Templates, NoFollow, and Google PR Juice

[andreskap]

Hello everyone,I have been doing a lot of research lately on how to optimize a website for SEO purposes.Many people advise against creating a website by using a template. However, I really love templates because they enable me to produce pages quickly so I get more content on my site. In addition, they allow me to create a theme for the website that in my opinion are really nice.However, this thread is about SEO implications on templates.Before I get into the details, I want to bring up the nofollow attribute in links. I read this was created to reduce spam in great forums such as this one. This tag supposely causes google not to pass PR juice to the link destination. I read this happened a few years ago and I really think it is a great thing. So, assuming this information is correct, I should be able to pass the PR juice on my own website to certain pages correct?Here is the particular template that I created:http://www.codebuyers.comPlease note, this is no where near being completed.However, notice how I have certain pages linked to the home page that would not be all that great to pass PR juice to - registration, password retrieval, privacy statement, site map, and terms and conditions.So if I place the nofollow tag on these links, the PR juice should be passed to important pages such as find a coder, find a buyer, find a package, and find a buyer. First, is my assumption correct? Is this how you would optimize this for google?My second issue has to do with the nofollow link. I read an article three days ago about nofollow links showing up in the google webmaster tools. People are asking if nofollow links are suppose to have no influence, then why are they showing up.The article that I read is here:http://www.googlewatchdog.info/2007/09/ ... ollow.htmlPeople are starting to question whether this tag does have some impact on google SERP results.What are your thoughts on this? Have you read any other recent documentation stating otherwise?Please advise. Thanks in advance.Sincerely,Travis [email protected] applies to links pointing to 3rd party sites.Use robots.txt instead of nofollow on links pointing to internal resources.Hey there,Thanks for the response.I was hoping it would apply to internal links as well.I think that would hugely impact mesh designs, meaning I could turn a mesh design into something more hierarchal.The freelance programming website I am working on is hierarchal to an extent, but the real estate website I made is really meshed.I guess I am going to have to redesign the template a bit so I do not have unimportant internal links such as "terms and conditions" on the home page.Well, thanks again for your help.Sincerely,Travis [email protected] there,I found an article that states that the nofollow link attribute can be used internally on websites to control the flow of link juice.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-an ... -spam-guruThis guy is claiming to have talked to Matt Cutts, and I think he works directly for Google.The useful information is in this guy's second question in the article.The article also appears to be very recent.Posted by randfish on Wed (8/29/07) at 12:27 PM GoogleSo now I am debating what I want to do with those links heh.. Nevertheless, maybe somebody else will find this information useful.Sincerely,Travis [email protected] the pages aren't important enough for the front page to provide "link juice" to, why are they on the front page to begin with for one, & why are they important enough for other pages to provide juice too which would make robots.txt unusable ?I think using nofollow for internal links is bad form & promotes slack-ass habbits.Use of robots.txt is still being hinted at in that response, the only reason an answer of yes was given was to be accomidating, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to use nofollow on internal links. Hey there,Well, I wanted to make the privacy statement and terms & conditions easily accessible. That is why I currently have them in the footer of the template.I know a lot about coding, and hardly anything about legal matters. I just do not want some idiot to sue me down the road because these documents are hidden within subpages of the website.If they are in the footer of the template, at least I could argue that these terms and conditions could be found easily. All the pages that are linked to the home page are going to carry the most PR juice. I do not want to see my privacy statement or terms and conditions high in the search results. That is why I wanted to block PR juice from going to these pages.Now, you could argue that I could block them with the robots.txt file. Now if the nofollow link attribute was not used, PR would be leaking to a page that is not in google's index. Maybe a combination of using the nofollow link attribute with the robots.txt blocking these pages would be the best combination.People sue people for stupid reasons. Recently, I heard somebody sued google because some page in google search results looked like their SSN upside down... As somebody just getting into the business world, I do not want to waste my time with people like that when I could be building more quality content Sincerely,Travis [email protected] got point there about putting nofollow tag for link such as registration, password retrieval, privacy statement, site map, and terms and conditions. it might work who knows."So if I place the nofollow tag on these links, the PR juice should be passed to important pages such as find a coder, find a buyer, find a package, and find a buyer.""Nofollow" tags are keeping the PR juice not to passed. This is usually blogs and other forums used in order to not to passed the PR juice.joebert wrote:Hey there,Why would you want your privacy page to be indexed anyway?My thinking on this is, is anybody going to be searching for your privacy page in google? Same goes with terms and conditions.Registration page is probably important enough to be indexed, but it is not important enough to pass PR juice to. Same goes with user site map (not XML sitemap).About creating links with javascript, I stay away from that. I do not want to give crawlers any reason to think I am trying to manipulate pages. Some people say crawlers can not understand javascript, but links are pretty plain text in the source code and would be easy to extract.Sincerely,Travis [email protected] wrote: