No follow vs do follow the how to
-
Hi Guys,
Sorry if this is an ammature question, just wanted to know I noticed a few people talking about no follows and do follows for backlinks. Is there suppose to be some way to set you website up as nofollow and dofollow for backlinks? I noticed a few people saying to make sure that some directories are nofollow, i would like to know if I can set this up for my own site as I'm a bit conscious and paranoid about others that might backlink to my site who have huge spam or negative seo etc?
Any insight into this would be much appreciated
Thanks all
-
In short - do not concern yourself about negative SEO. Yes it can happen - but if you monitor your site the way you are - ie using moz diagnostics to regularly crawl back links etc. you will identify spam links and then can go through the procedure to disallow. So you have that covered.
However you should appreciate that if someone creates a link for you, an editorial article - generally you want a follow link. I spend time for clients trying to turn no-follows into follows. Then you get the link juice and the bump hopefully in rankings.
Clear as mud? If not let me know. Good question your on the right track.
-
Hi Edward,
You are a little confused about what this means i think so let me try to explain.
Each link can be assigned an attribute called rel="nofollow", the person who owns the link has control of this attribute so you can control if the links on your website are nofollow, but you have no control of the link people point to your website.
Generally speaking you want your link profile to contain both and it demonstrates a healthy link profile.
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using
nofollow
causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow
, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handlenofollow
in slightly different ways.Using nofollow them on your own website
The use of nofollow links on your own website to your own pages stops google crawling and indexing certain pages on your website. For example is you had a "Login" or "Checkout" page. Many people choose to nofollow it to stop google crawling and indexing it. This stop a page with normally fairly poor content due to its nature being indexed on your site.
It is also used to prevent duplicate content, if you know a page is a duplicate of another but it is needed, rather than use canocial tags etc some people choose to nofollow them.
Im summary You can't nofollow links that point to your website from external sites (unless you contact the person sending the link and they agree to do so). Your best defence against spammy links is to monitor your link profile and when a link pops up you dont link follow the normal channels to remove it,
nofollow on your own website should only be used to stop google crawling and indexing certain links and passing link juice as and when you need it. It Google still has a bot that crawls through nofollows. But in general it will recognise your wishes.
-
It's important to remember that a healthy link profile will be a mix of both dofollow and nofollow links. There is no rule of thumb that says which links should contain which attributes, but if you were in a generic directory, for example, you would want it to be nofollowed.
More often than not, any link that is given editorially is fine with whatever it comes with. Nofollowed links are very useful, but just don't pass page rank.
Google is pretty smart at detecting spam links and negative SEO though, due to how these normally appear, so I wouldn't worry too much, unless you have seen something that is concerning you? You are also able to handle any negative SEO or bad links through disavowing the links in Webmaster Tools.
I hope this helps a little?
-Andy
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
-
I have an authority site with 90K visits per month. Now I have to change from non www to www. Will incur in any SEO issues while doing that? Could you please advice me on the best steps to follow to do this? Thank you very much!
