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.