Do NoFollow links still split link equity?
-
So I realize that Google will split link equity between all links on any given page. Example, if a landing page has 10 links then the authority from the landing page is split into 10 and each link given its own smaller amount of equity from that landing page. My question is if I were to turn 9 of the 10 links on this page to NoFollow links would the equity still remain split 10 ways or would it simply pass all of it to the one DoFollow link left on the page?
-
Hi Zach,
Good question. In the old days, this was referred to as "PageRank scuplting" - a process where you would place the nofollow tag on your unimportant links in order to pass more value to the links you wanted to count.
Then, in 2009, Google supposedly "plugged" the nofollow hole. Rand and team did a classic Whiteboard Friday on the topic. I still remember watching it the day it came out:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak
Today, you don't hear much about PageRank sculpting. Most SEOs don't bother with it, partly because of it's decreased effectiveness, but also in part because there are more effective ways of controlling the influence of links.
This is where the issue becomes more complex. Link "equity" or PageRank, (or MozRank), is only one small factor in the overall value of a link. Anchor text, position on the page, and a host of other factors all influence how much influence any given link can wield. Here's a good introduction on the subject (again from Rand)
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
As I understand it, the link equity is still spent evenly to all 10 links even if 9 of them are nofollow.
The 1 dofollow will receive its share, while the 9 nofollow will be sent it, but they won't receive the credit.
-
If you were to convert 9 of the 10 total links on the page into a nofollow, the only dofollow link will get all the link juice. I hope that clearly answers your question.
Edit: It looks like this changed a while ago (mid 2009) that if nofollow is added to 9 of the 10 links, the 10 links only get 10% of the link juice instead of the 100% and the 90% essentially gets lost.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
ASP Canonical and Internal Linking
Hello - I'm working with a large ASP website and trying to troubleshoot issues I believe might be related to how the canonical element is used. On page - all internal links, including navigation links, use the following format (uppercase) - website.com**/F**older/Folder/Product . So, any page navigated to will always display the uppercase version of the URL. And, all of these pages have the canonical tag pointing to the lowercase version of the URL. The pages included in Google's index are all lowercase versions of the URL like this - website.com**/f**older/folder/product . My concern is that a lot of internal authority flow is being impacted/negated because all internal links point to the uppercase versions of URLs and all those pages reference the lowercase version URL in the canonical reference. Is this a valid concern?
On-Page Optimization | | LA_Steve0 -
Problem with internal links.
Hello,I am trying to do an audit of the internal links of my site at zenplugs.com. I am having great difficulty simply trying to establish how many internal links there are on the home page. Off the top of my head I think there are probably 20-25 but Screaming Frog tells me there are 574, the MozBar is listing zero and Open Site Explorer is telling me my site hasn't been indexed yet. I have tried several web based services but most of them don't work. Can anyone recommend a tool which has given them a number they trust? My second query is that one of the tools told me that there are 4 links on the home page with no anchor text, linking to http://zenplugs.com/#. Is this a problem? Many thanks, in advance. Toby
On-Page Optimization | | T0BY0 -
Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview0 -
Ratio follow/nofollow outbound links
Dear all, So far, I couldn't find any satisfying answer to my problem - I hope you might be able to help: Due to the fact that our website consists of user-generated content, we've got many many outbound links to other sites. Until now, it was possible to assign a follow-attribute to these links. In the ages of "pandas" however, we realised we had to limit this possibility as well as the amount of outbound follow links already published. My question now is whether there is some kind of rule of thumb as to what ratio of outbound follow and nofollow links is advisable. I'd appreciate any ideas or comments. Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Mulle0 -
What are all those meta name= and link rel= on the cnn home page source?
I usually use Description, title and keywords tag. I keep seeing these meta name = "classification" or "distribution" and also link rel =stylesheet" and "pingback" etc. Please tell me how important this is for SEO. It would be great to be pointed to the right page. Also, is there a wordpress pluggin to just fill in and have these be populated on the front end? Thank You
On-Page Optimization | | waspmobile0 -
Do we have too many links in our footer?
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JohnTulley0 -
Link juice question
In theory: If i have a page with only two outgoing, do-follow links,
On-Page Optimization | | elgoog
and both have the same target,
only the first one will be counted.. right? Will that link pass 100% or 50% of the link juice? (if the anchor text is the same or different does not make any difference i think)0