Using the NoFollow tag for SEO advantage

Clever use of nofollow rules can help boost your page ranking.

Most websites have certain pages (about us, privacy policy, legal disclaimers etc) that are linked from every page, but have content that is irrelevant from a Search Engine Optimisation perspective.

The problem of linking to irrelevant pages

Every time a page links to another page it effectively gives away a little of its own page rank score to the page it links to.

Therefore, if your super salesly, fortune making page selling thousands of blue widgets to the world and his wife links to a bunch of irrelevant pages, it effectively gives away a potential rank which in the long term equals potential visitors and sales, which equals money.

How to stop giving away page rank

The links to your privacy policy can be slightly amended like this

<a href="privacy-policy.html" rel="nofollow">Privacy Policy</a>

The nofollow element instructs search engine spiders to ignore this link, and therefore Google will not give away page rank to that linked privacy policy page.

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