Should you use iframes to limit your sitewide links like Bruce Clay?

[Philip J. Fry]

Situation

I google site:domain.com and see pages like "employment" or "about us" or "links" (for link exchange) in the top 10 and 20. I know this is because I have those pages linked to in my footer navigation. I also know that Bruce Clay says that this is a no-no in a properly siloed site for link juice is leaked to those pages even though they are not pages you want to rank.

He recommended using Flash in his original post but, now, uses i-frames on his site (he no-index the i-frame's url in his robots.txt).

Question

Is this anything I should worry about? I have 400+ indexed pages.

What's the best solution for this? i-frame it up and no-indexed the iframe URLs like how Bruce has it or no-follow the links or no-index those pages?

Thanks guys.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

So, my thoughts on this is: Yeah, its obvious I'm losing link juice to the footer nav links but does it make a big impact in rankings? I don't see a lot of people doing this so is Bruce's advice just an extra 1% thing or should I do something about it?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wouldn't worry about it at all, but it's definitely an interesting topic.

I think what you would want to do is add links to those global pages to powerful pages that you want to rank so that the juice always flows around instead of stopping on those global pages. Of course you need a good reason to do that on the page, don't just randomly insert links.

The problem with no-indexing pages is that they are still followed and a part of the link graph. I've not used an iframe since the late 90's with Geocities so I don't really remember... does the content of the iframe render in the source code of the main page? If it does, then google's still going to let page rank juice flow through those links, whether they are no-index or no-follow.

And if doesn't show in the source code, does that put you at risk for hidden links? And does this heavy type of siloing put you at risk for manipulating the flow of the metric?

Also, we know that Google passes different amounts of page rank juice through navigation, footer, sidebar, and supplemental links than they do the main content. That's just another reason to not worry about this. They are already aware of how we build sites and most of the time will tweak the algo to accommodate that.

 

[qwianghomingh]

If that site's on wordpress and linked to via menus, menus have an option to nofollow links to pages/links.

try Appearance/Menus and go to Top Right Screen at Screen Options. Take a look at

"Show advanced menu properties"

Using
"Link Relationship (XFN)"

gives you an attribute fied that you can use for nofollowing those links. Just enter nofollow in such a field and you can use a new menu with custom links to filter out these must have useless links ranking-wise.

It works as looking at source:
< a rel=nofollow rel= "http://domain.com/contact" > Contac t < /a >