Brand new website, should I nofollow almost all internal links?
-
Hi,
As I am creating a completely new website for my employer (she will have zero incoming links, even the URL will be different), would it be advantageous to allow follows to the other internal pages from the home page, but disallow follows on all other internal links on each subsequent page?
So, for example each page will have this many internal links:
Home page: 5 (all 5 service pages)
Recruiting: 1 (home link)
Services: 1 (home link)
Talent Assessment: 1 (home link)
etc.
Does this make sense to bolster the home page until we can get some links coming in?
-
Hi there,
As a general rule, you almost always want to "follow" internal links - this includes links between internal pages. To do otherwise could hurt your SEO.
Links do a lot of things. They create a path for search robots to crawl your site. They send off relevancy and popularity signals to ranking algorithms.
Is there any particular reason you thought of "nofollowing" your internal links?
About the only time you want to add nofollow to internal links is when doing so prevents search robots from going down the wrong path, such as so-called spider traps, or sometimes as a layer of protection to keep robots from crawling certain pages (not the best method to use)
Regardless, making sure your internal links are followed has many, many benefits. This is one of my favorite blog posts of all time - although a little dated, it applies to internal links as well as external: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
yes and from a content perspective , it looks sensible and goes with the flow.
-
If its a new web site best practise is not to no follow any pages you want indexed. That said internal no follows are ignored anyway nowadays. Internal link juice manipulation, like external is not a great idea.
-
You mean, as long as each link is its own keyword, but doesn't repeat the keyword from the homepage?
-
as long as they are not targeting one particular keyword, you should be ok
-
Well, I plan on having my internal links so that the visitors can go from one page to the next from any page. The layout of the website is rather simple. It will be a home page and 5 supporting pages as of now. So, each page would have a total of 6 internal links if they were followed. Is that okay or would it matter if I just made the home page the only followed link?
-
Not necessarily, if the internal links are correctly in place to guide visitors in the right direction , then you're ok having them on the internal pages. You mentioned only 1 internal link for the inner pages , which should be ok. The issue would be if you overdid it and had lots of keyword rich internal links created to link to other pages.
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
-
Would a link from an unrelated website, that is popular, help me ?
I have a website that gets 200,000 visitors a month. It is a very popular financial tool. I have another website that sells widgets, but honestly, not really related to the financial tool. I would like to help out the unpopular website by giving it a link. What's the professional opinion?
Link Building | | sonic220 -
Internal Links - First Link Rule Confusion
Hello All - I would like to create a guide for my team of rules for internal links and I could use some help. My understanding is that Google only counts the first link to a page, so any crafted keyword text links within the content do not count if the page in question is linked to from the main navigation. Is this correct? For example, if the menu or drop down menu in main site nav (which exists on all pages of the site) includes a link to a particular section that will be the only one that ever counts since the menu is on every page? Example: let's say a website selling cat toys includes a drop down menu on the homepage with links to "holiday cat toys". Does this mean that no other text links in content on the site will support that page from an SEO perspective since the link is in the main nav and will always be the first one counted? In the past we have added text links in the content on the homepage to important pages on the site. It seems to work, though now I'm questing these tactics based on the first link rule. I would appreciate some advice, clarification, thoughts, etc. Thanks!
Link Building | | JBMediaGroup0 -
How can I find all the outbound links from a website domain?
I want to find all the outbound links (basically whatever comes in <a>tag) from a domain (say www.abc.com) as well as all the subdomains under it (say abc.com/a etc). Open Site Explorer provides the inbound links from a website but does not provide any functionality to get all the outbound links from a website. Is it possible to do?</a> <a>Thanks in advance. Deepak Jain</a>
Link Building | | Deepak_Jain0 -
Do NoFollow links count at all?
Does anyone really know whether or not links with rel=nofollow provide any value for link building at all? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | dan.backowski1 -
Best way of starting link building to a new website?
I am doing SEO for a security keyholding company and would like to build up some quality links from related and high PR sites. Submitting profiles to directories is incredibly time consuming. I am thinking of outsourcing a link building campaign to a link building company, but know Google advises against this. Does anyone recommend a cost effective and ethical link building service out there? Or are there any link building techniques to use that will help me out? What I want to be sure of is that a link building campaign won’t get my websites penalised in search engines and the links are from quality and related websites. Many thanks in advance
Link Building | | AlexBarnes0 -
How best to link multiple related websites.
I have a handful of e-commerce websites that overlap each other some in the same niche. I have already heard that it would have been best to make just one website, but this is not practical for me. Our business model goes back to a time before the internet. We have relationships with manufacturers where they refer business to us because we brand web sites which will not switch customers to competing brands. Our agreements make it ok to link to other websites so long as we have branded websites that focus on the specific manufacturers. For SEO, what is the best way to link these sites? Site wide links in footers.? Single links at on homepages? One way links from the most powerful site? Some other method? We have been wrestling with this question for some time.
Link Building | | EugeneF0 -
Do sites on the same c-block and same server count as seperate linking root domains when linking to each other?
Lets say there are 50 businesses who have their website on the same server and are on the same c-block but the owners of the individual sites are different (i.e. they are all completely different sites not relevant to each other). Each of those sites are linking to each other due to a feature on the sites. This obviously increases the number of total links to each site but does it also increase the number of linking root domains? Or does this just show up as one linking root domain due to all of them being on the same server and the sharing the same c-block?
Link Building | | cinternicola0 -
First 100 links for every new site?
Is there a rule of thumb I am unaware of or a place that others start to get links for every new site they create, something like the "first 100 links for every new site" regardless of content? I know you always start building links around what the content of your site is about, but does anyone have a rule of thumb that you always start with links from certain sites regardless of the site content. For example for a local company: Google Places, Bing Local, Linkedin, Facebook, Localeze etc. etc. I just want to make sure I am taking quality first steps for every site I start and was wondering if anyone could give me some good rules of thumb or resources.
Link Building | | photoseo10