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
-
Internal link structure for my loan website
Hi folks. I own a Norwegian consumer loan/financing website, which has been monetized with links. I've created various silos for my content, according to what I believe is most relevant to the user.
Technical SEO | | llevy
However, as a result each article now has a sidebar list, which in turn links to all other articles within the same category (silo). As you can see here, it has about 30 links in the sidebar: forbrukslån.no/beste-lån. With 30 articles in a silo, that corresponds to over 900 internal links, in just one silo alone. I wonder if this could be hurting me SEO wise? I know G cares a lot about relevance and user experience. So I have a feeling it could be interpreted as spammy. Reason I did this in the first place, is that the header links are also being repeated on all pages, without any issue. T4FHxHw0 -
Internal Ads on A Site
We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
No follow and do follow on wordpress
I am in the process of building a new wordpress site to replace my old static HTML site and I am now doing SEO on it. With my old site the default was do follow and I could easily change the HTML to no follow but on my wordpress site the default is no follow and I cannot seem to find a way to change parts to do follow. Tried a plugin but it does not deal with the home page at all and when I select do follow my SEO tools still highlight the links as no follow. A bit stumped on this one. Anyone have any experience with this? thanks
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Image Link
If I have an image that is well optimiswed for a keyword that the page it is on is ranking for but i put a no follow in the image link - is this going to lose the value of the image on that page. A strange question i know but this image i have on my homepage is optimised around a keyword, the image is also a link but when i changed the link in the image to no follow i seem to have dropped rankings for that keyword. Probably consicidence but i thought i would throw this question out there and get some views?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
.Nofollow and link count
If i use nofollow on links ( internal or external ), will it reduce the link count as regard to Google. If there are 50 external links, and i nofollow 20 of them, will Google count this as 30 external links.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Link Juice flow control
Hi, I'm really interested in a good explanation of how to control the flow of link juice. Most of my inbound links currently go to my home page, and I was just wondering how to maximise the link juice flow to those pages that I want ranking. Is there any benefit to nofollowing pages in my navigation that I don't need to rank? As above, but with links in my footer, such as privacy policy and the like (can i not waste link juice on these pages?) Does more link juice flow to pages higher up in my code? These are just some of the questions I'm concerned with. Basically, I'd really like to know the best-practices for sending link juice to where it is needed most. Thanks, Matt - No Yelling Driving School
Technical SEO | | strilliams0