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Do you ever think that your Privacy Policy, Help, and Contact Us pages need to have a Page Rank and distribute your oh so valuable link juice to them? We’ll if you answer is no, keep reading! If your answer is Yes, this doesn’t apply to you…

After spending all of your valuable time writing great content on your website to make it standout about your competitors and gaining those awesome link juice passing links to your site, the last thing you want is to be distributing your link juice/page rank through pages that don’t need to be indexed nor do they need to be a page rank of anything. The most common that come to mind are your Help, Contact Us, Privacy Policy pages that are on almost every website out there. I will explain further the two options you have if you want to consider this tip to implement on your own website.

If you want your page to still be indexed but don’t want any link juice being passed to it: Then anytime you link to that page whether it be through your header menu, footer, or any incontent links add a rel=”nofollow” tag to the hyperlink. This tag will make sure the search engines do not actually follow that link therefore passing any link juice from the current page to that page. The page will still be indexed and crawled through sitemap submissions and other methods but just wont have a valuable Page Rank which it doesn’t need, and will take that precious link juice/page rank and distribute it to the important pages. Again, let’s take a look at an example of a hyperlink <a href=”contactus.html”> this is a “do-follow, link juice/page rank passing” link. Here is an example of a “no-followed, no link juice/page rank passing link” <a rel=”nofollow” href=”contactus.html”>. If you are interested in seeing what your competitors have no-followed or want to look at what pages you have no-followed as you begin to implement you should definitely install the no/do follow plugin for firefox that will color coordinate links that are either followed or not followed.

If you want your page to not be indexed and no link juice passed to it: Then anytime you link to that page you want to setup the same rel=”nofollow” anytime that page is referenced in the header menu, footer, or any incontent links. You can reference the above example as to how to do the nofollow in a hyperlink. The other addition to no-following the link is to make sure it is not indexed. You can do this by setting up a robots.txt file on your server which will set which pages the search engines can crawl and not crawl. Please be very careful when setting up a robots.txt file because if you mess it up you can block your whole site from being indexed and lose all of your rankings. So pay close attention.

- First you need to create a new file at the root of your directory of sub-domain that you are wanting this to apply to, so lets say bluewidgets.com/robots.txt
- Now if you want to no-index the contactus.html file you would setup the following in the robots.txt file
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /contactus.html

Now that you have seen the two ways to handle these problems, please pay close attention to what pages really need to rank and what pages don’t need to rank on your websites and use one of the above to craft your link juice/page rank to the most important pages so you take full advantage of those valuable links that you have received for all your hard work and great content that you have created.