Should i remove the nofollow from mediawiki?
-
We have a website which uses mediawiki for public documentation. The moz crawler keeps nagging us that 50% of our sites have the nofollow-metatag. (And noindex for that matter). This is information pages and such in mediawiki.
From a SEO perspective: Should we remove these tags? I assume they probably do not hurt?
If we shouldn't remove the tags: Is there any way to get moz to ignore these pages so we can get rid of this "noise" in the moz-panel?
-
The nofollows are automatically created by mediawiki.
I'll try to find a solution for removing them i guess. Thank you for your input.
-
Ahh ok I see now.
Even though you have a nofollow on your link in the navigation from your url to your wiki, the pages will still be indexed! Even if the links are not being followed by search engines they are still being indexed by them-just want to make that clear. Also, it's important to note that even if Google reads a nofollow tag they still have an option to follow it anyway. Because of the open source platform you are using, I'm not sure if there's a way to stop the crawl from indexing the link between your url and your wiki. That might take some fancy foot work. That would be the only way to get the nofollow percentage removed…but you really don't want your wiki pages to not be indexed anyway.
Moz is reflecting what the crawl bots see…such as Google. You can't tell it to not show you certain things unless you alter your code, .htaccss, or robots files to change the way the site is being crawled.
As I stated earlier…having a lot of nofollows doesn't necessarily hurt your SEO, but it will not bring you the benefits of followed links that pass link juice and page rank.
I understand it's hard to see the real issues to address when you are flooded with this other stuff, but I'm not sure you have many other options unless you want to remove the nofollows.
Just curious…why do you use so many nofollows anyway? Or is it automatically generated by wiki?
-
Hi Adam.
Thank you for the good replies.
The url to the wiki: http://docs.host1.no/wiki
Url to main page: https://host1.no
"Complaints" from the moz.com-engine:
#1: (mediawiki-problem)
Crawl Issue Found: Use of 'nofollow' Tag
49% of site pages are tagged with the nofollow META attribute#2: (mediawiki-problem)
Crawl Issue Found: 404 Errors
8% of site pages served 404 errors during the last crawlExample of sites Moz.com complains about noindex/nofollow on:http://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=infohttp://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=historyhttp://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=editAnd so on.I assume google won't mind this as it's pages that really don't need to be indexed. But it would be nice to get moz' crawler to ignore these errors as they might mask other actual problems by the amount of errors i get. When i get 1000+ errors from this it's hard to find the real problems.
-
I'm still not entirely sure about how your site is structured but I'll give it a shot…
Firstly, the noindex tag is only for pages. It tells the crawl to not index an entire page and stops it from ranking. That tag is meant for the section of the page. Nofollow tags are found within the link and are meant to stop the transfer of page authority…so you are essentially telling the crawler bots that the links are external and/or not totally relevant/trustworthy. Nofollow shouldn't be used really on internal links within your site pages because you want to spread the page rank and authority and receive the SEO benefits of that.
It's probably telling you there is a problem because you are essentially stopping the flow of link juice within your site and from sharing page rank and authority with other trustworthy/relevant sites.
So why have you made them nofollow in the first place? Maybe you can assess why and where to use the nofollow so that it is beneficial. I guess it's not necessarily a "problem" …but you are not receiving any possible benefits from limiting your nofollow links.
Hope that helps!
-
The links within the site (within mediawiki to be specific) is noindex + nofollow. This due to it being information-sites and such in mediawiki.
Not sure what to do with them, but it's fairly annoying that moz lists it as a problem with "1000 internal links having nofollow" if it's not really a problem at all.
-
Are you saying that your sites are noindex/nofollow or are the links within the site nofollow?
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
-
Want to remove google font
hi this is my site https://alcouponest.com/
On-Page Optimization | | Moshako
and i want to remove google fonts and use system fonts
what is the best plugin to do that
thx0 -
I seem to have about 10 ### tags in the sidebar. Should they be removed?
A plugin inserts H3 tags in sidebar 'read more' type links. They are tangentially related to the content (as the whole site is on ice hockey), but not directly related. Will Google think these are part of the content and be a little confused on the subject matter or is it smart enough to realize this is Sidebar material? Do I need to take action/be concerned? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | BrvceTHW0 -
Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?
My website is an ecommerce and we have on homepage about 470 links ! 1. We have a top bar with my account, login, faq, home, contact us and link to a content page. 2 . Then we have multistore selection 3. Then we have the departament menu, with several parants + child category links 4. Then we have a banner 5. Then we have a list of the recently sold and new products. 6. then we have an image grid with the most important cms/content pages (like faq, about us, etc) 7. then we have footer, with all info pages, contact us, about us, my account etc. There are some links that are repeted 2, 3 times. For a user it is easier to find the informations but I'm not sure how search bots (google) deal with that. So I was thinking on how can I have around 150 links to be followed. To remove the links from the page is not possible. What about to add nofollow to repeted links and some child category, as the spider will crawl the father and will access child on the next page? Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | qgairsoft0 -
Should I noindex, nofollow a lot of child pages?
Some category pages on my website have A LOT of product pages in them. Many of these pages do not receive any sort of organic traffic. Is there a reason for Google to be crawling these pages? Should I noindex, nofollow these pages to make Google's life a little easier? Could I possibly see some benefits from this or should I leave it the way it is?
On-Page Optimization | | jampaper0 -
Follow or nofollow the social links?
I recently seen a site that has delibrately no followed the links to there social sites. The company's Google Plus, Facebook and twitter icons all no followed? I would have thought you would want google to know about these profiles? Whats everyone elses take on this?? shivun
On-Page Optimization | | seohive-2227200 -
Should I nofollow all my outbound links?
I've read a lot of stuff and I can't get a good answer about this. Now I'm reading Wordpress 3 - Search Engine Optimization, and the writer says that less outbound dofollow links you have, better for you. What is the best practice in this subject? Should I really nofollow more than 80% of all my outbound links? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | izaiasalmeida0 -
Nofollow on these internal links?
On an x-cart ecommerce website we have, seomoz has picked up a lot of duplicate content, based on URLs that are different, but are essentially the same page. These come from Fitlers, that allow a page to show only certain colours and styles, reordering page by price etc, and also the page 2, page 3 etc of a category: All the below are '4ft-bedding.html' http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?filter=1&value=Pink http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?page=2 http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?sort=price&view_all=Y I've now changed all these internal links to rel="nofollow" on the a tag. Is that the correct and best way to sort? I might be mistaken on when I did this update and when the last report was ran, but on the SEOmoz crawling report, it still has the above as problem pages. thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | rowleysit-2598920
