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E-commerce blog Get Elastic wrote a post describing how to use the no-follow attribute to “attribute on your internal links to control the flow of “Page Rank” throughout your site.” Here’s how they explain PageRank:

Page Rank (think Larry Page) is Google’s way of assigning authority to a web page. Your home page is likely to have the highest Page Rank because it’s linked to more often by other websites than your other pages. Page Rank flows between pages on your own site, flows in from other sites’ links to you and “leaks” through links to other sites. If you need more information on this, check out SEOMoz’ Whiteboard Friday on the subject.

PageRank gives you linking power, called “link juice.” For example, let’s say your homepage has a PageRank of 6 and you link from your homepage to the website of a local restaurant. By linking to them, you are essentially “vouching” for them that they are a good site worth your visitors’ time and you pass some “link juice.” to them. Search engines recognize that your homepage has a PageRank of 6 and therefore give more importance to the restaurant’s website than if the restaurant’s website was linked by only a couple sites with PageRanks of 2.

But here’s the kicker, you really only have so much link juice to go around. If you are linking to hundreds upon hundreds of sites from your homepage, your link juice is that much more diluted, dropping the power your PageRank can really pass to other sites, or even your internal sections.

So why does this matter?

Because you can up the search rankings of your news site’s internal sections by limiting which pages you choose to pass your link juice to. You can limit which pages you pass link juice to by using the no-follow attribute in your anchor tags. (example: <a href=”wherever” rel=”nofollow”>)

Real-world example:

Using the web developer Firefox plugin, I was able to find that IndyStar.com links to 302 pages from it’s main page. That includes internal and external links. All of these pages are sharing the Star’s 6/10 PageRank. Imagine if the Star was linking to only 100 pages with a 6/10 PageRank, think of how much more concentrated the link juice would be on these linked pages.

How could the Star better serve it’s internal pages using it’s 6/10 homepage PageRank. For starters, it should use the no-follow attribute in the anchor tags in the homepage footer. IndyStar’s homepage is sending it’s 6/10 PR link juice to it’s “Privacy Policy” page, which has a PageRank of 6 itself! This is likely because all pages on IndyStar is linking to the Privacy Policy page, but does that page really need to come up in search engines?

The same is true for the Star’s “contact us” page, which is linked in the right rail.  This page also has a 6/10 PageRank.

If the Star added the “no-follow” attribute to a number of their anchor tags, they likely would have stronger link juice to pass onto their section pages and articles, which would help improve their search engine results rankings.

If you want to get more in-depth on this topic, check out the searchengineland.com post about sculpting your PageRank.

Have you dabbled in the use of “no-follow” or any SEO of your news site? What have been your favorite tactics?