Internal no follow links
-
I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog.
Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow.
What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?
-
Yeah that's pretty much overkill. "No-follow" isn't actually named very well as it doesn't prevent users or search engines from 'following' a hyperlink. I know, it was named really badly! In fact many people feel it's not even a directive to stop links from being 'followed' (or visited)
What the no-follow tag is commonly used for these days is to denote the difference between editorial and advertorial hyperlinks. It's only really an issue with external links, rather than internal ones. If you have placed content on another site (and you paid for it, like a sponsored post) with a link pointing back to your own site (to try and get referral traffic), the 'no-follow' tag lets Google know that the link is advertorial in nature and thus should not pass PageRank to the receiving domain / web-page
Because of this a lot of people believe that if you no-follow a link, it doesn't vent or lose any PageRank. This is false. If a link is default ('followed'), then an amount of PageRank will be lost from the linking page and donated to the receiving page. If a link is 'no-followed', the PageRank will still be lost by the linking page but the receiving page just won't get anything (so it gets vented into cyberspace). This is to stop "PageRank sculpting" using no-follow links from being a viable SEO manipulation tactic
As such, all no-following your duplicate internal links will do is vent tiny chunks of SEO authority without them then being appended to other pages on your site (so little bits of authority just get lost from your website's ecosystem)
It's not a huge problem that you should freak out about, in-fact the noticeable difference in performance via either implementation (I would guess) would be negligible to totally unnoticeable
But still - why chip away at yourself right? That's what your competitors are there for
-
Thanks, Roman,
You are echoing my sentiments. I'm glad I wasn't having a meltdown.
-
Based on my experience that is an Issues ....why?
Generally, with internal links, we want to link one page to another to help Google discover the content, while also creating a hierarchy to reflect which pages are more important than others. Internal linking fulfills different tasks.
- It ensures the accessibility of all documents.
- It prioritizes content and distributes link juice.
- It helps to cluster content and creates a context to explain what a page is supposed to rank for.
Basically, Google evaluates the priority of a page according to the quality and number of incoming links. Depending on your website, as well as say products or contents that you have on your domain, you need to understand what is most important from a business perspective.
If you have an online shop, you obviously will have lots of categories that usually target very generic, high volume keywords. Then you also have your product pages. These product pages usually target more specific, long tail keywords; therefore the search volume per URL and that of the keywords is usually lower. From a hierarchy perspective, you should ensure that the most important categories are very closely linked from the homepage.
Another important is the link juice. The main idea is that link juice is a kind of definer of all the positive and negative characteristics that can be passed by an internal or external link from one URL to another.
**IN SUMMARY **
- _Internal-links is one the best way to build a site structure _
- _Internal-links is also important to pass link juice from page to another _
- _with no follow tag on all the above explanation is almost useless _
**_"The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow." **seriouslyI don't understand what is he talking about _
Hope this info will help you
Regards and 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
-
Rel Sponsored on Internal Links
Hi all. Should you use rel sponsored on internal links? Here is the scenario: a company accepts money from one of their partners to place a prominent link on their home page. That link goes to an internal page on the company's website that contains information about that partner's service. If this was an external link that the partner was paying for, then you would obviously use rel="sponsored" but since this is a link that goes from awebsite.com to awebsite.com/some-page/, it seems odd to qualify that link in this way. Does this change if the link contains a "sponsored" label in the text (not in the rel qualifier)? Does this change if this link looks more like an ad (i.e. a banner image) vs. regular text (i.e. a link in a paragraph)? Thanks for any and all guidance or examples you can share!
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Paid Links - How does Google classify them?
Greetings All, I have a question regarding "Paid Links." My company creates custom websites for other small businesses across the country. We always have backlinks to our primary website from our "Dealer Sites." Would Google and other search engines consider links from our "dealer sites" to be "paid links?" Example:
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO
http://www.atlanticautoinc.com/ is the "dealer site." Would Google consider the links from Atlantic Auto to be a "paid link," and therefor have less of an impact for page rankings, due to it not being organic? Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!!0 -
Links below linking (not sitelinks)
Hi All, Please can you let me know the name and / or point me at an article / blog / directory on how best to achieve additional links under a search engine listing (I don't mean site links) e.g. I do a search for 'home insurance' on Google.co.uk and under the listing for Compare the Market it has - home insurance, building insurance and landlords insurance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Vodafone0 -
Too many navigational links
Hi there, I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages. Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure. 1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?). This is the situation: The website is a webshop The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here. Now here's the problem: The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option. But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues. Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this? Note: pages have good organic positions and authority. Thanks a lot. Marcel0 -
Are my Canonical Links set up correctly?
I have Enable Canonical Links (recommended) on my web site. However, I also have THIS checked: Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp) Is it hurting me??? Keep getting dinged on our report card. We are using the Volusion shopping cart software/platform.
Technical SEO | | GreenFarmParts0 -
INTERNAL ANCHOR TEXT LINKS
If your site has say 50 pages, and you have a anchor text link from the home page to that page, what should you do in response to last friday, I have 60 keywords in the top 10 and now thye are all in the top 30 at best. PAGE RANK is still 5s and 6s on all of these pages.... NO PROBLEM ON THIS SITE UNTIL LAST FRIDAY!
Technical SEO | | jdcline0 -
External Sitewide Links and SEO
I have one big question about the potential SEO value -- and possibly also dangers? -- of "followed" external sitewide links. Examples of these would be: a link to your site from another site's footer a blogroll link a link to your site from another site's global navigation Aside from the link's position in the HTML file (the higher the better, presumably), are these links essentially the same from an SEO point of view or different (and how)? There used to be an influential view out there that the link juice value of a sitewide link was the same as that of a single link (presumably from the linking site's home page), even though a sitewide link may in fact result a huge number individual links. Is this true or false? What is the math here? Should one worry about having "too many" sitewide links, in the sense that this may raise red flags by way of the algo? I talked to someone a few months ago (before the recent algo updates) who believed that he had got a minus 10 penalty or whatever it was for getting too many sitewide links We offer website design and development as well as SEO, and we put a keyworded link to ourselves in the footer. I think this is a fairly common practice. Is this a good or bad idea SEO-wise? One opinion is that for external sitewide footer links, you should best have a dofollow link on the home page, but nofollow it on all other pages. What is your opinion about that? Is there anything else that is distinct, interesting or important about sitewide links' SEO value and pitfalls? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Philip-SEO1