I’ve seen a few posts (Dave Naylor, Joost de Valk) discussing this over the last few days and thought I’d share my view of it.
Both posts bring up the same analogy, attributed to Matt Cutts:
Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect.
My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.
Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.
While I agree in theory, I think that’s a bit oversimplified. What if you could re-allocate your $100 more effectively in just a few minutes, then go try to raise it to $300?
Sculpting PageRank is one of those things that can earn a nice benefit in a short period of time, but you can keep tweaking forever for progressively lesser and lesser gains. See the chart on the left.
For example, you probably have links on your site for “log-in”, “privacy policy” and other such pages. Go in and nofollow those. How long did that take? Two minutes? That alone probably brought as much benefit as it will to go through every page and carefully sculpt things out.
Knock out a few of those links, then spend your time trying to work on getting $300.
Well put – straight to the point. Whenever someone claims it’s “not worth it”, or that it’s “not necessary” I just can’t believe how shortsighted they are.
Hey, what plugin are you using for that image of the chart? I like that!
Agreed. It’s either something that should be done once a campaign is really mature and just needs some “tweeking” and work on finer points, or else something (as you mention) that can be done quickly and initially because there’s really no harm in n/f’ing those privacy & terms pages.
Scott — The plug-in is called “FancyZoom”. I covered my favorite plug-ins in this post. Here is a link directly to the FancyZoom page:
http://www.wpelements.com/2008/02/27/my-first-attempt-at-a-plugin-fancy-zoom/
I’ve been playing with the “Robots-Meta” plug-in by Joost de Valk. I’ve added it to some of my blogs in an effort to do a little better sculpting. Info/download here:
http://www.joostdevalk.nl/whats-the-pagerank-of-your-wp-admin-dir/
Thanks Mickey, I’ll grab Fancy Zoom –
So I’m looking at the Robots-meta plugin, and I guess I didn’t realize the depth it offered. All of Joost’s stuff is a;lways great, but I never thought I needed that before….
I’ve always just put up my own robots file, but it looks pretty good! Thanks AGAIN, and I’ve now got another plugin for my standard install.
The plugin commentluv is really good especially with the do follow plugin http://www.commentluv.com
Nice, I like the chart. Did it make you $300?
i also know tips that how a site can be rank up but some tips i didn’t know before but here now i also found more tips for raking of site. Thanks for sharing this nice info.
Well, this is the 80/20 relation that appears nearly everywhere. To get 80% of benefits you have to spend 20% of effort. To get the left 20% of benefits you have to spend 80% of effort.
It may be profitable in many cases to go for the left 20% of benefits… in most cases it doesn’t.