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Actually, I wrote about this at great length over at SEO Theory in How To Fix Your Nofollow Screwup. I put the article there because it was so long and offers detailed suggestions on how SEOs and their clients can gracefully exit the Nofollow Hell they have created for themselves.

Let me sum up my major points here:

Some people are leaving their internalized nofollow links in place because they are afraid they will lose search traffic. That might actually happen because the internalized nofollow never fixed the original problem anyway.

Nonetheless, by leaving those internalized nofollow links on sites, people are passing part of their PageRank to other sites in the Google index (perhaps only to sites in the Main Web Index, but I don’t really know). If you or your clients have worked hard to build up PageRank, just giving it away like that devalues the time and effort that went into building it up.

You cannot hoard PageRank but you can shape its flow by deciding what to link to. You cannot shape its flow by using nofollow.

When dealing with sites that are struggling with poor search visibility, the SEO community should fix the underlying problems: bad navigation and architecture. There ARE solutions you can implement without having to redesign an entire site (I discuss some of those solutions in the SEO Theory article).

I think SEOs owe it to their clients at a moral level to help them fix these broken sites, or at least to provide the clients with methods for growing those sites out of the broken state into which they fell (and really without the SEOs’ knowledge — Google surprised everyone when it revealed how it had changed PageRank calculations).

I don’t believe that we as a consulting industry should be held responsible for the consequences of a change in search engine design and practice, but I do believe that we need to do the right thing and accept the challenge of guiding clients’ sites to good search engine visibility.

Simply leaving things where they are because everyone is “happy” with the status quo is not, in my opinion, a competitive philosophy.

With more people in the SEO community emphasizing the value of good internal linking these days, it’s easy to fall into the “it’s all about architecture” rut and forget that internal linking goes well beyond what you put into your primary and secondary navigation lists.

Here are three types of internal links you should be using on your Web sites. These linking styles work for virtually every kind of Web site, including ecommerce, blogs, and traditional static HTML sites.

1: Promotional Banner Ad
You may think banner ads are dinosaurs but when it comes to promoting your own content within your site, a well-designed banner ad helps increase user page conversions (a “page conversion” occurs whenever a visitor moves from one page to another within your site).

You can use simple banners or complex banners. Find where your comfort level is.

Each banner should be clearly branded, so that you identify your own content to your visitors.

Rotate your banners. You can use Javascript to do this, but some people prefer CGI.

You can track your banner conversions and use the data to improve your design and placement.

Include a visual aspect with your banner copy: a picture, a smiley, clip art — something that catches the visitor’s eye and which is relevant to the destination page.

2: Pull Quote Links
I learned to call these “floaters” in college but most people in the news and publishing industry probably call them “lift out quotes” or “pull quotes”. People don’t use floaters in their Web copy as much as they used to but floater links work very well. A “pull quote” is a block of copy you insert into your normal copy, using it to highlight a section of the article to attract reader interest (and to break up long articles that lack sufficient images and graphics). The pull quote is often demarcated by lines or fancy quotation marks. Horizontal rules work well for this, depending on how you have structured your HTML. You may have to use little images for the lines. Rather than fight with this blog’s CSS, I’ll use hard-coded underscores:

There are variations on this technique. For example, if you include someone’s picture with the link and position the link block at the side or front of a block of copy, it’s a Mug Shot Link or Pork Chop Link.

3: Kicker Links
Through the years many people have asked in SEO forums if they’ll get any advantage by embedding their links in Hx tags. I don’t know of any advantage, although I’ve experimented with such links just to see what mostly.

Mostly they just look ugly.

But you may not be aware of the kicker. This is a small headline, usually underlined, that appears just above the headline of an article. The font is small, not microscopic. The text as has to be human-readable (and I mean readable with the use of magnifying glasses or microscopes). Don’t make the visitor struggle to see what is in your kicker, but you can use it to link to other content on your site that is relevant to all or some portion of your page copy.

Example:

You want to create credible links in your copy

How To Create Good Links People Click Through

If this were a real article about creating good links that people click through, it would provide you with information and suggestions on how to style, position, and use internal links to help increase page conversions in your copy.

Another variation on kicker links would be kernel links. A kernel is a brief statement or abstract summarizing an article, usually placed at the top of the article.

