To nofollow or follow internal links, that is the question...
-
"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff.
I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what?
Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages.
Thanks! Best... Darcy
-
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the info. To answer your question, the member profile pages are noindexed because there are 80,000 and most have little to no non-duplicate info. Some members fill in something. Most do not. Of the ones that do, they often pull the text from LinkedIn. Rather than have 80,000 duplicate or nearly duplicate pages in the index, we noindexed them.
Best... Darcy
-
What you're talking about is generally called Pagerank Sculpting and it's generally a bad idea:
http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/
The way it works, at least for distribution, is that the # of links is counted as a whole, not "number of followed links." That means you can't really help yourself this way. The article says it fairly clearly:
"Google has changed the way PageRank considers nofollowed links. Now, nofollowed links still count towards the distribution of PageRank, except the PageRank they would pass is reduced to zero. So your page A with 10 PR and five links, with four of them nofollowed, would pass 2 PR to the one followed link and 0 to the other four links."
So while you can, as Patrick pointed out, noindex them, let the juice flow everywhere.
-
Hi Darcy
Do not "nofollow" internal links to these pages - you want link equity to continue to move through your site. If you must noindex profile pages, leave the pages at least "noindex,follow" so that link equity can pass through those profile pages and continue to move through the site. Also, some members may have links from their site pointed at their profiles, I would check backlinks pointing to those pages if you get the opportunity.
You can do so through:
Majestic
OSEOut of curiosity, why did you noindex member profile pages if I may ask? Did you check and see if any of those pages get search traffic before noindexing? You might be missing an opportunity there. 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
-
"Avoid Too Many Internal Links" when you have a mega menu
Using the on-page grader and whilst further investigating internal linking, I'm concerned that as the ecommerce website has a very link heavy mega menu the rule of 100 may be impeding on the contextual links we're creating. Clearly we don't want to no-follow our entire menu. Should we consider no-indexing the third-level- for example short sleeve shirts here... Clothing > Shirts > Short Sleeve Shirts What about other pages we're don't care to index anyway such as the 'login page' the 'cart' the search button? Any thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ant-Scarborough0 -
Is Link equity / Link Juice lost to a blocked URL in the same way that it is lost to nofollow link
Hi If there is a link on a page that goes to a URL that is blocked in robots txt - is the link juice lost in the same way as when you add nofollow to a link on a page. Any help would be most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Linking to own homepage with keywords as link text
I recently discovered, that previous SEO work on a client's website apparently included setting links from subpages to the homepage using keywords as link text that the whole website should rank for. i.e. (fictional example) a subpage about chocolate would link to the homepage via "Visit the best sweet shop in Dallas and get a free sample." I am dubious about the influence this might have - anybody with any tests? I also think that it is quite weird when considering user friendliness - at least I would not expect such a link to take me to the homepage of the very site I was just on, probably browsing in a relevant page. So, what about such links: actually helpful, mostly don't matter or even potentially harmful? Looking forward to your opinions! Nico
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
International SEO
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be www.mysite.co.uk (current site) www.mysite.com (new intended site) www.mysite.com.au (new intended site) and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites. Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Questions About Link Detox
Greetings: In April of 2014 an SEO firm ran a link removal campaign (identified spammy links and uploaded a disavow). The overall campaign was ineffective and MOZ domain rank has fallen to 24 from about 30 in the last year and traffic is 20% lower. I purchased a basic package for Link Detox and ran a report today (see enclosed) to see if toxic links could be contributing to our mediocre rankings. As a novice I have a few questions for you regarding this the use of Link Detox: -We scored a domain wide detox risk of 1,723. The site has referring root domains with 7113 links to our site. 121 links were classified as high audit priority. 56 as medium audit priority. 221 links were previously disavowed and we uploaded a spreadsheet containing the names of the previously disavowed links. We had LinkDetox include an analysis of no-follow links as they recommend this. Is our score really bad? If we remove the questionable links should we see some benefit in ranking? -Some of the links we disavowed last year are still linking to our site. Is it worthwhile to include those links again in our new disavow file? -Prior to filing a disavow we will request that Webmaster remove offending links. LinkDetox offers a package called Superhero for $469.00 that automates the process. Does this package effectively help with the entire process of writing and tracking the removal requests? Do you know of any other good alternatives? -A feature called "Boost" is included in the LinkDetox Super Hero package. It is suppose to expedite Google's processing of the disavow file. I was told by the staff at Link Detox that with Boost Google will process the disavow within a week. Do you have any idea if this claim is valid??? It would be great if it were true. -We never experienced any manual penalty from Google. Will uploading a disavow help us under the circumstances? Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it!!! Alan p2S6H7l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Promoting as Affiliate by Having Nofollow Links, can it hurt
Hello, we have a PR-5 site http://www.updater.in In it - we are promoting Hosting, Web development primarily acting as affiliate to these companies. All links to the best of info are marked as nofollow, but still can it hurt search rankings as visitors are been directed within seconds to the respective partner I mean - the time which a person spends is pretty low and every page is marked as Affiliate. If yes - How to get this corrected with sites acting of such nature thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi1 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0