I had an SEO discussion with a friend this week over a site that featured 4 “nofollow” links, and then listed those same 4 links a bit below them, “followed” this time and with relevant anchor text, instead of simply “Site.com”. My friend, who definitely knows his stuff when it comes to SEO, explained they chose this tactic so the full amount of “link juice” would only flow to the followed set of 4 links, rather than having to be split between the two sets of links. I replied that yes, the theory behind this is valid, but on a site with a grand total of 8 outgoing links, it’s a bit of a mute point, and may actually raise a spider’s suspicion, as the site is basically shouting out that they’re gaming search engines.

His perspective was that of a technical SEO specialist, mine was more of a natural, visitor-centric SEO specialist. His point is 100% correct, but in this instance, there’s no need to “nofollow” those links. If the site had 25 outgoing links and only wanted PageRank to flow through 4 of them, then the other 21 links should certainly be “nofollowed”. But not for a site with a total of 8 links.

This brings up a good point – if an SEO specialist knows the Google Webmaster Guidelines in and out and applies those principles to their client’s sites, does that make them experienced in SEO? Personally, I feel that knowing when to implement those guidelines is what really shows you know SEO. I’m always learning, but I feel it’s best to learn the technical SEO techniques, and then, and only through experience, learn why they’re beneficial to some sites and how to apply them to best benefit that individual site.

My friend has a wealth of SEO knowledge, and I do look to him for technical SEO questions. SEO duals are nothing new between us and keep us both on top of our game. The art of SEO is about gaining experience on knowing when to apply those SEO best practices, not necessarily in memorizing them.