Final Word
This is not about being sneaky. If you’re even tempted to use one of these techniques to hide links, you’re doing it wrong. You want to leverage these ideas to make your copy more interesting and to inform your visitors of other content on your site that is relevant to whatever they find. It may be that they are really looking for the other article anyway. You never know.

The point is that you don’t have to limit your internal linking to navigation and cross-promotional links embedded in your page copy. You can be creative and informative together, and that makes your site more interesting to everyone.

And you may have noticed that I cheated on the pull quote link — it links to the SEO Glossary at SEO Theory. There is no reason why you have to limit these kinds of links to just the site that hosts them; they are clearly flexible linking mechanisms. Just make sure you don’t confuse your readers (too much).

A hotsheet is a simple list of items that are currently “hot”, high value, or available only for a short period of time. In some contexts a hotsheet might be a list of stolen items, a list of forbidden items, or a list of items to find.

If you want to be serious about link building then you need to work with link hotsheets. These are not the spreadsheets your grandma uses every Sunday. Here are a few scenarios that illustrate how to use link hotsheets.

Scenario 1: Top Linking Resources – Everyone is looking for places to get more links from. You should have a hotsheet that includes 10-20 places where you can place credible links to your content. You won’t be able to use every resource on the list at any one time. Still, when you roll out a new section for your site or launch a new site entirely you should check this hotsheet first to see which sites can help you.

Criteria for Top Linking Resources:

1. Frequent cache updates in major search indexes
2. Verifiable anchor text passing
3. Easy to update
4. Not used by many other people

Scenario 2: New Linking Resources – Everyone in the SEO blogosphere wants to get the next hot thing on Sphinn, and some people stupidly publish lists of linking resources. You should keep track of the newer ones AND AVOID THEM LIKE THE PLAGUE. Don’t waste your time using linking resources that every SEO idiot in the world will exploit and burn to Link Spam Hell.

Criteria For New Linking Resources:

1. Blogged about by 2 or more people in the past six months
2. Google Toolbar Penalty Applied
3. Recommended by any popular SEO tutorial, book, or webinar in the last year
4. Mentioned in any SEO-related video that gets more than 2 views

Scenario 3: This Week’s (month’s) Hot Content – There is no point in building links if you have nothing to link to. You should be building deep links, fresh links, and refresh links. Cycle through your URLs (especially if you have a lot). Don’t just point every link at the “important” pages on your site — point links at ALL the pages on your site.

Criteria For Hot Content Resources:

1. You just created the page
2. You haven’t built a link to the page in at least six months
3. The page will become relevant to seasonal queries in 2-3 months
4. You just updated the page

Scenario 4: Safe, Non-Competitive, Relevant Resources – These are sites you link to freely to help create value in your own content. They are relevant to your content but not competing with you. That should be self-explanatory enough I don’t need to list specific criteria for inclusion on the list.

Here are some basic rules for using link hotsheets:

• DO NOT SHARE THESE LISTS
• Update these lists at least once a month
• DO NOT SHARE THESE LISTS
• Keep more than one set of hotsheets if you promote multiple sites
• DO NOT SHARE THESE LISTS

There is no greater harm you can do to your own SEO power than to share with people which resources you use. It doesn’t matter how many other people know about them. Do not contribute to their popularity because they WILL become useless if they become popular enough.

Ubiquity signals the death of any SEO linking resource. There are no exceptions to the rules, just a lot of useless links being built by fools.

Many people today implement SEO tactics without thinking through their strategies. Here is a quick guide to help you set a strategy and match good tactics for it.

The SEO strategy defines your objectives and the tactics you’ll use to achieve them. In other words, you use an SEO strategy to state your goals and how you will work toward accomplishing those goals.

Example of an SEO Strategy: Our Web site will leverage its content to gain 1st active keyword matrix relevant to the topic of “strange banana glues that glow in the dark”.

Some Example SEO Strategies:

• Brand launch campaign
• Rebranding campaign
• Invasive Campaign
• Competitive Displacement Campaign
• Query Building Campaign

Brand Launching SEO Strategies are the most complex because you have to create value in the new brand, build active queries around it, and position content to prevent other people from seizing your glory. If you’re doing the SEO separately from the marketing, chances are good there will be mis-steps along the way. Your strategy should encompass a recovery and adjustment phase.

