When Google first introduced nofollow-tag many of us used this functionality to sculpt the link juice flow on websites. It was a pretty good feature because you could exclude many irrelevant pages from passing link juice (f.e. privacy policy or contact pages). Nofollow-tag was also used to give some pages more importance than others, this way you could create a great internal link structure in your benefit. Links tagged nofollow weren’t simply counted as links so your total amount of links could be slightly reduced.
Unfortunately in June this year Google shifted it’s mind on how to handle nofollow. Matt Cutts wrote that all nofollow links were counted as regular links but still weren’t passing any link juice. So in other words, those links were leaking your precious pagerank to nowhere. In the past the total link juice passed was only divided to the do-follow links, nofollow-links were excluded form that count. Now it’s over, total link juice is being spread over all links (including nofollow).
But there is a simple solution to this, which fits into Google Webmaster Guidelines, JavaScript. Instead of using nofollow links you can now use simple JavaScript to point users to your irrelevant pages and not dripping any Google juice.
<script type=”text/javascript”>// <![CDATA[
var str="Example Link with Javascript";
document.write(str.link("http://www.w3.org"));
// ]]></script>
Outcome:
The beauty of it is that it looks like a normal link but it isn’t counted as one by Google. It provides a nice way to again sculp your internal pagerank as you like.