Where to use rel="nofollow"? Should I allow Google to index my Privacy Policy

Marketing
1

I am trying to decide which pages of my site I should be using rel=“nofollow”

My site (http://www.taylorlovett.com) is a web development portfolio website. So right now the only pages I am letting Google index are my services(soutions) page, and my portfolio.

Here is my site map: http://www.taylorlovett.com/about/sitemap

About, web terminology 101, blog (mostly just personal stuff about me), acoustic guitar pages I have added the rel=“nofollow” attribute.

Should I do this for my privacy policy?

Also at the top of the page, my contact links opens up a div overlay on the screen. Should no follow be added to this?

Any help is appreciated thank you.

2

I just had a very interesting experience concerning my privacy policy and my rank that I think is relevant to this post.

One of my websites, Hover Coupon, ranked page #1, result #2 on Google GLOBALLY for “Hover Coupon” and relevant terms. My website completely abides by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, my site validates according to the W3C (Thanks to SitePoint’s awesome tutorials!), my content is all 100% unique, well-written, useful, etc. and, really, I’ve done everything right. Everything was going perfect until… I renamed my privacy policy from privacy.html to privacy.php to better integrate it into my website’s theme. I went to sleep after this.

I forgot to put a permanent redirect on privacy.html to privacy.php. Googlebot came, according to my server logs, 2 hours later and got a 404 for privacy.html. Within 12 hours, I couldn’t find myself anywhere in Google except for site:hovercoupon.com. I was showing page #1 for all terms relevant to my site’s content and if not page #1, #2, but after Google couldn’t find my privacy policy, my ranking immediately went in the toilet. I was pissed.

I created the redirect. Googlebot tried again yesterday and immediately found and indexed privacy.php. I am back to page #1 for “Hover Coupon” but second from the bottom rather than second from the top. Things probably won’t return to normal until Google has crawled my entire site, updated its cache, etc.

There are a lot of theories about “Google TrustRank” out there. One is that having a privacy policy, contact page, disclaimer, etc. greatly helps with rankings since it demonstrates trust. Matt Cutts always talks about whether or not “Google Trusts a Site” so… Yea.

In any event, DO NOT nofollow your privacy policy. Do not noindex it. Do not disallow it in your robots.txt. It is important that Google finds AND indexes this file! I can confirm from my personal experience, which I highly doubt is coincidence, that Google cares - a LOT - about these things.

Hope this helps!

3

Use of nofollow to sculpt or maintain ‘juice’ is a dead issue - debunked by Google themselves in the last year.

I wouldn’t apply no-follow to links to any of your content/pages. What you are doing is telling the search engines that you can’t vouch for that content. Additionally the vote you remove for those pages is also reducing the value of the other internal boilerplate/nav links on/from those pages.

I would only use no-follow to external links where you can’t vouch for their authority or content.

4

I have no idea why you’re limiting the amount of your website that the search engine will index (especially using it on your own pages). I would have thought getting everything indexed possible (that isn’t private) would be better for you. The only links which I would ever apply nofollow to would be links to external locations (other websites) which you see fit to reference but don’t want to give it any kind of credibility (with search engines) as to you listing it. :slight_smile:

5

I’m not sure on that one, the HREF is to a different resource (so the nofollow would apply to that - though contact.php doesn’t exist on your server) but as how Google deals with JavaScript is questionable, I would be concerned they might direct the nofollow onto the page itself as the contact lightbox itself exists and is triggered through that same link. Best to research a bit more on how search engines deal with lightboxes or fragment links using nofollow. :slight_smile:

6

Did you look at my contact script? It’s not it’s own page but just an overlay. Should I let Google index that?

7

I’ve never heard of Google penalizing for a lack of a privacy policy (though you could dispute that nofollow doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist) however if you want to restrict what’s indexed to maintain a tight set of indexed content I would keep the about page (as it mentions your skills and such - people search for those), the portfolio, the services and leave it at that. Have contact (if on a separate page) and privacy (people rarely read privacy policies) as nofollow. :slight_smile:

8

I’m confused though, what benefit does using nofollow (which search engines will ignore) have over disallow through robots.txt (which again registers the page to be excluded from the index - thereby negating the value of the link to it) or as has been mentioned, using an XML sitemap with measured priority listings per page. Certainly an interesting idea of pages still being indexable but their juice not transferring internally though. :slight_smile:

9

Whether by nofollow or no my question still remains:

Which page on my site should I let Google index? Privacy Policy? About?

I’ve heard that Google penalizes sites without privacy policies.

10

Thanks for the help Alex.

11

Wow, interesting read thanks for posting it.

12

I think Affilorama are somewhat overstating the problem of leaking link juice. If you have lots of outbound links, that doesn’t demote your site. That would be the death of the web - Google would not arbitrarily penalise sites that link to other sites.

Sites that have their privacy policy or error pages or anything like that ranking too highly have clearly got structural and navigational problems far beyond the scope of “nofollow” links. If you submit a Google sitemap, you can specify an internal ranking of how relatively important each page is.

If you’re linking to pages that have disappeared, you’re failing your visitors - you should be regularly checking for linkrot so that you don’t have any dead links.

The principal reason for using “nofollow” is on unmoderated forums and blog comments to ensure that spammers can’t profit from submitting self-promoting links - not for hiding sections of your own site!

13

Because I would be giving away my pages credibility or “link juice” to pages which have no importance like my acoustic guitar page.

I’m surprised you don’t know about this. It’s a pretty big deal now with the “SEO gurus” within the internet marketing community and such. Do a little googling you’ll find a wealth of information on the subject.

We will mainly look at two issues that could be affecting your site; that of passing on link juice to unimportant pages and also missing pages on your site that result in 404 errors for visitors.

Firstly, the issue of leaking link juice to unimportant pages on your site. Some companies have found their highest ranking pages are actually ones such as their privacy policy or a company profile page. Ok so this isnt quite the end of the world but honestly wouldn’t you want pages that are actually selling your stuff to be your top ranking pages? The reason for this is not just that these unimportant pages are stuffed with your company name and/or product name but that they also get a healthy dose of link juice from linking directly to your high ranking homepage, plus every other page on your site.

Secondly, the missing pages issue can result in your site losing precious link juice, particularly where a highly ranked page is no longer available or the URL has changed. The new page created to replace this missing page is being denied all the link juice its predecessor enjoyed!