Post Theme: Blog Overhaul

Every link on the web has the potential to pass (search engine) ranking value to other pages. This doesn’t just apply to links from other sites to your own, but also links within your site. I’ll be referring to this as “value” for the rest of the article.

If I have some links pointing to my home page from other sites, I can choose to either keep all that value centered on that page, or pass some of it on to other page (or other sites). Most of us do this anyway, because we link to other pages without cutting off the search engine value they hold.

How can we control the passing of value?

There are a few ways it can be done. First, we can use rel=”nofollow” on an individual link to stop it passing value to the target page. This isn’t recognised by all search engines, but its really only the major ones we are interested in.

Second, placing a robots.txt file within your site (usually the root directory), can stop individual pages or directories from being indexed. Think about it as approaching the situation from the opposite direction to rel=”nofollow”. To stop value being passed to a particular page, add the following code to your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /mypage.php
Disallow: /mydirectory/

And finally, a meta tag can be put within the head of a web page to either stop that page from being indexed, or links on that page from being followed (or both):

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />

What types of pages might we want to stop value being passed to?

Some people say that pages such as an About or Contact page should be de-indexed, to stop value leaking to them. Whilst I’d agree with the Contact page, I’m not entirely convinced about something like the About page (since it could be very topical to your site’s theme). So that one is up to you!

Another issue ties in with that of duplicate content. If you have a blog for example, your archive pages will have much the same content as your individual post pages. Therefore the use of nofollow and / or noindexing your archive pages can help prevent the leaking of value to those extra pages.

You could argue that all non-post pages are just extras for the reader’s benefit (and should therefore be ignored by the search engines). When I started this blog, I blocked off all category / archive / search pages from being indexed or passing authority. I have since relaxed it a little to index the first page of “deep” categories (2nd tier), although I can’t say for sure what effect it is having yet.

You should also be careful about passing value to other sites. That includes things like affiliate / social media links (which should always be nofollowed), as well as links to other important sites. Think of it as sites that don’t need any of your help, because they already have a lot of value pointing to them. No point in wasting your value on them!

Distribution of Value?

Once you’ve figured out what pages or links should pass no value, you may want to think about how you want value to be distributed through the pages that are left (and you want value to pass to). Most links will point to a site’s home page, so (for a blog) it is always a good idea to make sure value passes from the home page to some post pages directly.

You should also try to link to related posts from other posts. You can do this manually (as I did above with the duplicate content link) or by using an automated solution such as the wordpress related posts plugin.

There are more ellaborate strategies you can use, including linking all pages equally for equal distribution, to a more heirachical approach (such as the blog home page / posts relationship). It’s best to visualise your site, and decide how you want the value to be distributed, then use the value blocking techniques above to control the value appropriately.
In the final post on this theme, I’ll be looking at the different social networking options out there, and what could be good for your blog!