SEO Experiment: The Effect Of No-following A Link On A Page
There has been rumour that if you nofollow a link on a page to another page, all other links to that page will be nofollowed also.
For example if you were trying to beat Google by nofollowing the link back to your home page within the navigation with the anchor text “home” and then having another followed link back to your home page somewhere in the content with your chosen anchor text, this may not have the desired effect.
If the rumour is true, Google will see you have nofollowed the link back to your home page and will treat all links back to your home page from that page as nofollow also.
Here I am going to try a little experiment to see what actually happens if you try and get Google to ignore anchor text such as “home” and “home page”.
Scenario
I have set up two test pages, both are identical and are aiming to rank for the keyword “hoompalart” (random keyword that has no results.. try it).
I am going to link to both pages from this post with that exact anchor text, only difference is that I am going to link to one of the pages twice, one of the links followed and the other one will be nofollowed. If the rumour is true then in theory, the link weight that should be passed to the test page with two links will be discarded and the page with only one link should outrank the other.
Here is the nofollowed link : hoompalart and here are both the followed links hoompalart and hoompalart.
For note and clarification, I have linked test-1.htm with a nofollow and a followed link and test-2.htm with just a followed link, if the rumour is true, then test-2.htm should rank better than test-1.htm for the term hoompalart.
I will post the results as soon as we find something, keep checking back!