I make mistakes all the time. Today I thought I’d point one out so you don’t do the same thing. The debate over what Google’s PageRank is, how it is measured, and how it impacts your rank is always a hot topic. If you’re unfamiliar, there is a good overview here.

Before we get started here’s my take on things:

  • PageRank matters and has an impact on your site’s ranking
  • What you see on the toolbar is not a real-time reflection of a particular pages’ rank
  • High quality back-links improve PageRank
  • An improvement in PageRank = an improvement in where your page shows up in the search results

Ultimately the more people you can bring to your site the more money you will make. The tag “rel=nofollow” can be added to all links you don’t want passing valuable PageRank to non money making pages. Google will still follow and crawl these links, but PageRank will not be passed as a “vote” for the page. Pages with higher PageRank will likely get more credit when users search for your relevant keywords in Google. Lets look at my mistake as an example.

Use nofollow to Improve Rank

At the time I started writing this post (about two weeks ago) this page was ranked 4/10. If you want to take a look scroll to the bottom of the page, it’s in the footer of about 80,000 pages on the site. Do I really want Google to think that is an important page for ranking purposes? No way! It is important for visitors to read, but not so much search engines, so why give it link juice? I had accidentally overwritten the nofollow tag a long time ago for footer links, eventually leading to each footer item getting a 4/10 rank. You want to direct PageRank to your most important traffic pages (usually that have ads or products for sale), and keep it from hitting purely informational pages (like contact forms, terms of use, etc.)

Think of Your Site Like a House

A good analogy for how to control the flow of PageRank around your site is to think of your site as a big house with all the lights off, and each page as a room in the house. If you want to show off the house, you’ll turn the lights on and open the doors on the rooms that matter; the kitchen, the master bedroom, the family room etc.. You’ll skip the garage and laundry room of course :)

Give Google a great path to follow on your site and you’ll improve your rankings. Just add rel=nofollow on each ‘a href’ tag you don’t want PageRank flowing to.

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