Because I want to increase site speed, Siteground (my hosting) suggested I use Cloudflare Plus which needs my site to have www in order to work. I'm also using a cloud hosting. Im a bit scared of doing this, and thus decided to come to the community. I used MOZ for over 6 months now and love the tool. Please help me make the best possible decisions and what steps to follow. It would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_IT0 -
508 compliance vs good SEO re: Image alt tags
I'm currently in debate with our 508 compliance team over the use of alt tags on images. For SEO, it is best practice to use alt tags so that readers can tell what the image represents. However, they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. I feel they are taking the "decorative" image concept in 508 compliance too far. It's intention is for images for bullets, etc that truly are decorative in nature and add no benefit to the reader. What is the communities thoughts on this? Have you ever run into scenario where 508 is attempting to ruin SEO? Usually the 2 play nicely.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpfleiderer0 -
Canonical Vs No Follow for Duplicate Products
I am in the process of migrating a site from Volusion to BigCommerce. There is a limitation on the ability to display one product in 2 different ways. Here is the situation. One of the manufacturers will not allow us to display products to customers who are not logged in. We have convinced them to let us display the products with no prices. Then we created an Exclusive Contractor section that will allow users to see the price and be able to purchase the products online. Originally we were going to just direct users to call to make purchases like our competitors are doing. Because we have a large amount of purchasers online we wanted to manipulate the system to be able to allow online purchases. Since these products will have duplicates with no pricing I was thinking that Canonical tags would be kind of best practice. However, everything will be behind a firewall with a message directing people to log in. Since this will undoubtedly create a high bounce rate I feel like I need to no follow those links. This is a rather large site, over 5000 pages. The 250 no follow URLs most likely won't have a large impact on the overall performance of the site. Or so I hope anyway. My gut tells me if these products are going to technically be hidden from the searcher they should also be hidden from the engines. Does Disallowing these URLs seem like a better way to do this than simply using the Canonical tags? Any thoughts or suggestions would be really helpful!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonicaOConnor0 -
One Site vs. Many
This is a question that I am not sure has a "right" answer. I am just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on this. I can see benefit of both sides of the coin. In your opinion, is it better to have one large e-commerce site with all of your content on the same domain or is it better to have multiple more targeted domains with your content broken up into smaller chunks? The reason I ask is, I feel like while multiple more targeted sites certainly have the benefit of focus, aren't you taking all your traffic and content, splitting it up and leaving you with several sites that most likely are getting less traffic than one large site would. All opinions welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey0 -
SEO implications of serving a different site on HTTPS vs. HTTP
I have two sites: Site A, and Site B. Both sites are hosted on the same IP address, and server using IIS 7.5. Site B has an SSL cert, and Site A does not. It has recently been brought to my attention that when requesting the HTTPS version of Site A (the site w/o an SSL cert), IIS will serve Site B... Our server has been configured this way for roughly a year. We don't do any promotion of Site A using HTTPS URLs, though I suppose somebody could accidentally link to or type in HTTPS and get the wrong website. Until we can upgrade to IIS8 / Windows Server 2012 to support SNI, it seems I have two reasonable options: Move Site B over to its own dedicated IP, and let HTTPS requests for Site A 404. Get another certificate for Site A, and have it's HTTPS version 301 redirect to HTTP/non-ssl. #1 seems preferable, as we don't really need an SSL cert for Site A, and HTTPS doesn't really have any SEO benefits over HTTP/non-ssl. However, I'm concerned if we've done any SEO damage to Site A by letting our configuration sit this way for so long. I could see Googlebot trying https versions of websites to test if they exist, even if there aren't any ssl/https links for the given domain in the wild... In which case, option #2 would seem to mostly reverse any damage done (if any). Though Site A seems to be indexed fine. No concerns other than my gut. Does anybody have any recommendations? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Issues with Google-Bot crawl vs. Roger-Bot
Greetings from a first time poster and SEO noob... I hope that this question makes sense... I have a small e-commerce site, I have had Roger-bot crawl the site and I have fixed all errors and warnings that Volusion will allow me to fix. Then I checked Webmaster Tools, HTML improvements section and the Google-bot sees different dupe. title tag issues that Roger-bot did not. so A few weeks back I changed the title tag for a product, and GWT says that I have duplicate title tags but there is only one live page for the product. GWT lists the dupe. title tags, but when I click on each they all lead to the same live page. I'm confused, what pages are these other title tags referring to? Does Google have more than one page for that product indexed due to me changing the title tag when the page had a different URL? Does this question make sense? 2) Is this issue a problem? 3) What can I do to fix it? Any help would be greatly appreciated Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Wordtracker vs Google Keyword Tool
When I find keyword opportunities in Wordtracker, I'll sometimes run them through Adwords Keyword tool only to find that Google says these keywords have 0 search volume. Would you use these keywords even though Google says users aren't searching for them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0