Can we use internal no-follow links without negatively affecting rankings
-
we are creating a site structure for a travel website.
the site homepage has a top navigation bar with 8 top level links and a total link count of 33 links in this (within menus).
There are also 10 footer and ad-hoc links
As this top navigation bar is a site-wide navigation, when entering s specific "travel destination" page, the "travel destination" page has its own contextual links and reference links, making the total inks on the destination page approx 107.
do you think its ok to make all links in the top navigation bar no follow on all pages except the homepage?
how would you approach this to create less links to maintain effective link-juice flow to required pages
-
hi
the reason we are trying to reduce them was because the site has a fancy navigation bar which looks good, gives fast a navigation, but then inturn providesa high volume of links from the source page,
thanks
-
If you're seriously considering nofollowing links in your main nav, then they probably don't belong there in the first place. Take them off of the main nav and add them as submenus that only show on topically-related pages.
-
Hi there
Do not "nofollow" your internal links, especially your top nav off your homepage. As this page gets a lot of your search equity, you want to make sure that that equity gets passed, especially through your top category pages. I would also optimize top navigation pages and deeper pages for the searches that are relevant to your users.
Read the following: On-Page Ranking Factors (Moz)
Internal Links (Moz)
Content Marketing Institute (tons of great resources to help you plan and effectively implement a content strategy)Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Google Parsing jQuery Links as Real Links
While trying to diagnose a recent Google penalty I found out that links were being parsed by Google even though they were made using jQuery. I had the linkify plugin on my site and configured it to convert URLs to links on all of my pages. Today I found links to other sites of mine from sites that should not have been linking to them and found that the links came from pages whose links were generated via jQuery. This makes me wonder, how do I know if Google is counting javascript generated links? Is it possible that my native ad widgets are creating links that Google might count? Since I don't own any of the sites that advertise via the widgets I don't know how to tell if they are getting link juice or not. It used to be that Google didn't parse javascript, so you could add as many links to your site via javascript as you wanted without being seen by Google as linking to those sites. Does anyone know of a jQuery plugin that does turn URLs into clickable links that Google won't parse as real links?
On-Page Optimization | | STDCarriers0 -
To NoFollow or to NoIndex internal links
I all, I have recently taken over a fairly large e-commerce site that I am trying to "fix" and have come across something that I need a second opinion on. A Semrush audit has revealed that there are a heck of a lot of internal nofollow links (over 90 000) that point to predominantly 4 pages from the Header of each page in the site, these are change currency pages to show clients different currencies and a members login page. The pages are: /?action=changecurrency¤cy=EUR /?action=changecurrency¤cy=USD /?action=changecurrency¤cy=GBP /members/ My opinion is that these pages should just be no index pages and they should be followed. instead of being indexed and no followed? Any thoughts on this out there?
On-Page Optimization | | cradut0 -
Do these items affect Google ranking or Quality Score?
Hi community, After my first crawl of a site that I'm working to improve the SEO on, I find that I have about 500 issues regarding missing Alt Text and Title text for images on my site, as well as about 175 issues with regard to duplicate meta description, missing meta descriptions, and too short/too long meta descriptions. My client is not sure it matters to fix these items and only wants to do so if they have an affect on Google ranking or Quality Score. Does anyone know? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | gataninc0 -
Does the follow link from the moz Profile really count after first with nofollow?
Hey all, I discovered that the link from the public profile might not count. To my knowledge Google "counts" the first link to another page on any given page. The public profile has a nofollow link before your follow link:
On-Page Optimization | | Sebes
linktodomain.tld linktodomain.tld Doesn't this invalidates all the public profile links? What is your stance on this? Regards Sebastian2 -
Internal and Link Juice Analysis - Too Many Links Error
Howdy! I have an analysis question related to internal links/link juice. Here is the general link set up of our site: 1. All Site Pages (Including Home Page): We have drop down "mega" menus in the header of everypage linking to various sub-categories on the site. So, because of this, in our header, we have a few hundred links to various pages on our site and these show up on every page of the site. 2. Product Pages: Header pages as mentioned above, but on top of that, we list out the keywords for that particular product and each keyword is linked back to our search results pages for that particular keyword. In General Moz is telling us we are having between 200-300 links on each product page. Currently, our Search Results pages are ranking higher and showing up in search more than our actual product pages. So, based on the above info, here are some thoughts: 1. Should we ajax in the Header links so that they aren't showing up for the search engines? Or, should we ajax them in only on all pages that are not the Home Page? 2. Should we get rid of the keyword links back to the Search Results pages that are on the product pages? What effect would these changes "actually" have? Does this just improve crawling? Or are there other positive results that would come of changes like these? We have hundreds of thousands of products, so if we were to make changes like these, could we experience negative results? Thanks for your help! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
Why Am I not Ranking ?
Despite having a A in the on-page report card. The keyword I am trying to optimize my site for is not ranking at all in Google. What could cause this ?
On-Page Optimization | | Pzabarko0 -
Can Sitemap Be Used to Manage Canonical URLs?
We have a duplicate content challenge that likely has contributed to us loosing SERPs especially for generic keywords such as "audiobook," "audiobooks," "audio book," and "audio books." Our duplicate content is on two levels. 1. The first level is at our web store, www.audiobooksonline.com. Audiobooks are sometimes published in abridged, unabridged, on compact discs, on MP3 CD by the same publisher. In this case we use the publisher description of the story for each "flavor" = duplicate content. Can we use our sitemap to identify only one "flavor" so that a spider doesn't index the others? 2. The second level is that most online merchants of the same publisher's audio book use the same description of the story = lots of duplicate content on the Web. In that we have 11,000+ audio book titles offered at our Web store, I expect Google sees us as having lots of duplicated (on the Web) content and devalues our site. Some of our competitors who rank very high for our generic keywords use the same publisher's description. Any suggestions on how we could make our individual audio book title pages unique will be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | lbohen0 -
Drop in Internal Links to Root
This morning I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that my internal links to my root domain (Home Page), dropped from 428,000 to 58,000. It appears that this could be my header or footer links back to the home page that Google is not showing any more. My programmers claim they have not made any changes over the last 30 days. My rankings and traffic are normal. Any cause for concern?
On-Page Optimization | | tdawson090
