I was wondering if it’s possible to gain backlinks from your site to your site. I’ve made some tests to some websites and the results were that some of the backlinks were generated from the same site. How is this possible? I Understand that it happens in subdomains but something like this is really interesting.
I believe this advice is a bit dated. Google changed its algorithm more than two years ago and you no longer benefit by making your internal links nofollow. In fact, you are actually sending a portion of your link juice to the ether by making those internal links nofollow. This link is a detailed discussion about PageRank Sculpting posted by Google engineer Matt Cutts.
Pagerank sculpting isn’t completely dead, it’s just not effective to do with the nofollow attribute on your links. This link will give you some ideals on how you can still do PR sculpting on your website:
PageRank Sculpting Isn’t Dead But Comments Can Kill Your PageRank
While you might see that as a problem, actually it’s a nice positive opportunity. Both your “Terms” and “Privacy Policy” pages now have link juice that feeds back to any navigation links you may have placed on those pages. Hopefully, you had the good sense to include keywords in your navigation link anchortext.
You could also channel some of that link juice to an internal page that you’re trying to get to rank for a specific keyword. Just add a single call-to-action at the bottom of those pages using your targeted keyword and you will instantly boost the ranking power of the target pages.
