Any website owner who cares about ranking well in search engines should utilize what is sometimes referred to as link condoms, or more commonly known as “nofollows” .

Nofollows was originally created by Google to combat the large spam problems that faced many bloggers. Spammers would post irrelevant comments in blog posts with hyperlinks to their websites. This would pass SEO link advantage to their site and eventually provide an increase in search engine rankings.

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is assigned to a hyperlink, and provides no SEO link advantage to the destination page. With no apparent SEO advantage to spamming blogs, most spammers simply looked to other areas to game Google’s organic listings. Blog spamming is still being practiced today but since the introduction to nofollows, this type of spam method has dramatically decreased.

Nofollows was made to deter spammers and help reduce altering organic listings, but with it’s existence proved to be quite useful with on-page optimization. This is especially true when applied to a high-level SEO technique called Site Theming. Here, nofollows play a vital role in increasing a theme’s overall topical relevancy.

With Site Theming, the goal is to structure a site in a themed sectional structure. For example, if you have a site about automobiles, you may have a themed section for Ford, Toyota, and Chevy. Within each section, you can find it’s supporting pages. These pages will be topically related to the sections they are in thus supporting the sections overall theme. An example would be a Ford Mustang page would fall under the Ford section. Any supporting pages to the Ford Mustang page would also be under this section.

Now, the idea is to link to pages within the same theme section. All Ford hyperlinks only link to Ford pages. This will provide a high theme weight for each section and could provide a big boost within search engine rankings. Unfortunately, from a usability standpoint, you need to link to other themed sections. By doing this, you will dilute your section’s overall theme weight resulting in lower search rankings. This is where nofollows come in handy.

Using a nofollow on links to unrelated themes will help keep all the link weight within it’s own theme. Like I said earlier, nofollows don’t pass off any link value, it stays within it’s page. You’re simply telling Google, don’t pass off any link love (link value) to this page, just keep the link love to myself.

In this article, I only scratched the surface of Site Theming. It is one of the more complex on-page optimization strategies but when utilized correctly, it can provide a huge boost in organic listings.