Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
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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:
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PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page
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Short description text
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"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.
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Thank you guys,
I got it. I will remove all the internal nofollows from my site!
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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.
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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.
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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)
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