Video transcription
MATT CUTTS Today’s question comes from Christian in Madrid.
Christian asks, Does it make sense to use rel=”nofollow” for internal links, for example, to link to your login page? Does it really make a difference?
So let me give you the rules of thumb.
I’ve talked about this a little bit in the past. But it’s worth mentioning it again.
Rel=”nofollow” means the page rank won’t flow through that link as far as discovering the link, page rank computation,all that sort of stuff.
So for internal links, links within your site, I would try to leave the nofollow off.
So if it’s a link from one page on your site to another page on your site, you want that page rank to flow. You want Googlebot to be able to find that page.
So almost every link within your site– that is a link going from one page on your site to another page on your site–I would make sure that the page rank does flow, which means leaving off the nofollow link.
Now, this question goes a little bit deeper.And it’s a little more nuanced.It’s talking about login pages.
It doesn’t hurt if you want to put a nofollow pointing to a login page or to a page that you think is really useless,like a terms and conditions page, or something like that.
But in general, it doesn’t hurt for Googlebot to crawl that page, because it’s not like we’re going to submit a credit card to make an order, or try to log in, orsomething like that.
So if it’s a link within your site to another page within your site, I would usually leave the nofollow off.
Now, nofollow pointing to other sites outside of your site, if it’s someone who can leave a comment, that’s often where spammers try to get in.
So those are ones where you want to think about, OK, is this a trusted user?
Have they been around for a while? Have I approved it?
Those are the sorts of things where you might want to go ahead and have those links flow page rank, whereas if it’s anyone who signs up on your forum can get a profile link, that can be abused.
People will even try to get by CAPTCHAs And that’s the sort of thing where you probably don’t want to have page rank flow. So I would add a nofollow on those.
But for any link within your site to another page on your site, the general rule of thumb is go ahead and let the page rank flow. Let Googlebot explore all the pages of your site.
If you’re super-nuanced and you really don’t want a particular page to show up, that’s totally fine.But even then, you might consider just using noindex, or something like that.
And even having a login page show up can still be useful for some searchers. So unless you have a really good reason, I’d try to let Googlebot crawl all the pages of your site as much as you can.
Quick Answer: Ordinarily no as internal links should not normally use rel="nofollow".