Should I use nofollow in links to my disclaimer and privacy policy?

We have a question from Michelle in Netherlands, who asks “Is it good thing to put ‘nofollow’ in links to a disclaimer, privacy statements and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? I hear different stories about this.”

Good question! The reason that I would use nofollow is if you truly don’t want your page indexed at all. So for example a login page, Googlebot does not know how to login, and that’s not of any value for users to have. I can imagine that the disclaimer or privacy statement could be kind of useful. So you can put those links on, it’s not that it’s going to cause you a spam penalty but truthfully I would tend to worry more about having enough good links because you have enough great content that you tend to get a lot of people linking to you, you tend to get a lot of good coverage in Google’s index. It’s a second order effect the best, I really wouldn’t spend a lot of time in saying that I have nofollow on my links on the stuff that I don’t care about. Typically you do better by may be linking or by not linking to stuff. Link to the privacy policy for once but you don’t have to link to it on every page of your site or something like that. But really I would only use it for the pages that you really don’t want to be in Google at all. Don’t worry much about sculpting that tends to take a lot more time and not really be a bigger bang for your buck compared to just putting your efforts on making a good content that will attract links.

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