Establishing if links are 'nofollow'
-
Wonder if any of you guys can tell me if there is any other way to tell google links are nofollow other than in the html (ie can you tell google to nofollow every link in a subdomain or something). I'm trying to establish if a couple of links on a very high ranking site are passing me pagerank or not without asking them directly and looking silly! Within the source code for the page they are NOT tagged as nofollow at present.
Hope that all makes sense
-
If you mean links to your site from some URL not on your site then you could do the following:
- Do a site:somesite.com/page to see if it is indexed, plus try and find in results
- Check the URL to you is clean - no redirects, no js, no frame etc
- Check their URL in OSE to see if there is any authority.
Otherwise if Google is not blocked from the other URL and there is no no-follow links on the page then Google is not instructed to no-follow. Therefore a small amount of link equity will pass - unless made negligible by
- The page authority is very poor
- there are multiple links on the page
-
You can also use Screaming Frog to look at the linking page--look in the "Meta & Canonical" tab to see if it's nofollow or not. [It is free for a limited number of pages.]
-
There is a neat tool for Firefox called "Highlight No-follow links" it does what it says and just puts a red highlight on no-follow links which is very handy. other suggestions above are really good too.
You can also use tools like Ahrefs, OSE, Majestic etc. to see no-follow links pointing towards you. Regards to the robots (meta or file) if it has "no-follow in there as seen here - http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt but this isn't completely the case. If you are worried don't be a few follow links won't do you a massive amount of hard if you're worried (not to mention you can always disavow).
-
My fault for muddying the waters sorry! It's not the page I am worried about but rather the links on the page to my site. They are not tagged as nofollow in HTML but I wondered if there was a way to check on the other methods of 'nofollowing' like using the robots.txt?
-
What's led you to think that, Mat?
-
quick way would be to type the url into the Google and see if it appears in SEPs or if you don't want to type in the url the article name and site:example.com
If the page has been around a while you can check to see its PA in Moz - but as the last Moz update was a while ago it won't have updated any new pages (not a great solution, but its a quick and easy - not always correct).
Alternatively send me a private message / post the url on here and I will have a look for you.
-
Thanks all! There is no mention of nofollow tags in the source but am still not sure if the page itself has been disallowed or nofollowed via the robots.txt file - anyone come across this before?
-
SEOquake is the other one I use, besides the Mozbar, btw.
-
Hi
Mozbar as mentioned above is the best tool. Its simple and easy to use.
But the source code is always the best.
Thanks
Andy
-
There are a number of ways, along with the source code. Open Site Explorer will tell you, as will the Mozbar. There are also browser plugins you can use.
-
If you're using Chrome, there are a few decent extensions for this. They highlight nofollow links with a red border or something similar but they aren't always 100%. Hope this helps.
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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
Too many on page links
Hi I know previously it was recommended to stick to under 100 links on the page, but I've run a crawl and mine are over this now with 130+ How important is this now? I've read a few articles to say it's not as crucial as before. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Site Structure: How do I deal with a great user experience that's not the best for Google's spiders?
We have ~3,000 photos that have all been tagged. We have a wonderful AJAXy interface for users where they can toggle all of these tags to find the exact set of photos they're looking for very quickly. We've also optimized a site structure for Google's benefit that gives each category a page. Each category page links to applicable album pages. Each album page links to individual photo pages. All pages have a good chunk of unique text. Now, for Google, the domain.com/photos index page should be a directory of sorts that links to each category page. Alternatively, the user would probably prefer the AJAXy interface. What is the best way to execute this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tatermarketing0 -
Incoming links which don't exists...
I believe our site is being penalized/held back in rankings, and I think this is why... We placed an advert on a website which they didn't make "no follow" so we had hundreds of site-wide links coming into our site. We asked them to remove the advert which they did. This was 4 months ago, and the links are still showing in GWMT. We have look into their pages which GWMT is saying still link to us, but these a number pages aren't being indexed by Google, and others aren't being cached. Is it possible that because Google cant find these pages, it can tell our link has been removed? And/or are we being penalized for this? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34341 -
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 -
Do I have any harmful links? If so, what should I do?
URL in question: www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html I'm using OSE and see some questionable backlinks. At first glance, if you look at the page authority and domain authority, they look great. Once you go to the actual pages, they look spammy. If the links are hurting the rankings for the site, should I try to remove the links manually or just ignore and continue to build good quality links or even build a new site? I noticed for the last couple of weeks, the rankings started to slip. Thanks in Advance, Lucas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link? Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute? I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880 -
Links to Facebook pages
I would like to ask if anyone has any knowledge regarding linking to a company's facebook page. I have built a few links to a client's facebook page in an effort to have it rank better in SERPs. I just learned that unlike twitter and linkedin, it is apparently not possibly to directly link to facebook pages. At least it is not possible from a search engine's perspective. If you follow any facebook page link while you are not logged into facebook, you are redirected to the facebook home page. I can't think of any way around this obstacle. I'd love some clever solution such as providing a URL which includes a basic dummy facebook login but there is nothing I am aware of to achieve this result. Does anyone have any ideas on this topic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0