobook.com/robots-txt-vs-rel-nofollow-vs-meta-robots-nofollow).
If I don't want an internal page to get any link juice, I don't link to it using the menu system, but only from inside of nodes/blocks or the footer message text.
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is there a way
Is there a way to add "nofollow" attributes to the primary links in Drupal's menu system?
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My "day job" - Internet Marketing Specialist, at a Drupal Design and Internet Marketing agency.
Twitter: LevelTen_Colin
This module makes it easy:
This module makes it easy: http://drupal.org/project/menu_attributes
I use it for a few sites.
sweet!
this is precisely what I was looking for.. thanks!
-=- christopher
PR sculpting
PageRank sculpting appears to be dead now.
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Reference?
Do you have a reference you can cite?
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Christian
The inventor of nofollow
The inventor of nofollow
...until the next time
...until the next time google changes its mind ;)
-=- christopher
They killed PR sculpting a
They killed PR sculpting a long time ago, but just didn't tell anyone. I don't think it will ever come back (or should have been a "feature" of nofollow to start with).
Now that pagerank sculpting
Now that pagerank sculpting via nofollow is dead, I'd like to see a discussion on another approach, one that assists with sculpting while not leaving the "SEO footprint" that Google may look for. What I mean by this, is if a solution was to hide links within javascript (yes, still can be done), then Google is likely to "know", particularly with a hand check, that the site was touched by an SEO. This isn't a good thing.
What I would like to see is a minimization of links automatically created. So, for example, in the login block I'd like to have the links reduced from "Create new account" and "Request new password" to a single management page, something like "Create Account or Get Password"...simple enough, and reduces the number of links on the page.
IMHO, this is the best way forward for sculpting. Since it's been stated Google monitors projects by known SEOs, I don't believe it wise to have the tell-tale signs of SEO on it (like the nofollows of a large amount of internal links, or purposefully hiding links via javascript). And since nofollowing a link doesn't help sculpting any longer, I believe the best solution is more control over which links appear on every page.
We could take this further and have options with the Primary Links (main navigation), where we can set some links in the nav to only appear on certain pages, or list pages they should not appear on (much like we do blocks).
Dan
Google reads and follows
Google reads and follows some JavaScript links now, so that might not work and even if it does, it might not last for long as Google will probably spider more types of JavaScript links in the future.
Also, JavaScript won't show up on some devices (e.g., mobile devices), reducing the usability the website.
I would just use robots.txt to control the bots. I haven't seen any drop in my sites' rankings from having a lot of comments. Google never tells the whole truth so I think that making radical changes to Drupal based on ambiguous comments by Matt Cutts would be a mistake.
If you wanted to prevent Google from seeing so many links, write a module that removes all links from the comments. At the bottom of the comments put one link: "Add a comment". That link goes to a page of comments (blocked by robots.txt) that lists only the comments, but with "reply" links.
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True, some javascript links
True, some javascript links are already crawled. While there are ways to write them so they are not, you're right again that next week Google may crawl those as well...
Using the robots.txt file doesn't prevent the loss of that link juice either, which is the ultimate goal of this thread (as I understand it)...to efficiently distribute PR to the pages you identify on your site.
I'm not so concerned about comments. I know many are, but comments are good for a site. That type of interaction is a bonus. While I want to sculpt my PageRank, I'll never suggest that this is the most important thing. In the end, sculpting PageRank doesn't make money, quality sites do.
Dan
zed's dead, baby..
well calling it "dead" isn't really what is going on in the seo community as a whole... it's just that considerations for its use must be adjusted from what was previously assumed.. and like Matt Cutts even said regarding his own blog, he still nofollows certain links on a page such as RSS feed links and that sort of thing. I definitely agree with you, though, with regards to limiting the number or links automatically emitted by Drupal.. or at least giving the end user control, which is really what my post was originally about... and not just for seo purposes, either. There has been a lot of talk in the Design For Drupal initiative about returning easy to use control of menus to the users, allowing them to add classes and ID's as they deem it necessary without having to use a programmatic solution to do such a basic task when theming. This would work well with SEO, as well, with a well thought-out solution that simply gives all users, regardless of their task, control to the links on their pages.
-=- christopher
In terms of PR sculpting,
In terms of PR sculpting, nofollow is dead. It doesn't operate like many (most...) expected, and to utilize it with that old assumption doesn't help sculpt, but can actually detract from the goals of sculpting.
The RSS example was because it's not helpful to search engines. That point wasn't about sculpting, that was an example of when to use nofollow on internal links, which really was already clear.
Control is good and it's good to hear about the Design for Drupal initiative. For most users this is all unnecessary, but for building large sites with high revenue expectations, these are things it would be nice to have the ability to do without programming.
Dan
He nofollows the RSS feeds
He nofollows the RSS feeds to keep them out of the SERPs, not to focus PageRank on other pages ("sculpting").
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that is now true, but
that is now true, but previously he was doing it, in effect, to not pass pagerank. now nofollow will tell it to do both... keep it out of SERPs and, less importantly, don't give it any pagerank... but just having the link on the page increases the divisor of pagerank amongst links on the page, making it more important to consider any and all links you put on a page, which is what SEOMoz and some other people are pointing out, that the 'new sculpting' is going to be more akin to the old school way of doing things.... including but not limited to just really considering if you should be creating that link at all, which brings us back to the issue of the user having more control in Drupal of when and where links are generated. :)
-=- christopher
nofollowing that link
nofollowing that link doesn't "focus PageRank on other pages". That's what we're dealing with now. Since a nofollowed link still counts when dividing a page's PR "juice", many are reconsidering what to link to.