Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
So You No-Follow Privacy Policy Pages etc?
-
site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp
Some people have recently suggested my homepage is giving out to much PR.
Do I need to no-follow the "about us", "Customer Service" and "contact us" pages?
-
Hi Rhys,
Taking a look at your site, your links all seemed natural and within reason. ( I did think the homepage was a little light on content - mostly just navigation and quick links to products. But that's another conversation.
"Best practice" is to consolidate your non-important links into a format that makes sense and is human friendly. Rand wrote a post about footer links awhile ago that still works today:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience
I wrote about this in another Q&A thread a short time back.
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.
...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)
If you "no-follow" your important contact pages (about us, etc) Google may have trouble finding and crawling those pages. Because these are both valuable pieces of content and trust signals for your site, this probably isn't the outcome you want.
To summarize: Adding nofollow in your case doesn't make sense. It really only makes sense in a very few cases, and isn't as effective in controlling ranking signals as many people would like to believe.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Did you read through all the comments? There is a lot of useful information in there. Here is another article by Rand shortly after the update that describes how this will affect websites:
Here's a simplified example: Say you have a page with 10 links on it, this page is essentially passing on 10 points of Page Rank (PR) to other pages on your site. If you nofollow 3 of the links you are only passing on 7 points to the rest of your site, the remaining 3 points evaporate. If you have 500 pages on your site and you nofollow just 3 links on each page then how much of your PR are you wasting in total?
This is why Matt recommends that you let your PR flow freely through your site. PR sculpting using this strategy used to work before they made this change in 2009.
Of course this is still down to interpretation and how much you believe what Google says, obviously they don't give away too many secrets. This question gets asked in this forum every week and I would say the vast majority of the SEO experts here advise against this practice.
I hope that helps
-
heya
I read the whole post but couldn't find a single point which says that "This strategy died years ago"
Even matt uses nofollow for RSS/Atom to not pass PageRank and showing RSS/Atom in SERPs
I am really interested in knowing if it has really died. please guys provide some more credible and straight posts/information.
-
nofollowing no longer works, and although Google can read some javascript, you can obfuscate the js links and conserve pr from leaking that way
-
Todd is right, this won't save your PR from leaking. This strategy died years ago. Have a look at a similar topic here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-internal-links-on-page-any-benefit-to-nofollow
or here Matt Cutts describes how 'Page Rank Sculpting' no longer works:
-
Sorry Khem I do not agree.
The nofollow attribute doesn't stop a page from being pulled in a search engine. It also doesn't stop the flow of PR (Sure that's what Google says it does, but it definitely does not work that way). The only time you should be using a nofollow is for links you either:
1. Don't trust
2.links that lead to pages that search engines cannot understand
in regard to number 2, if you have a 'sign in' link on your homepage you should put a nofollow on that. Search engines cannot sign in to your website. There is no reason for a search engine to follow that link. All other links - just keep them dofollow. You're not 'sculpting' your PR by using nofollow links.
You should switch your concern away from nofollow and focus on site speed. Your site seems slow to me.
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
-
Images on their own page?
Hi Mozers, We have images on their own separate pages that are then pulled onto content pages. Should the standalone pages be indexable? On the one hand, it seems good to have an image on it's own page, with it's own title. On the other hand, it may be better SEO for crawler to find the image on a content page dedicated to that topic. Unsure. Would appreciate any guidance! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0
