Moving from no follow to follow links on our eCommerce site

[RebekahVP]

Hi everyone,

I recently taken on an SEO eCommerce account and found that all the footer links have a no follow attribute.

I've requested that the no follow tags be removed as the pages are quite valuable (about us, finance, recycling, help centre etc). I've been asked what the risks are and all I can think of is a slightly increased number of pages for Google to Crawl. Are there any other risks you can think of?

Does anyone have experience around making this type of change?

For benefits, I believe that it will make our content look more trustworthy to Google and help with traffic through to those pages in the SERPs. Any other pros you can think of will be a great help.

[RebekahVP]

Fab, thank you both for your thoughts. I was 99% sure I was going to do it, just needed someone else to agree with me

[Xiano]

Are the pages linked elsewhere with follow links? And therefore, are those pages already indexed? (I would be surprised if they weren't, especially "About Us"). If so, changing the follow status won't have any impact on crawl budget but will demonstrate to Google that those pages are more important to you.

It seems to me that the pages you've listed would certainly be pages you would want to be indexed. And give the small number of pages you're talking about, it's not going to have any real impact on your crawl budget.

The fact that you're talking about less than 10 additional pages aside, if you're worried about crawl budget (as you might need to be if your e-commerce site is vast), then there is a good article here from Yoast: https://yoast.com/crawl-budget-optimization/
The pertinent section, and to work out if you really need to worry, is:

1. Determine how many pages you have on your site, the number of your URLs in your XML sitemaps might be a good start.
2. Go into Google Search Console.
3. Go to Crawl -> Crawl stats and take note of the average pages crawled per day.
4. Divide the number of pages by the “Average crawled per day” number.
5. If you end up with a number higher than ~10 (so you have 10x more pages than what Google crawls each day), you should optimize your crawl budget. If you end up with a number lower than 3, go read something else.

[jacobmartinnn]

You can go for it.