Using Nofollow To Improve Your Internal Linking

Have you ever heard of the first link rule? This is when Google only follows the first link to a page, for example : if your page has a link to the home page in the topnav with the anchor text “home” and a link in the footer with the anchor text “your keyword”. The anchor text that appears first in your html will be followed and then the other link(s) to the page will be discarded.

Case Study

Here is Michael Gray’s SEO Blog :

Here I have copied the header and the footer, just to show you an example of how you can avoid this. Using the search status tool bar, I used the function that allows me to highlight all of the no followed links. Notice that the home page has been highlighted, but the other link to the home page with the anchor text “Graywolfs SEO Blog” has not been nofollowed. This is because he is choosing what anchor text he wants to link to the home page with, this makes sense because a lot more people would search for “SEO Blog” or “Graywolfs SEO Blog” than they would “Home page” or “Home”.  By nofollowing the first home page link, Google will not follow this, so effectively the first link back to the home page will be the one in the footer with your chosen anchor text.

Michael must be doing something right as he is well known and respected throughout the industry, his blog has mass traffic and he ranks number 1 for the competitive term “SEO blog” as well as having a strong brand.

Also I noticed by nofollowing links to pages that you are blocking with your robots.txt , you will reduce the amount of “restricted by robots.txt” errors in webmaster tools. By doing this, it could give your page more authority and you could see better rankings, for your chosen keywords.