Search Engine Optimization Using rel=nofollow

Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of an ebook called Revenge Of The Mininet by Michael Campbell. In that book and associated tools and utilities provided by search engine optimization guru Leslie Rhode was detailed ideas and strategies about how to control the flow of PageRank through your website.

I did some modifications to my Content Management System to do just that, specifically control the flow of PageRank exactly where I wanted it in my site and my customers sites and boy, it worked like a charm.

The option I chose back then was to modify the content management system to use javascript to redirect menu links. So I changed all the regular <a href links to javascript window.location. This has worked fine and served me well.

However, at the beginning of 2005 Google, Yahoo, MSN and some of the other major players introduced a new <a tag called rel=nofollow. This tag allows you to explicitly tell the search engine spider to either follow the link or not, which is what I had done with javascript code.

Now it’s all the rage to be ‘going natural’ with SEO and I’m thinking that it might be a better option to change the content management system back to regular <a links rather than javascript. I forgot to mention that the only way the search engine spiders currently crawl any of my sites modified in this way is via a site map, either a regular html site map or now xml site maps too.

So I’m going to try and find out if this is the way to go now before making any changes. Maybe I should stick to the old adage “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”?…

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