I've recently switched back to Safari as my main browser because good ol' Firefox kept crashing on me, and I must say that it's been a smooth experience so far. Safari is a great browser, of course, and 3.1 is very fast as well. One of the things I like to see for every site though is where they use nofollow, so I had to find a way to do that in Safari.

The easiest way of doing that, in my opinion, is using a user stylesheet. You can specify it in your Safari preferences, under Advanced:

(BTW, you can use user style sheets on Firefox too.)

Then put the following in the stylesheet you selected:

a[rel~=nofollow] {
background-color: pink !important;
color: black !important;
font-weight: normal !important;
text-decoration: underline !important;
}

And after that, all nofollow links you encounter should look something like this.

If you want to make sure you see nofollowed image-links as well, add this:

a[rel~=nofollow] img {
border-bottom: 3px solid pink !important;
}

That will add a small pink bottom border to the image that is linked. Download the entire stylesheet here.

User stylesheets to show nofollows is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In the interview that started the whole discussion again, Matt said:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

This inspired Dan Thies to write his article, which is, in my opinion, both very good and also a bit flawed. Dan says:"That's the key point. Getting more of your important pages indexed." And I simply, do not agree, most of the other stuff is very true and valuable though. Let's get back to the basic theory of how you should create a site structure and theme it correctly: siloing.

Siloing

photo credit: twob

One of the oldest articles I found on siloing is on Bruce Clay's site, in an article from 2005.

The idea (and yes I'm oversimplifying a bit now) is that you only link to pages on your site with the same theme, to make it easier to rank for keywords and keyword groups. A quote:

Siloing resolves this problem by allowing you to achieve high search engine placement both for general and targeted keyword phrases through themed vertical page linking and/or construction.

This article talks about only linking to pages that you really should be linking to. Of course, this is still the best practice, and if you totally lived by that, you wouldn't need to nofollow any links. However if you, for any reason whatsoever (like management that doesn't get it, weird laws / lawyers, or conversion / up-selling reasons), have to link to another, unrelated, page, nofollow is the tool you could use to still abide by those siloing laws.

Nofollow != untrusted

In the beginning of this nofollow discussion, some people I really like and respect, like Greg Boser, Todd Friesen and Dave Naylor, were saying that you should really not use nofollow internally, using the argument: "why would you want to tell search engines that you don't trust certain pages on your site?"

Well, it's not about trust (anymore), as Greg admitted in an interview with Mike McDonald at SES recently, now that Matt has come out and said that. Others are still whining though, in part I think because either they don't get it, or they don't think other people will get it and want people to focus on different things that are more important, like site structure. In part, I agree. PageRank sculpting like that is not something for the faint of heart, or the SEO rookie. It IS however a valuable tool when you actually know what you're doing and have a lot of juice to play around with.

So what is it about then?

As my buddy Michael Gray said: why would Apple want to rank for [contact us]? Doesn't that single ranking imply a wasted opportunity to rank for a few more products they actually sell?

A quote from Matt at DaveN's blog is very important here:

Nofollowing your internals (PageRank sculpting - JdV) can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect.

Anyway, at Onetomarket we've been doing this for at least 4 years. We used javascript links before nofollow was around, and we know that it works because we tested it. It's not specifically about getting more pages indexed, it's about getting those pages indexed that matter to you, and about, as Greg also pointed out in the video interview above, getting as much pages indexed as your overall PageRank can handle. You don't want to "spread yourself too thin".

PageRank sculpting is more then Nofollow

You really need to know that at some point, you'll need more then nofollow. You'll need page per page control of the robots meta tag, and you will probably be using it to noindex, follow category / tag / archive pages, in favor of single pages. That, combined with not giving too much linklove to these pages, is the essence of third level push.

It's also very important to be honest with yourself: "Do I really need this page / this set of pages in the index right now?" It might be wiser to make sure you have a smaller amount of pages in the index, throwing the deeper pages out and allowing yourself to actually rank with the pages higher up in your site's structure.

Those two uses of nofollow, together with the use in siloing of nofollowing links to unrelated pages, make it a very powerful tool. You can be a good SEO without using it, and a lot of times you can probably make more money by focussing on other things, but anyone saying that it's bad advice or nonsense, doesn't know what he or she is talking about, and should think twice before writing openly that people should not follow that advice.

PageRank sculpting – Siloing and more is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I've been thinking of a plugin to do cooler stuff with commenters for a while, and I'll move it up my list a bit. I actually want to be able to give those of you whom I trust and who contribute to this blog to be able to have follow links.So what I'm thinking of, partly inspired by Jeremy, is a way to give people profiles on this blog, much like SEOmoz has. I want to allow those profiles to have straight links, but only after I chose to give that person the right to create such a profile...

Might be a bit of work, so don't expect this to be finished tomorrow ;)

Putting nofollow back on links in comments is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Nofollow was meant to combat comment spam. It failed miserably at that, but it was designed with the intent of preventing link-juice flowing to links that had not been editorially reviewed, and thus prevent you from linking to spammy sites. If people start using them within blogposts, where's the end? SEO wise, there's no use. You're linking to content relevant to the topic at hand, thus increasing the value of the post for both the search engine and the user. So please, don't use nofollow for editorially reviewed links. Ever.

Update: Markus has replied in the comments and has removed the nofollow, kudos to you pal!

nofollow is NOT meant for editorially reviewed links is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In my opinion, this is great news, as it will reduce the amount of spam in WikiPedia a lot, all though people will still be spamming it for the traffic it get's.

[tags]wikipedia, linkbuidling, seo, link building, nofollow[/tags]

Outbound links in english WikiPedia now nofollowed as well is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!