Pyramid link structure - how to noindex, nofollow
-
I'm talking about this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link
Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1
Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?
-
Hi there,
I see what you're trying to do, and I think I understand it. You're attempting to conserve your link equity and flow it only to the most important pages, or what we use to call "pagerank sculpting."
The good news is you don't really need to worry about it. These days, adding nofollow to your links doesn't really increase the equity flowing through the followed links. And in fact, you could be shooting yourself in the proverbial foot by denying equity passing links to your lower product pages.
Best time to use nofollow for internal pages is typically to increase crawling efficiency, or to prevent bots from visiting pages you don't want indexed anyway. Attempting to scuplt link equity in this way could cause lots of unintended negative consequences and my advice would be in most cases to let your link equity flow freely throughout your site in a way that was natural to both humans and bots alike.
Best of luck!
-
I agree with Nitin here.
I think the confusion is perhaps that you're taking the pyramid structure in that Moz article too literally? There is nothing wrong with linking between different pages as Nitin said. In fact, by linking to related/relevant content on your website, you are enforcing the context and the meaning of the pages' content. The diagram in the Moz article is just showing how you should have the minimum number of links possible between the homepage and any given "deep" page on the website. So, using Moz's diagram as an example, from that website's homepage, you can get to their deepest page in only three clicks. The more clicks (or links) the harder the page is to find, and therefore less likely to be found and crawled by Google. Remember that Google has a crawl budget.
So long as you don't have hundreds of links on any one page you are trying to rank and it doesn't take too many links to get to any one page, I wouldn't worry too much it. The nofollow attribute is only to be used when you don't want Google to follow that link and pass link juice between the pages.
-
Well, these aren't "useless" links. After all, they're linking your categories/sub-categories etc. and should be followed by bots even if a HTML snapshot of any page captures 2-3 follow links (from flyout/menu navigation, breadcrumbs etc.) of another page.
Hope this helps!
-
No, I just want get rid of million useless links from both menus and make clean pyramid structure with plain link flow:
(product have only 1 link to subcategory, subcategory have 1 link to category and few links to products and so on). -
No! Don't "nofollow" them. Why do you want to nofollow them now?
You're not spamming here, inter-linking from flyout-navigation/header/footer/on-page-navigation/breadcrumbs are the natural ways people use for internal-linking, that won't hurt you for sure.
-
Alright, I got it, lets forget about noindex, left nofollow only.
Now to have pyramid scheme my plan should look like this, right?
Product page: nofollow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: nofollow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
-
Are you trying to say that you're planning to have multiple URLs for a single product page here? For instance, if you have a product which can be reached from multiple navigation paths, so you want to have those multiple URLs for it?
Like if a product is tagged in category "x" and "x" is a sub-category of category "y", then the number of possible URLs for product page "p" would be
So, here these 2 URLs are candidates of duplicate content penalty and hence, you want to noindex them? Is this what you're trying to explain?
-
Hi,
Well, following "pyramid" scheme and noindexing pages are two different things altogether. Let's not mix them, its creating confusion actually. So, tell me why do you want to noindex your pages?
Using pyramid scheme and optimizing your site's architecture the best possible way can be done independently.
-
If you noindex a page, you are telling Google that you don't want the page to be indexed and it will disappear from Google Search. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? Maybe you are thinking of index, nofollow on Recommended Products instead to reduce the number of links that Google will follow?
-
I just want to follow "pyramid" scheme (see pic in article). If not use noindex, how to do this pyramide?
-
Oh, sorry, I mean product page have lot of links from top, left menu, from "recommended" products. My offer is left only 1 "way out" - to parent category (in this case it Plain shirts).
But if I will noindex "recommended" products, are they will disappear from G. search?..
-
I'm confused. Why would you want to noindex all of those pages? If you don't want those pages to be indexed by Google, tagging them noindex is not harmful at all. But why would you want to noindex the front page, category, subcategory and product page?
-
Hi,
Could you please help me understand your concern here? What do you mean by "noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs"?
May be you need to elaborate your concern or share some screenshots to help me understand it.
P.S noindexing a subset of pages is not harmful for sure.
