Nofollowed links still dilute pagerank, right?

[Poplanu]

I'm a bit puzzled by the website below:

• https://bestvpn.org/

Take a look at his internal links - they're all nofollowed:

I suppose that they want to keep max. "link juice" on the homepage.

But that's not how link juice works, right? Because the PR of the page still gets diluted, no matter whether the link is NF or not? So nofollowing internal links is a bad practice, no matter how you look at it?

I just wanted to double-check that I'm not missing something here.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Because the PR of the page still gets diluted, no matter whether the link is NF or not?

That's the official word from Google, from Matt Cutts on June 15, 2009 on the topic of PageRank Sculpting. (over 10 years ago! time flies):

"So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each."​

​

The only thing I'd be using nofollow for is for affiliate links, links I don't want to vouch for (mentioning negatively), or to optimize my crawl budget. That site you mentioned is failing on all three points.

They may succeed while doing everything wrong since Google now has decided to change if they want to count nofollow links because of sites like these, Wikipedia, and all the big magazine sites that went all nofollow. There's a lot more emphasis on links themselves and domain wide metrics than just PageRank these days.

Like Matt Cutts said in that post, even since the year 2000 when he had joined Google, by 2009 things were insanely more complex than the public had any idea of. Exponentially more today.

 

[Poplanu]

They may succeed while doing everything wrong since Google now has decided to change if they want to count nofollow links because of sites like these, Wikipedia, and all the big magazine sites that went all nofollow.

Forbes and Wikipedia went all nofollow only on external links, though. I haven't seen a site with serious traffic like this one nofollow their internal links. So this one's an anomaly of sorts.

Related to the above, why would a site nofollow their "login" link? What's the rationale behind that? Example:

 

[CCarter]

Uhhh, I guess that is my cue...

We do everything to tell search engines to stay away from our members area. Noindex, nofollow, and nocache each panel (meta robots source code), including the login page.

Then we discourage it in the robots.txt file.

Then we discourage it further with a nofollow, and restrict the domain’s power from sending any pagerank juice to it.

Why? Search engines are sneaky and could technically get in by the demo link. But if they get there there are no words or content for it to interpret or understand since it’s 90% javascript and unique data, not really meant for search engine consumption.

So we simply want search engines to stay away from that area, cause there is nothing of “interest” for them there. Every user’s experience will be different when logging in due to their particular data, so it could technically be mis-understood as cloaking at some level.

Also for security you don’t want search engines crawling all over a members area.

And a spider could trip one of the security measures like flooding the members area with too many requests then getting it’s ip address put on our firewall list which would result in search engines de-indexing our whole site accidentally since they can no longer get to the whole site.

90% security, 10% there is no content for them to index or be of value.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Yeah, I meant nofollow on external links, as another example of sites doing the wrong thing and still succeeding, which is what the VPN site is doing. Because the algorithm has so many factors, you can really mess up one when you can make up for it big time in other ways.

It's one of those cases of "Don't just blindly follow someone who's succeeding, assuming they must be doing everything right."

Related to the above, why would a site nofollow their "login" link? What's the rationale behind that?

In addition to what CCarter said about this specific case, I'll nofollow specific links on my site, especially ones that are sitewide, that I don't want spiders getting lost in. This is to wrangle in my crawl budget better.

As an example, why do I need to send Google spiders into my RSS feed from the homepage when it lists the exact same stuff that's currently on the homepage and isn't indexable? I don't.

What I see most often, similar to Best VPN, is an attempt at PageRank Sculpting (which I'm guessing they're trying to do too). Sites will nofollow all of their boilerplate content (About, Contact) in their footers, and even nofollow all of the categories and the homepage logo in their menus.

It all stems from them believing that nofollow links do NOT dilute pagerank.

I think a good question to ask, is do nofollow links dilute an equal portion of pagerank into the aether, or do they only drain off 50% of what we should expect, or even less? In that case, you could sculpt PR. You'd still be wasting juice but you'd push more juice where you wanted it.

I'm fairly confident that there's probably something to this, since I'm also fairly confident page rank flows differently through main content (contextual), supplemental content (sidebars), and navigational content (header, footer).