rel="nofollow" your own links on homepage?

[bdnseo]

Guys... I have a website that has a main business focusing on widgets. This business has several webmaster services related to widgets but these are just to exchange traffic. These services are hosted at the widget side and have a landing page webmaster widgets page that is a tier 2 page.

I would like to indicate on the homepage of the site that these services exist without passing page rank to these pages from the homepage because they are tier 3 site pages and linked that way because it makes logical sense for the website.

I would like the search engine's to follow the links from our tier 2 landing page for widget webmaster services which has links to the various services offered and distribute the website's internal page rank accordingly... but I want to expose these services on our homepage without hurting our internal page rank for our main business units.

Will rel="nofollow" on my homepage links to these services accomplish this?

Am I out to lunch even thinking about this :?

[glengara]

I wouldn't use them to funnel internal PR, nothing concrete to base it on, just a feeling they may be seen as an indicator of an overly SEO'd page/site.

[dannysullivan]

Yeah, you could do that, and it should work as you suspect. But I'm with glengara, I wouldn't bother. I doubt it would make that much of a difference. And down the line, if the search engines decide that nofollow links should perhaps be treated negatively, then nightmare. In the end, if you think these links warrant being on your home page, I'd say let them get the pagerank flow.

[bdnseo]

I just don't know what other options are available to tell the search engines how to value my site.

I figured that using the nofollow would show users that the service is there while letting the engine spider my site from my nav bar link to the widgets webmasters page.

I want to get people using the service without taking away from my core business.

[glengara]

It's a bit confusing, I'd have thought either the links were worth having on the home page or they're not.....

[bdnseo]

The services are new and webmaster related... the site is a commercial site not a webmaster site.

Why would google come up with rel="nofollow" and then turn around and penalize sites for using it? ... as over-optimization which was suggested earlier...

I think I will just place the links inside a flash banner... I was really hoping somebody with some rel="nofollow" experiences would offer up their knowledge.

Thanks guys I do appreciate the opinions. I can be a little confrontational but I just want to find out some concrete answers ;)

[St0n3y]

You can always put the links in a complicated javascript so search engines don't "see" them.

[bdnseo]

I will probably do that... but my original preference was to have the widgets webmaster "text" on the homepage with rel="nofollow" links to the services... I wanted the text to get indexed indicating I offered the service but not distribute page rank from the homepage to these services...while at the same time exposing the service on the homepage to build a buzz...