: Rel="nofollow" SEO impact I saw a technique used where there was a block with three parts: 1. Image (wrapped in an anchor tag) 2. Heading (anchor tag with heading text) 3. Paragraph (regular p

@Samaraweera270

The idea of a nofollow is to prevent Google from passing value across a link. Currently, it's commonly applied to links entered in unmoderated user-generated content, to avoid unintentionally having your site linked to anything risky.

Controlling anchor text

I think the intent in your example is to control the anchor text which is attributed to the linked page. In short, the words used in a link (i.e., the "anchor text") are part of the search optimisation of the page linked to. However, according to SEOMoz experiments, Google only uses the anchor text for the first instance of a link on any one page. So in your case, the developer is probably trying to ensure that the <h1> text, and not the image alt, is used.

PageRank sculpting

It used to be used (as Anagio notes) for a technique called "PageRank sculpting", whereby webmasters attempted to "hoard" their sites value by preventing PageRank from flowing to competitors or low-importance pages on their own site. That no longer works.

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@LarsenBagley505

Matt Cutts suggested letting link juice flow and to not try and sculpt your PageRank
www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
It's pointless to set nofollow on an internal link going to an image with a relative path. Googl's smart guys, they spend millions on their algorithm so do you think that is fooling anyone or helping that site?

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