Question

Should one apply rel="nofollow" attribute to site links that are bound for secure/login required pages?

We have a URI date based link structure where the previous year’s news content is free, while the current year, and any year prior to the last, are paid, login required content.

The net effect is that when doing a search for our company name in google, what comes up first is Contact, About, Login, etc., standard non-login required content. That’s fine, but ideally we have our free content, the pages we want to promote, shown first in the search engine results.

Toward this end, the link structure now generates rel="follow" for the free content we want to promote, and rel="nofollow" for all paid content and Contact, About, Login, etc. screens that we want at the bottom of the SEO search result ladder.

I have yet to deploy the new linking scheme for fear of, you know, blowing up the site SEO-wise 😉 It’s not in great shape to begin with, despite our decent ranking, but I don’t want us to disappear either.

Anyway, words of wisdom appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

nofollow

I think Emil Vikström is wrong about nofollow. You can use the rel value nofollow for internal links. The microformats spec and the HTML5 spec don’t say the opposite.

Google even gives such an example:

Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.

This does apply to your use case. So you could nofollow the links to your login page. Note however, if you also meta–noindex them, people that search for "YourSiteName login" probably won’t get the desired page in their search results, then.

follow

There is no rel value "follow". It’s not defined in the HTML5 spec nor in the HTML5 Link Type extensions. It isn’t even mentioned in http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values at all. A link without the rel value nofollow is automatically a "follow link".
You can’t overwrite a meta–nofollow for certain links (the two nofollow values even have a different semantic).

Your case

I’d use nofollow for all links to restricted/paid content. I wouldn’t nofollow the links to the informational pages about the site (About, Contact, Login), because they are useful, people might search especially for them, and they give information about your site, while all the content pages give information about the various topics.