Rebranding SEO Strategies may be tediously detailed but they are not nearly as complex as branding SEO strategies because when you relaunch a brand you can (and should) use the old brand to create a transition for your clients and prospects (or suspects) to the new brand space. Again, if you’re doing the SEO separately from the marketing, the chances for miscues rise significantly so you should allow for recovery and adjustment.

Invasive SEO Strategies are the most competitive and aggressive strategies. You’re moving a new site into an established space. It doesn’t have to be highly competitive — your showing up may be sufficient to trigger an SEO war. SEO wars wear you down because you have to stay on top of so much detail. These are high-stress campaigns and you should design your strategies around cycles.

Competitive Displacement Campaign SEO Strategies may sound ugly but these are very common. eCommerce sites implement them all the time when they roll out new products and drop old products. Many affiliate sites also implement competitive displacement campaign strategies. People probably describe the process by a hundred names and expressions. The goal is to position new content in the search results without losing significant traffic while removing old content from your site. Many SEO technicians are brought in after the change in content has occurred, when people start to realize it’s not as simple as taking down old pages and putting up new pages.

Query Building SEO Strategies dovetail nicely with other strategies but you can implement these strategies without doing anything else. Think of a site or document that is relevant to two expressions. Your initial keyword research suggests one query is far more active than another. You try an invasive strategy and it fails. So what do you do? You can try building interest in the less active query, where your chances of dominating will be better.

Some Example SEO Tactics:

• Targeted copywriting (articles, press releases, blog posts, etc.)
• SERP listing modifications
• Supporting content placement
• Strategic Link Placement
• Supporting Link Placement

The Targeted Copywriting SEO Tactic is simple. You write an article and place it on a site. The article should contain one or more links. People most often use blogs, article directories, and press release services for this type of tactic. A powerful strategy would utilize a variety of targeted copy formats on many sites.

SERP Listing Modifications SEO Tactic should be self-evident. You change page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs.

Supporting Content Placement SEO Tactics differ from Targeted Copywriting SEO Tactics because supporting content is not intended to rank well in the dominant query. Let’s say you are promoting a site that sells dog supplies. Your supporting content might consist of blog posts about dogs on a site that advertises your dog supplies site (through banners, embedded image ads, videos, text links, etc.). The content has to have value. It has to serve a purpose other than being there simply for a link.

Strategic Link Placement SEO Tactics are very common. You cherry pick the Web sites where you place your links and optimize the anchor text. Some people optimize the surrounding text, too. Strategic Link Placement SEO Tactics may include creating microsites but I would regard that to be a drastic effort.

Supporting Link Placement SEO Tactics include creating spammy linking resource sites, swapping links, submitting links to directories, buying links, dropping links in blog comments and forum signatures, etc. Not all supporting link placement SEO tactics are naughty. They’re just low-key, minimal effort, low-value ROI methods. On any average day, no matter how sick you feel, you should be able to get at least 10 of these kinds of links without having to get dressed for work (well, if you’re an experienced SEO, that is).

Matching SEO Strategies With SEO Tactics
Frankly, you could use all these tactics with all these strategies. It really comes down to time and resources. You should choose the best possible set of tactics to achieve the highest reasonable return on your investment. That does not necessarily mean do everything possible until you get a Web site to rank first for keyword X.

A good strategy will pull up short of the mark if it’s not the most efficient means of achieving the ultimate objective (which, technically, should be to increase converting search referrals regardless of keywords and rankings). You can use a launcher strategy and an adjustment strategy, followed up by a maintenance strategy.

Sometimes you have to throw a Hail Mary SEO Strategy into play. This is the strategy you pull out of your back pocket when the reasonable, low-cost, high return-on-investment strategies don’t achieve what you need to achieve. Hail Mary strategies are almost tactics. A Hail Mary Strategy has to be structured around risks as well as payoffs (which is why it’s not a tactic).

An example of a Hail Mary Strategy might be where you pull down an entire site and replace every page with new content that is meant to rank for an entirely different set of keywords, a sort of “B” matrix of related keywords. Hail Mary strategies are radical and risky. You don’t want to build a business on this kind of work because the payoff is not usually high enough to justify the effort.