How to minimalise links in your footer
-
Hi guys,
I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at.
Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website.
I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/
and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links.
because I do found also some negative comments on this approach
http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow
I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.
-
Hi Letty,
I agree with the others here. There are exceptions, but for the most part you want Google to be able to follow most of the links on your site. The rule can be broken, but as a best practice there's usually no harm in following your links.
That said, I'm a big, huge fan of link consolidation and faceted navigation.
I've seen a lot of positive results from sites that have cleaned up and consolidated thier footer links, so I'm hopeful about what you're doing!
-
I second the dofollow advice from Oleg. Nofollow is not the way to go here.
I just want to add that your footer links need to be "relevant" to a person coming in to ANY page on your site. That's how I try to build them. Obviously there are some common ones, home, contact, etc. If the link in the footer is only specific to a particular part of your website and wouldn't be helpful to someone coming into a different section, then remove them. If it will help ANYONE no matter what page they are on, then keep them.
-
The opinions about the usage of internal nofollow links are mixed, but since Google changed how they treat nofollowed links using nofollow for internal links is not such a good idea.
Basically you are loosing link juice.
Now, what you can do, is to have (if possible) targeted links in the footer (if you are using WP you can accomplish that by using conditional tags).
The idea is to let PR flow naturally. This is the conclusion of my readings.
Spare 2 minutes and check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4SAPUx4Beh8
-
If you are trying to consolidate link authority by changing some links to be nofollow, that won't work. This would have worked a few years back when nofollow was used for pagerank sculpting, but G has changed the way these links are treated.
I would dofollow all the internal links on your site.
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 would you link build to this page?
Hi Guys, I'm looking to build links to a commercial page similar to this: https://apolloblinds.com.au/venetian-blinds/ How would you even create quality links (not against Google TOS) to a commercial page like that? Any ideas would be very much appreciated. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Spammy Inbound Links
Hello, We have been using Zendesk to manage our customer support tickets for approx 2 years. We recently noticed that the attached forum had lot's of spam comments attached to it. Promoting Viagra and the like. The system was installed as a subdomain of my site support.mysite.com We have since deleted our account with Zendesk but Moz and Google are reporting loads of inbound links to that subdomain that are all total spam with Viagra in the anchor text etc. The subdomain no longer exists and now throws a 404. Can these links still hurt me? Is there other steps I need to take? I have disavowed all the links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niallfred0 -
Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Link from Google.com
Hi guys I've just seen a website get a link from Google's Webmaster Snippet testing tool. Basically, they've linked to a results page for their own website test. Here's an example of what this would look like for a result on my website. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.impression.co.uk There's a meta nofollow, but I just wondered what everyone's take is on Trust, etc, passing down? (Don't worry, I'm not encouraging people to go out spamming links to results pages!) Looking forward to some interesting responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Depth of Links on Ecommerce Site
Hi, In my sitemap, I have the preferred entrance pages and URL's of categories and subcategories. But I would like to know more about how Googlebot and other spiders see a site - e.g. - what is classed as a deep link? I am using Screaming Frog SEO spider, and it has a metric called level on it - and this represents how deep or how many clicks away this content is.. but I don't know if that is how Googlebot would see it - From what Screaming Frog SEO spider software says, each move horizontally across from Navigation is another level which visually doesnt make sense to me? Also, in my sitemap, I list the URL's of all the products, there are no levels within the sitemap. Should I be concerned about this? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
On-site links
Hi everybody, There's a lot of information about getting sitewide backlinks, but so few about on-site optimization. Is there a maximum of links to put on a page ? Is there a maximum of link that a page should receive ? etc ... ? So, what is the optimal strategy ? And I'm only concerned about on-page and on-site link, not backlinks commming from other sites. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidPilon0 -
Is this link SEO-Friendly?
Hi Mozzers, Was wondering if someone could tell me if this link is SEO-friendly? class = "sl">name="sc" type="checkbox" value="1449"><a <span="">href</a> <a <span="">="</a>http://www.example.com/" onclick = "Javascript: return dosc(2);">src="imsd/coff.gif" id="cbsc2"/>Keyword It has some Javascript that makes the link work like a filter. Cheers, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Switching to masked affiliate links
Hi there, I run a content affiliate website where I introduce products in articles and then link to merchants where the user can buy the respective product. Currently I am using regular affiliate links here with the "nofollow" attribute. With growing size of the site, I would like to switch to masked affiliate links, so instead of a link like "jdoqocy.com/click-123" I want to use "mydomain.com/recommend/123". My question here is: When switching to masked affiliate links, does it makes sense to also convert all the older unmasked affiliate links? If yes, what would be the best way to do that - Convert all old links at once or convert them over time (e.g. over a few month)? Currently about 2/3 of my site's outbound links are unmasked, external affiliate links. So I am afraid that changing this relatively large share of links from unmasked external affiliate links to masked links doenst look natural at all... Thank you for your advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FabRag0