No followed links, what happens to the PR?
-
Hi,
I have read a few times, on here and other places that when a website applies a no follow tag to a link the PR is not retained but instead disappears (evaporates) thus neither website benefiting.
Is that true? If so what is the actual benefit of no following a link?
-
You raise an excellent point, I had completely forgotten that. EGOL has the right of it, Matt Cutts said it evaporates and aside from that we don't really know. I've seen nothing since that gives us any more information and I think given how things have changed you'd have a lot of trouble running an experiment to find out.
I should have been more careful when I spoke
Nofollow is something I honestly don't worry about in my day to day linking practices, to me it's just a way of indicating that my linking is not a personal endorsement of the site I am linking to.
While my first and fourth paragraphs above may be null and void, the rest I believe remains true.
One thing I forgot to add above (my poor memory is a theme here) is that the site receiving the nofollowed link still gets the traffic from the link and maybe some lesser residual link benefits. There is a reason that nofollows still feature in the SEOmoz analytics.
-
Thanks,
So your saying it is retained on the website?
Check it out, EGOL post para 3 - http://www.seomoz.org/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice
That's just one of the reasons why I started questioning it but I have seen it else where.
I suppose it's not really a question as I don't actually worry about it that much but I like to know so the question had to be asked.
Thanks for the reply.
-
It doesn't evaporate, it just reduces the flow considerably from one site to another, allowing the linking site to retain some of it's "juice".
It's also a way to indicate a sponsored link, keeping your site in line with Google's spam guidelines.
Or you can use it to link to a site you want to talk about but don't want to be that associated with.
There are very good reasons to use nofollow, but it's important to keep your linking natural, so don't take this information and decide to nofollow everything to preserve PR.
I would also encourage you to worry a lot less about Page Rank in general, but that's a battle for another time.
EDIT: read next reply and my follow up for revisions and my errors.
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
-
How can i check which inbound links to my site go to 404 pages?
I have external links coming into my site going to 404 pages, but i cant seem to find a way to search all broken links pointed at my website.
On-Page Optimization | | NickJPearse0 -
Sitemap include all site links or just ones we want indexed?
Got a quick sitemap question. We have a clients site built in opencart and are getting ready to submit the sitmap. The default sitemap setting generates urls right off of the root. For example site.com/product. These urls are also accessible through the site itself. We prefer to give the site some depth and have structured the products so the urls are site.com/category/product. All of the product pages have canonicals including the category so we should not have to worry about duplicate content on the /product page vs the /category/product page. My question is both types of product pages are included in the sitemap at the moment. Since we don't want google to index the /product urls should we leave them off of the sitemap even though they are readily accessible from the frontend(though not linked)? Or just leave them and let the canonical tag be used in directing google as to which urls to index. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Whebb0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. So, my SEO team has worked very hard to finally resolve RogerBot/GoogleBot specific Crawl Errors either manually or programmatically can be fixed for our Budget Blinds USA Pro Campaign. We've done a good job even if a lot of it came from Robots.txt file entries as this was the most efficient way our client chose to do it. Good news is most of it is CMS configuration and not bad site architecture. That being said our next big volume of Crawl Errors is "Too Many On-Page Links". Our Moz DomainRank is 61. Our client, on this new version of the website, added a large nav-based footer which has duplicate links from the Header Main Navigation. I believe our solution is to put in No-Follow Metatags at the Footer Link Level, so we don't zap Page Authority by over-dividing as you recommend. Is this the best way to resolve this? Is there any risk in this? Or is a 61 DomainRank high enough for RogerBot and GoogleBot to crawl these anyway? Please advise,
On-Page Optimization | | Aviatech0 -
To follow or not to follow...?
One of my client's uses alot of links in their content. They follow style and fashion news. Many times I find the use of nofollows unnecessary, but sometimes they have articles with well over 20 oubound links...I wonder if this "drains" the authority/link juice of the page to the point where the long tail traffic wont kick in? Should I have reason for concern, and should I use nofollow on the links? I notice many of our competitors dont really bother, but they also have alot more authority.
On-Page Optimization | | jkellz5140 -
Should I link my 3 E-Commerce sites?
Good Morning, I have 3 E-Commerce sites that all sell the same products, but have unique content on them (unique text, unique urls, same products).... Up until now, I have not put any links from one to any of the others... I just started to wonder about that since these are all related to the same industry, and are owned by 1 company, what would be the downside to linking them... Does anyone have any advice on if I should link to each site from the other 2 sites? Also, if you think I should be linking them, please advise how you would do it (on which pages, how many links, anchor texts, etc...) Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
The Value of Internal Links?
I have seen countless SEO "experts" suggest internal links are great to help the search engines find your content. I wonder if that is true any more. It seems like a sitemap would do a better job. I think tags may even hurt the content I want to Google to know as most important. I'm using Simple Tags on all of my WP sites. If it "sees" a word in the article that is also a tag it adds a link for that tag to a listing of all the articles with that tag. It only does this once per tag though. Going on the experts advice, I thought this was a good idea. But now, I'm thinking these tags reduce the value of links to my eBook or other content i want to feature. Which doesn't get tagged much since I don't promote it all that often on my site within content. I make it nearly impossible to miss it on the site though. 🙂 What I do see the tags doing is helping users find the content. So I do see it improving the bounce rate and giving uses an assist in finding more content about what they are looking for. I have tags marked as noindex follow. But I'm really considering now removing the links. I hate plugins anyway. 🙂 Seems I'm always finding another must have plugin though. Now I'm thinking I'd be better off to just add links manually into the content that I really want to feature. All these automatic links I'm generating can't be good. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | RustyF0 -
Anchor text on outbound links on a blog, relevancy detrimental or positive?
We have a blog related to computer support, and we have been using guest posts and promotion of those posts to boost freshness and rankings of the blog. We have been restricting outbound links to prevent words such as 'computer repair, 'computer support' etc, because we were under the impression that if we want to rank for those words, we should only allow INCOMING links with that anchor text, and that outbound links from the page, would rob the other parts of the site of the link juice this page provides. My question is, is this wrong? Should I freely allow outbound links on my blog page that contain anchor text that I my self am trying to rank for? Or was I correct initially? Current the anchor text is in 'related' industries, such as mobile apps, technology news, etc...things that google might think are 'related', but not exactly what the site is about.
On-Page Optimization | | ilyaelbert0 -
Too many on page links on ecommerce site
I have an online store with 10 catagories, many of those have subcategories. I have a tree style navigation menu on the page. This helps people quickly find what they need. However, I end up with about 125 links on the page that way. Does google really penalize me for this? Is there anyway around this? Advice much appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | bhsiao0