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
-
Gained a number of new 'do-follow' links - Good or Bad?
So, my client's site is on a subdomain of the parent site and there were a number of links previously pointing to the subdomain site from the main site which were all no-follow so were purely for referral/traffic benefits. Around the end of February, the main site changed all the links to 'do-follow'. Is this likely to have caused the decline we've recently seen in organic traffic to the site and a drop in rankings? I'm curious as to how that could have affected the site as we didn't know and have only just found out about it but I'm not sure how to show that it's led to a decline. Any help is appreciated!
Link Building | | soapmed1 -
Should harmful links to your own website be removed?
Upon running a link report on a website, there are often multiple links flagged as bad or suspect that come from a blog that is integrated into the website, which means there are links (set up as article tags) in the site that go to other pages in the same site. They have likely been flagged due to their high frequency. A similar problem is occurring where blogs from a connected site (from an offshoot site of a company that is part of the original) are also tagging their blog posts to link into the original website. Should these links be disavowed? Will these links have an effect on the website if they are disavowed or not?
Link Building | | rachelmanning8880 -
Strange new links being picked up in Webmaster tools affecting SERPs
Hi, I have a question regarding new links being found by Google, and showing in our latest links file from Webmaster tools. I run this site: http://www.propertysales.com it's a fairly new website with a small (ish) link profile but over the last 3 months I've seen a lot of links being found in Google like this: http://www.financecourier.com/news/story/523316/foreign-carmakers-milk-chinas-cash-cow/full_story.html it's clearly a scrap of a webpage from the FT.com, who we partner with, that has a link to PropertySales.com but the number of links Webmaster tools is seeing is much bigger than we would normally get in any given month. As a rule I would normally ignore scrapper sites as I’ve always assumed Google is smart enough to know which site these are and thus wouldn't affect your SERPs but I’ve also seen a drop in our SERPs over the same month so now I’m thinking these are effecting the sites SEO. Does anybody have any insight into this or advice on the best way to handle this, I looking at going through these site and adding them to our disavow file but this can take a few month to take effect so are they any better options or way to handle this? Thanks for your help in advance. Rufus
Link Building | | Dynamis0 -
Poor Blog and Website DA and links
Hi There We have a mature website and a mature blog with over 500 genuine blogs written on it over 4 years. In terms of actual "people" value it has to be high. We used to get 1000 visitors per day, we now get 300. We still have 850 subscribers so its of a certain size. However we have been hit by the Penguin/Panda updates and our DA has dropped to what everyone is telling us is too low for a site like this and we still have a google backlink problem, unyet we only have 190 external links that we think are all OK now. The problem we have is that we seem to have too many links from the blog to the main website with the same anchor text. This has occurred with a blogroll style link to the home page which appears on every post/page of the blog, also I think we have too many anchor same anchor text links to product pages (Motorola ES400) and category pages (Tablet PC). We're going through changing these now so that we have the right mix but the specific questions I wanted to ask were: 1. Will loads of links with the same anchor text affect us if the blog is counted as internal links. Its on the same "blog" sub-domain as the main website. 2. Will this affect the DA of both sites? 3. Is Wordpress capable of damaging us with all the extra pages it creates automatically. We've done nothing but genuine content posting here and i'm sure we can get it back but it kind of really demotivates you when 2/3rds of your traffic goes overnight. Many thanks for any help.
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Internal Links: How Important and How to Boost
A couple of my competitors have WAY more internal links than I do, and are outranking me. Could that be an important factor? (Let's assume all other things equal, i.e. don't bother explaining that it's complicated and many factors are involved, please.) If boosting the number is important, what's the best way to do it (site is heliski.com) thx, tj
Link Building | | heliski0 -
Most OSE Top Links Are Internal
If I run an OSE report and check the 'top links' tab, I find that 95% of the links are internal pages on the same root domain. Can I deduce from this that my link profile sucks, and is in need of serious improvement? Thanks.
Link Building | | -Al-0 -
I have 87,636 links to my website from a single domain, is this bad?
Hi guys I have 87,636 links from one website, of which 75,189 of those link to my homepage using my website name as the anchor. Another has 29,811 links back to my website, again the majority of the links using my website name as the anchor. Is this a bad thing? Let me explain how this has happened - a company by the name of Daylife uses our RSS feed and distributes this to hundreds of their clients, which include indiatimes, usatoday, dallasnews etc, now I noticed that the majority of these websites all link back to our website with the same anchor text used several times on a single page. Attached is an example. Would this be a bad thing seen as the majority of these links have the same anchor text and link to my homepage? Looking at my GWT there is an estimated 183,373 backlinks that are all like this. Our traffic has dropped since Mr Panda hit and I am trying to find out if this could be adding to the problem. Thank you for you time links.jpg
Link Building | | hstdigital0 -
New links for Internal Anchor Text
If pages get moved and 301s are in place is it still important to update the anchor text links to the new page url? For example would it be optimal to go through old blog posts and change the urls for the anchor text if the old anchor text url redirects to the new page url.
Link Building | | jmansd0