Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
-
Hello everyone.
I have searched on these forums for an answer to my concerns, and despite I found many discussions and questions about applying or not applying "nofollow" to internal links, I couldn't find an answer specific to my particular scenarios.
Here is my first scenario: I have an e-commerce site selling digital sheet music, and on my category pages our products are shown typically with the following format:
-
PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page
-
Short description text
-
"more info" link that takes to the same product page again
As you may notice, the "more info" link takes at the very same page of the PRODUCT TITLE link. So, my question is: is there any benefit to "nofollow" the "more info" link to tell SEs to "ignore" that link? Or should I leave the way it is and let the SE figure it out? My biggest concern by leaving the "nofollow" out is that the "more info" generic and repetitive anchor text could dilute or "compete" with the keyword content of the PRODUCT TITLE anchor text.... but maybe that doesn't really matter!
Here a typical category page from my site;
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html
My second scenario: on our product pages, we have several different links that take to the very same "preview page" of the product we sell. Each link has a different anchor text, and some other links are just images, all taking to the same page. Here are the anchor texts or ALT text of such same links:
"Download Free Sample" (text link)
"Cover of the [product title]" (ALT image text)
"Look inside this title" (ALT image text)
"[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text)
"This item contains one high quality PDF sheet music file ready to download and print." (ALT image text)
"PDF" (text link)
"[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text)
So, I have 7 links on the same product page taking the user to the same "product preview page" which is, by the way, canonicalized to the "main" product page we are talking about.
Here is an example of product page on my site:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html
My instinct is to tell SEs to take into account just the links with the "[product title] PDF file" anchor text, and then add a "nofollow" to the other links... but may that hurting in some way? Is that irrelevant? Doesn't matter? How should I move? Just ignore this issue and let the SEs figure it out?
Any thoughts are very welcome!
Thank you in advance.
-
-
Thank you guys,
I got it. I will remove all the internal nofollows from my site!
-
Paddy is right not to nofollow internal links (Actually Matt Cutts just addressed this a day or two ago in a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86GHCVRReJs
And Elias is absolutely right about the first link.
Sage advice gentlemen.
-
I agree with Paddy, don't use nofollow on internal links.
Google follows the first link to a page and ignores subsequent links according to a matt cutts web master video.
My advice would be to make sure that the first link in the page (code view) is the a rich link i.e. the name of the product rather than a 'more info' link.
-
As you said this has come up many times and my answer is always the same, NEVER use No-follow on internal links... ever. No-follow just throws page authority out the window. I haven't seen a good argument for using no-follow on internal links (bar on pages like "create account" that you don't want to index, but I think no-index on the pages themselves is a better option)
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
-
Base href + relative link href for canonical link
I have a site that in the head section we specify a base href being the domain with a trailing slash and a canonical link href being the relative link to the domain. <base <="" span="">href="http://www.domain.com/" /> href="link-to-page.html" rel="canonical" /> I know that Google recommends using an absolute path as a canonical link but is specifying a base href with a relative canonical link the same thing or is it still seen as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
Does Google take notice of nofollow links?
Does Google take any notice of nofollow links, they seem to count for something but don't know how much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
Any experience?1 -
Site wide links - should they be nofollow or followed links
Hi We have a retail site and a blog that goes along with the site. The blog is very popular and the MD wanted a link from the blog back to the main retail site. However as this is a site wide link on the blog, am I right in thinking this really should be no follow link. The link is at the top of every page. Thanks in advance for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
Greetings MOZ community: If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"? My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense. What is proper form? As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Error: Missing required field "updated"
In my WordPress blog, there are pages for tags,categories,... like : https://www.abc.com/blog/category/how-to-cook-something/ On these pages I am getting the following error: Error: Missing required field "updated" So far I have 39 if these errors. Please let me know if this is an important issue to pay attention to? If yes, how I can fix it? Thanks Everyone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Varying Internal Link Anchor Text with Each New Page Load
I'm asking for people's opinions on varying internal anchor text. Before you jump in and say, "Oh yes, varying your anchor text is always a good idea", let me explain. I'm not talking about varying anchor text on different links scattered throughout a site. We all know that is a wise thing to do for a variety of reasons that have been covered in many places. What I'm talking about is including semi-useful links below the fold and then varying the anchor text with each page load. Each time Googlebot crawls a page, it sees different anchor text for each link. That way, Googlebot is seeing, for example, 'san diego bars', 'taverns in san diego', 'san diego clubs', and 'pubs in san diego' all pointing to a San Diego bar/tavern/club/pub page. I'm wondering if there is value in this approach. Will it help a site rank well for multiple search queries? Could it potentially be better than static anchor text as it may help Google better understand the targeted page? Is it a good way to protect a large site with a huge number of internal links from Penguin? To summarize, we're talking about the impact of varying the anchor text on a single page with each page load as opposed to varying the anchor text on different pages. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Best strategy for "product blocks" linking to sister site? Penguin Penalty?
Here is the scenario -- we own several different tennis based websites and want to be able to maximize traffic between them. Ideally we would have them ALL in 1 site/domain but 2 of the 3 are a partnership which we own 50% of and why are they are off as a separate domain. Big question is how do we link the "products" from the 2 different websites without looking spammy? Here is the breakdown of sites: Site1: Tennis Retail website --> about 1200 tennis products Site2: Tennis team and league management site --> about 60k unique visitors/month Site3: Tennis coaching tip website --> about 10k unique visitors/month The interesting thing was right after we launched the retail store website (site1), google was cranking up and sending upwards of 25k search impressions/day within the first 45 days. Orders kept trickling in and doing well overall for first launching. Interesting thing was Google "impressions" peaked at about 60 days post launch and then started trickling down farther and farther and now at about 3k-5k impressions/day. Many keywords phrases were originally on page 1 (position 6-10) and now on page 3-8 instead. Next step was to start putting "product links" (3 products per page) on site2 and site3 -- about 10k pages in total with about 6 links per page off to the product page (1 per product and 1 per category). We actually divided up about 100 different products to be displayed so this would mean about 2k links per product depending on the page. FYI, those original 10k pages from site2 and site3 already rank very well in Google and have been indexed for the past 2+ years in there. Most popular word on the sites is Tennis so very related. Our rationale was "all the websites are tennis related" and figured that the links on the latest and greatest products would be good for our audience. Pre-Penguin, we also figured this strategy would also help us rank for these products as well for when users are searching on them. We are thinking through since traffic and gone down and down and down from the peak of 45 days ago, that Penguin doesn't like all these links -- so what to do now? How to fix it and make the Penguin happy? Here are a couple of my thoughts on fixing it: 1. Remove the "category link" in our "product grouping" which would cut down the link by 1/3rd. 2. Place a "nofollow" on all the links for the other "product links". This would allow us to get the "user clicks" from these while the user is on that page. 3. On our homepage (site2 & site3), place 3 core products that change frequently (weekly) and showcase the latest and greatest products/deals. Thought is to NOT use the "nofollow" on these links since it is the homepage and only about 5 links overall. Heck part of me debated on taking our top 1000 pages (from the 10k page) and put the links ONLY on those and distribute about 500 products on them so this would mean only 2 links per product -- it would mean though about 4k links going there. Still thinking #2 above could be better? Any other thoughts would be great! Thanks, Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jab10000 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0