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
-
Long url links
Just wondering about creating links.
On-Page Optimization | | Robotnik
Is it ok to have very long links?
Like: http://www.robotnik.com/computer-hardware-ram/8gb-ddr3-1600-desktop Is the above too long, is it better for SEO to be more to the point? Also For better SEO, is it better to use hyphens in a domain name or not?0 -
Landing page content and link distribution
Hey there fellow mozers, Need some advice, one of my clients asked us about the best way to distribute their content: number of restaurants per page, links and footer in their Landing pages. Here are 2 examples of what I mean: http://www.just-eat.es/adomicilio/madrid http://www.just-eat.es/adomicilio/pizza Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Comunicare0 -
Too Many Internal Links Reported By SEOmoz
Hi, I recently did run a crawl report for my blog dapazze.com, and found that SEOmoz is reporting many pages on my blog having more than 100 internal links. I opened OSE, and made a search for one of my pages which was reported to contain more than 100 links. And I found it to contain 464 internal links. Here is the link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=dapazze.com%2F2012%2F10%2Fwin-a-commentluv-premium-single-site-and-multi-site-license-worth-about-154-giveaway-of-october%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0 Please have a look at it. I have chosen - Show "All" links from "only internal" pages to "this page" option in OSE, which reports me this. I see almost every page in my blog linking to every page. This is not the problem for me. I have also tried to make a search for some popular bloggers, like ProBlogger.net, ShoutMeLoud.com, HellBoundBloggers.com, etc, and all of them have the same problem. Should I be worrying about this problem? What is the problem actually?
On-Page Optimization | | rahulchowdhury0 -
To Many Links On Page
I'm having a problem on a crawl warning for our main site. The warning is that every one of my pages has to many links, a little over 1,000 on almost all of them. I think this is because our category list on our left hand sidebar has so many categories, and that sidebar appears on every last one of our pages even all the way into our products. Can anyone take a look and tell me if this is the reason why and what I could possibly do about this? Thanks in advance! www.Ocelco.com
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean0 -
Relating forum discussions to improve internal linking
Hi all, I have a matter i would like a discussion about, since I am looking for a good solution. First the case: I have a site with a large community based discussion board. We daily have 40 to 80 active forum threads with average of 200 posts. As it is right now each thread page shows, at the bottom of the thread, the 20 threads with latest activity. From a SEO point of view this is not the best solution, since all thread pages passes link juice to the latest 20 threads. However, the threads change daily so the juice is sprayed around all over the place. What I want to do is related forum threads, such that each thread at the bottom shows up to 10 threads which could be of interest to the reader. In this way one thread will have more or less the same threads at the bottom at all time, unless the relevancy is better for other threads, causing som minor changes to happen over time. The question is, how can one do this? In the backend, the forum has two tables. One holding threads and one holding posts relating to the threads. All in all the system has 66.500 threads, and in total 469.000 posts. Every thread has a title, and the posts are of varying length. The threads have categories, but they are not so distinct that a thread in one category can not be related to a thread in another category. So I would like to make the relevancy from the title of the thread and the content of the forum posts. As of yet I have not come up with a good solution, and i will look forward to reading any feedback for this. I will answer any questions as fast as possible, to get a good discussion goint here. Best regards, Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
404 link | How to remove the link so it is not found?
My report has listed a few links with 404 errors. They are internal links but are not found. Is there a way to remove that link so it is not found again? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SavingSense0 -
Too many links on a page?
On my blog posts, I have links to all the categories and months, dating back 5-6 years. This make the number of links on each blog page well over 100, which I understand might decrease the value of each page. Is there a problem with having more than 100 links on a page?
On-Page Optimization | | rdreich492 -
I have a direct question about file structure.
This question is about a new file structure and SEO friendly URL's. Does a file name make a difference? I have a direct question about file structure. Our old site was formated with a URL of http://rousechamberlin.com/about_us.aspx our new site is structured http://rousechamberlin.com/AboutUs/ no file no extension. As the SEO guy of the company and not the programmer my feeling is this is killing us. Does anybody have any thoughts on this?
On-Page Optimization | | HeadWebChef0