Google’s Matt Cutts: NoFollow Attributes On Internal Links Don’t Hurt But Generally Don’t Do It

In a video, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts published today an answer to the question, “Should I use rel=”nofollow” on internal links to a login page?”

Matt Cutts basically said you shouldn’t, but said it won’t hurt you if you did. Matt said, “It doesn’t hurt if you want to put a nofollow pointing to a login page or to a page that you think is really useless.” But Matt said, “in general” it also doesn’t hurt to not add a nofollow, and in general, you should let Googlebot crawl and explore your site.

In most cases, using a noindex may be better than using a nofollow on the link attribute.

This is interesting because of what Matt Cutts explained in 2009 about using the nofollow of PageRank sculpting, where it doesn’t work as you’d expect.

Here is the full video:

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.

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