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.
Noindex,follow is a waste of link juice?
-
On my wordpress shopping cart plugin, I have three pages /account, /checkout and /terms on which I have added “noindex,follow” attribute. But I think I may be wasting link juice on these pages as they are not to be indexed anyway, so is there any point giving them any link juice? I can add “noindex,nofollow” on to the page itself. However, the actual text/anchor link to these pages on the site header will remain “follow” as I have no means of amending that right now. So this presents the following two scenarios – No juice flows from homepage to these 3 pages (GOOD) – This would be perfect then, as the pages themselves have nofollow attribute. Juice flows from homepage to these pages (BAD) - This may mean that the juice flows from homepage anchor text links to these 3 pages BUT then STOPS there as they have “nofollow” attribute on that page. This will be a bigger problem and if this is the case and I cant stop the juice from flowing in, then ill rather let it flow out to other pages. Hope you understand my question, any input is very much appreciated. Thanks
-
If you no index a page, link juice will flow to that page still. if you no follow it, it will still flow but will not flow out of it again.
you should always add noindex,follow if you want the link juice to return to your index pages. Even then some link juice will be lost that stays on that noindex page
I tried also could not find it. but here is a quote from Matt Cutts "Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?
Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.
Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.
Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.
For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.
Eric Enge: Another example is if you have pages on a site with content that from a user point of view you recognize that it's valuable to have the page, but you feel that is too duplicative of content on another page on the site
That page might still get links, but you don't want it in the Index and you want the crawler to follow the paths into the rest of the site.
Matt Cutts: That's right. Another good example is, maybe you have a login page, and everybody ends up linking to that login page. That provides very little content value, so you could NoIndex that page, but then the outgoing links would still have PageRank.
Now, if you want to you can also add a NoFollow metatag, and that will say don't show this page at all in Google's Index, and don't follow any outgoing links, and no PageRank flows from that page. We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention."
http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml
-
I just wanted to share I completely agree with EGOL and the understanding he shared. I skipped responding to this question because I didn't want to respond with all the explanation of the disclaimers, where EGOL tackled the question anyway and offered great details in both the original reply and follow up.
-
Great answer, and in this specific case, i have "noindex, follow" attribute on my pages too that i do not want to be indexed.
Regarding competitors - I study them, onsite and link profiles, specially the successful ones to learn from it. Most of the SEO strategies ive learned have been by reading forums / blogs etc. Quite often people have conflicting views there. So i try to find real life examples of stuff that is quite likely working for a successful site, try to see a pattern in there, and where i spot one, i try to implement that on my sites.
You on the other hand - have experience and proven philosophies :), something i am dying to acquire.
Thanks
-
Here is a philosophy that I have... (I am not trying to be a wise guy... just sayin'....)
I don't pay a lot of attention to the methods used by my competitors. Instead I decide what I think will work best for me and then do it.
Right now I have pages on my site that I don't want in the search engines index. So I have code on them as follows....
name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
I believe that code keeps them out of the index but allows pagerank to flow through them to other pages. I offer that here so that anyone can tell me if it is wrong.
I welcome anyone who can set me straight or anyone who can suggest a better method.
However, I am not going to look at my competitors and try to figure out what they are doing because there is a very good chance that they don't know what they are doing. (I think your competitors don't know what they are doing.)
I have absolutely no problem with doing things differently from my competitors. In fact I think that mimicking them is the best way to finish behind them.
-
EGOL, thank you so much for your input, i really value your opinion. However, i have a follow up question, and i maybe muddled up with things here, but here it is -
Many of my successful competitors in various niches have added rel=nofollow to certain internal pages.
For example -
1. On homepage of this wordpress site, the anchor text link to wp tag pages have rel=nofollow. The tag pages themselves are "noindex,follow".
2. Also all links in the header are rel=nofollow. The only follow links are post pages, and post pages are being used for navigation.
Any page that has a rel=nofollow anchor text is "noindex,follow" itself. Nowhere a "noindex" has been added to a wholepage, its only on certain anchor text links.
Is that slightly different from making the whole page nofollow? because here only pages are being stopped from getting any link juice.
-
I am going to explain how I understand this. I could be wrong on some of the details because of two different reasons.... 1) I simply am wrong... or .... 2) I am correct according to what search engines have said in public but they are doing something different in practice.
When nofollow was first introduced a lot of people used it to "sculpt" the flow of pagerank. They were told at that time by some search engine employees that pagerank did not flow into nofollowed pages. That is how search engines who made public statements about it were supposed to be treating it in the beginning.
Later we learned that google (and maybe other) search engines changed their mind on how they handle nofollow and that change was to evaporate ALL pagerank that would have flowed into a nofollow link. In that situation it would be a bad idea to use nofollow because the pagerank was permanently lost.
Do they still handle nofollow links that way? I don't know.
However...... how I currently understand it is that if you designate a page as noindex / follow then pagerank flows into that page and through the links on that page. This would conserve any pass-through pagerank but would result in a loss of any pagerank that is retained in that page (or maybe it all passes through since the page is no index - I don't know).
So, if I had pages that I wanted to link to on my site but didn't want in the index I would use noindex / follow to allow the pagerank that flows into those pages to pass through to other pages on my site. But I would never be sure that it really works that way. Also, keep in mind that there are numerous search engines and there could be many different ways of treating these links - and pagerank is a substance unique to google.
If anyone understands this differently or suspect that it does not work as explained, please let us know.
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
-
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Pages with excessive number of links
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions. The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178" The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external). However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content. Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu. So my questions are: 1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster? Thank you.0 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Do 404s really 'lose' link juice?
It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read. What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors. It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site? I could redirect forever but that makes little sense. What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404. I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way. It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time. Am I looking at it wrong? ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
Hi there. I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article ) Thanks 🙂 Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Transfer link juice from old to new site
Hi seomozzers, The design team is building a new website for one of our clients. My role is to make sure all the link juice is kept. My first question is, should I just make 301s or is there another technique to preserve all the link juice from the old to new site that I should be focusing on? Second Question is that ok to transfer link juice using dev urls like www.dev2.example.com (new site) or 182.3456.2333? or should I wait the creation of real urls to do link juice transfer? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0