I think something that is badly needed for drupal SEO is a way to add nofollow tags selectively to a menu link.
The noindex idea is good but it doesn't really solve the intended problem. Even if a page is set to noindex and there is a link to it (which of course there is) link juice will be sent it's way. So in a way its actually worse. Your sending link juice to a page and then telling the SE's not to index it. Essentially sending your link juice to oblivian.
What needs to happen is to actually be able to add the nofollow attribute to links to pages which are just eating link juice and serving no SEO purpose (contact us page, privacy policy, etc)
I see this as happening on the edit menu page.
One could then distribute link popularity through a site in the way desired from an SEO standpoint.
I'm not a programmer so don't have the ability to build a module such as this but I'd certainly contribute in any other way including funding a portion of it.
What d'ya think
Phil
Comments
Nofollow List
Have you seen the Nofollow List module? It whitelists or blacklists external sites and is a bit different from your idea, but you may want to take a look at it. It only supports hostnames but could conceivably support internal paths as well.
I would use that
I'd definitely use that to block juice to the contact page or online forms that we link to from our menu. Great idea.
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nofollow internal links
I did an experiment with manually adding rel=nofollow to internal links on a Drupal site with about 1200 Google referrals per day and didn't notice significant difference in referrals.
was this a conclusive experiment
Do you mean you actually tried to deprive certain pages of PR. If so did these pages have all links cut off to them including external links. It's hard to gauge by PR lately. The google page rank seems to have some considerable lag times. SERPs change without a change in PR.
With so many google refferals I would assume the site had a great deal of link juice floating around anyway so redirecting it away from a few pages probably had negligible results with a large distribution of pages.
Hard to say exactly what went on there without specifics.
I believe Google webmaster guidelines says it's a good practice and numerous experiments point in that direction.
I'm of the opinion its a good practice. Have you found otherwise.
Phil
PR
Many of the pages were blocked with robots.txt. (Pages with robots.txt still acquire PageRank.)
A large percentage of links on each page were blocked, theoretically sending a significant percentage of the PageRank to other content.
I would be interested to see that if you can find it. I searched through the docs and didn't see it.
I would also be interested to see those.
My experiment was not controlled.
I am not decided on the technique of nofollowing internal links. I think that it is a bad idea for Google to endorse that technique because it breaks the standard (or the sad attempt by Google to make nofollow a standard over on microformats.org). I think that robots should be controlled by robots.txt, not microformats.
Matt Cutts
Here's an article which qoutes Matt Cutts on the subject.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070830-114552
Phil
nofollow or robots.txt
I think we can be sure enough that using nofollow to direct link love is worth it. Despite what Matt C says it might not do much but that applies to much SEO effort. Very interestingly, Matt C says:
"Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out)"
Which suggests we can use robots.txt to do the job which is great for pages that you don't ever want any link love to go to. I also like to withhold link love sometimes, eg, a page might be deprived of link love from my most powerful pages but get it from others.
Smart distribution of link power throughout a site is, IMO, essential for SEO and the most neglected SEO technique.
The module would be great but it might want to go beyond menus. Many modules create blocks with links in that it would be nice to control.
automation principle
What about adding the robots.txt file to this package, and outputting one after knowing what pages your sending juice too?
A bash script with the > can overwrite the file with new understanding.
The php is probably just as easy, as long as robots.txt has write permissions.
Working backwards with the problems, or factors involved, doesn't seem to be the way to go tho. Although it sounds like most of the factors to be working with are there.
robotstxt module
Be sure you don't miss the robotstxt module which does some of this work (not any autogeneration, but at least it provides a way for Drupal to be responsible for the file instead of a file on the server).
On the nofollow topic - one problem is that until D6 there is no way for a module to mess with links that are in the menu system without getting into the theme. In d6 modules can do that via the theme registry.
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Ideally, nofollow should follow robots.txt
It would sure be nice to just focus on building a good robots.txt -- then be able to automatically "nofollow" all links to blocked material. It seems to me that nofollow links could be based on robots.txt. Both are essentially saying "this is material is not relevant for search". This might be a nice option to include in the D6 robotstxt module.
