Where should i use rel="nofollow" [closed]

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We have a URI date based link structure where the previous year's news content is free, while the current year, and any year prior to the last, are paid, login required content.

The net effect is that when doing a search for our company name in google, what comes up first is Contact, About, Login, etc., standard non-login required content. That's fine, but ideally we have our free content, the pages we want to promote, shown first in the search engine results.

Toward this end, the link structure now generates rel="follow" for the free content we want to promote, and rel="nofollow" for all paid content and Contact, About, Login, etc. screens that we want at the bottom of the SEO search result ladder.

Answer 1

rel="nofollow" should only be put on links which you think Google should not follow.

Example Case:

Your site may have earned a good reputation. If someone has posted a link to example.com, which may be a bad site, Google follows the link and it knows that it is a bad site.

In this process, your site's reputation will fall down in Google's eyes, which you obviously don't want to happen.

Many blog frameworks automatically add this attribute to end user's links.

_{When I say Google, I mean to say search engines.}

Answer 2

I agree with Amit regarding the use of rel="nofollow" to disavow potentially poor quality links from your website, protecting its reputation, however I don't think this is all you need to accomplish what you were asking.

Regarding 'nofollow', it causes Google to drop the target links from their graph (or view of the web) however, they may still appear in Google's search results if other sites link to those pages which you will have less control over. Also, other search engines may handle nofollow differently so it is not a catchall solution.

To prevent all "robots" from indexing a page on your site, therefore allowing your other pages to take a higher status place the following meta tag into the section of your page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

OR to apply the 'nofollow' directive to all links on that page use the following;

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

When search engines see the noindex meta tag on a page, they will (in most cases) completely ignore the page and drop it from their search results (at least Google and most major ones do), even if other pages link to it. Once again, other search engines may interpret this directive differently but most wil indeed ignore the page.