Internal LinkingLink Juice Sculpting

SMX EastOctober 7, 2008

The Syntax

• NoFollow Attribute– <a href=“/someurl.html” rel=“nofollow”>

• NoFollow Metatag– <meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

• NoIndex Metatag– <meta name="robots" content="noindex”>

• Combined NoFollow and NoIndex– <meta name="robots" content="noindex,

nofollow">

Robots.txt Syntax

• User-agent: *• Disallow: /

– Prevents all crawling of your site

• user-agent: *• disallow: /test/• disallow: /cgi-bin/

– Prevents crawling of your test and cig-bin folders

Link 1 YES

YES

YES

YES

Link 2

Link 3

NoIndex Illustrated

SE Index

SE Robot

NO

Link 1NO

NO

NO

YES

Link 2

Link 3

NoFollow Metatag Illustrated

SE Index

SE Robot

YES

Link 1 NO

YES

YES

YES

Link 2

Link 3

NoFollow Attribute Illustrated

SE Index

SE Robot

YES

Link 1 NO

NO

NO

NO

Link 2

Link 3

Robots.txt Illustrated

SE Index

SE Robot

YES

Duplicate Content Scenario

• PR 7 Site - aggregates press release content• About 60% the press releases show up on

other sites• Value add of the site was to aggregate and

organize the press releases• Google was having none of it

– Hit by an algorithmic penalty

Duplicate Content Solution• NoIndex the pages

– Let crawler find and remove the pages

• Can speed this up using URL Removal Tool in WMT

• Once removed, NoFollow links to the pages• DON’T use Robots.txt.

– What if someone else links to them?– Want it to be able to pass juice

Content Syndication

• Syndicate tens of thousands of pages• Exact copies of content for a major media site• To a PageRank 8 site• Sounds like major trouble, no?• SOLUTION:

– NoIndex the syndicated pages– Prevents dupe content problem– Still passes link juice

The Site that took the Content?

Link Building

• Ecommerce site• Hard to get links for it• SOLUTION:

– Build a rich content tree– Get links to that– Incorporate in the content tree links to key parts

of the site– NoFollow all the other links

Link Building for E-Commerce

LinksE-Comm

Quality Content

Other Site Pages

Very Basic Sculpting

What They Did

This Example From Citysearch

Http and Https Dupe Content• E-commerce site• User lands on http://www.yourdomain.com• Puts a product in the shopping cart• Goes to check out• Get sent to

https://www.yourdomain.com/shoppingcart.asp• That page uses relative links (instead of

absolute)

Http and Https Dupe Content - 2

• Example link:– <a href=“/about-us.asp”> - Instead of:– <a href=http://www.yourdomain.com/about-us.asp>

• Click About Us on the home page:– <a href=http://www.yourdomain.com/about-us.asp>

• Click About Us on the shopping cart page:– <a href=https://www.yourdomain.com/about-us.asp>

Http and Https Solution

• Implement https://robots.txt to Disallow crawling of https pages.

• NoFollow all links to the https pages.• Make sure you use https only where you really

need it

Thank You!

Eric EngePresidentStone Temple Consultingeenge@stonetemple.com