Web Development

32 posts

SEO Myth: nofollow can be used on internal links to control link juice.

In 2005 Google announced the rel=nofollow link attribute. They said that using it would make Google ignore the link. Googlebot would not pass PageRank across the link. For search engine ranking purposes, it was like the link wasn't even in the page. The purpose of nofollow would be to mark links that could be spammy such as links in user generated content.

That lead many webmasters to see nofollow as a tool to control link juice on internal links within their own site. The thinking was that adding nofollow to an internal link would cause Google to pass link juice only to the important internal links on the page. It turns out that thinking was misguided.

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SEO Myth: Site search can power SEO friendly pages

Site search can produce pages targeted towards phrases for which you would like to rank in search engines. It is tempting to try to make those pages SEO friendly and link to them so that they get indexed in search engines. That isn't a good idea. If you do so, Google could penalize your entire site.

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SEO Myth: Adding URL parameters does not create new pages for search engines

If you create a page on your website (like /some-page.html), then it is just one page, even URL parameters are added (like /some-page.html?foo=bar), right? The myth is that search engines see both of those URLs as a single page.

In reality, search engines have to treat URLs with parameters of if they could be completely separate pages. Some sites rely on URL parameters to show different content (eg /show?page=some-page and /show?page=other-page).

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