BTW, I've been using nofollow for years and Google just loves it. Before nofollow, there were two alternative SEO tricks to accomplish the same thing: 1) re-writing such links as javascript or 2) using a certain attribute in the link which caused the Googlebot to choke. I switched to nofollow because it seemed only a matter of time before Google discovered and fixed the bug in its crawler. But two years later the bug still appears to be there.
So much for Google' gaggle of Ph.D's.
ChadJ
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no way! thats too strict for
no way! thats too strict for people who need easier ways of working. the robots.txt module should integrate with this one, in fact this one shud be telling the robotstxt module what to do, really!!
Each time you make a new posting you dont want to update the robots file, it really has to be automatic, at least let people have the choice to do less work.
think i'm nearly there..
I've put together a module that allows you to nofollow menu items and taxonomy terms using the page-specific visibility settings as seen on block configuration pages.
This way you can set nofollow/dofollow status on a page by page basis, and have the option of using PHP if you want to get really anal about things.
It's done with custom themeing and hook_form_alter and works great on the menu settings though on taxonomy its a bit of a kludge especially as everyone uses different methods of displaying taxonomy.
Essentially it uses a custom themeing function to run a filter (borrowed from Nofollow list) on block output from taxonomy modules ( taxonomy_* - i've jsut tested it with taxonomy context but it should work with taxonomy_menu etc ) and add nofollow to taxonomy links that deserve it. Probably not the most elegant approach but it does work. It also checks node links and nofollows the appropriate ones.
I need to tidy it up a bit and provide some documentation (and reinstall cvs, its been a while) but you can see the site I've been playing with it on here if you are currently highlighting nofollow links: http://www.compareprices.me.uk
it's looking good and useful
Had a look at your site and I'm impressed with the way you've pulled things together. I'm new to Drupal and at the research and planning stage for a niche specific comparison site. - Lot's of ideas of what I want but how do I ...? :)
Can I ask what modules are you using, especially for the 'buy now 'redirect linking?
BTW is the no-follow module available yet?
Thanks
Kev
Ok when will we see it
I'm pretty excited about your module Jonny. When ya gonna cut loose with it.
Phil
sorry, went to climb a
sorry, went to climb a mountain :)
I'm having issues with CVS on Vista at the moment, bit of a pain in the arse - I used to use TortoiseCVS on XP, anyone got any suggestions for something that'll work on Vista?
disclaimer
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about here but in searching around I found this
Note: Since a 64-bit version of TortoiseCVS is currently not available, Explorer integration doesn't work for Vista/64. As a workaround you can use the 32-bit Internet Explorer with the command:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" "D:\DrupalCVS"
(Replace "D:\DrupalCVS" with whatever is your local CVS directory.)
http://drupal.org/node/22293
Phil
Got it working at last -
Got it working at last - just had to ignore all tortoisecvs' warnings about possibly being unstable and it seemed to work alright.
The project page is here: http://drupal.org/project/nofollow
but the release won't be up until tommorow. Let me know if you have any suggestions or feature requests.
Cheers,
Jonny
Support for 6.x?
This is exactly what I was looking for. My company has just re-built our site with Drupal 6.2 and I'm taking over SEO for the site. I've had good success with using nofollow to sculpt link juice on client sites, and would like to utilize this strategy on our own. Is there a plan to bring this module into compliance with 6.x?
Menu Attributes
If all you really want to do is add a nofollow to menu links, then http://drupal.org/project/menu_attributes will do that and more including the ability to add additional classes, IDs, etc.
Menu Attributes is great
I was looking for a module to programatically nofollow contact pages and sitemaps.
Believe me the SEO stuff counts.
I recently reconfigured my website and did some mistakes.
Google missinterpreted my need to make some content available from any page of the website as an attempt to put emphasys on those links. As a result, I ranked better for important keyords on the html variant of the sitemap.
It's been a while since the debate of nofollow importance, I am telling you it is important, I've been burnt.
I have been searching this module and I can't believe I didn't find it using the nofollow keyword. Menu Attributes is great.
Cheers