Optimizing your Website: Use the nofollow tag

Any pages that aren't so important should have the nofollow tag placed in the code. This tells robots not to pass on any of the page rank for the page they are on to that page and thus stops page rank bleed. What? Well, say you have a page rank of 4 on your homepage and your homepage links to 10 other pages on your site. That page rank will leak or bleed out a little to be shared amongst all those extra pages thus diluting your homepage page rank. Now whilst you may well be happy to share that page rank amongst 6 of those pages you probably won't want it be split between your about us and contact us pages. To get around this you can go into your home page's code and add the tag "no follow" after the link. This will prevent any of the homepages page rank spreading to pages you don't want it to.

Example:

Instead of

<p><a href="http://www.bmums.com/contact-us.htm" title="B'Mums - Contact Us">Contact Us</a></p>

use this

<p><a href="http://www.bmums.com/contact-us.htm" title="B'Mums - Contact Us" rel="nofollow">Contact Us</a></p>

When linking to external sites you can also use the nofollow tag - unless of course you have offered a link in return for content when this would be bad practice.