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
-
301 vs Canonical - With A Side of Partial URL Rewrite and Google URL Parameters-OH MY
Hi Everyone, I am in the middle of an SEO contract with a site that is partially HTML pages and the rest are PHP and part of an ecommerce system for digital delivery of college classes. I am working with a web developer that has worked with this site for many years. In the php pages, there are also 6 different parameters that are currently filtered by Google URL parameters in the old Google Search Console. When I came on board, part of the site was https and the remainder was not. Our first project was to move completely to https and it went well. 301 redirects were already in place from a few legacy sites they owned so the developer expanded the 301 redirects to move everything to https. Among those legacy sites is an old site that we don't want visible, but it is extensively linked to the new site and some of our top keywords are branded keywords that originated with that site. Developer says old site can go away, but people searching for it are still prevalent in search. Biggest part of this project is now to rewrite the dynamic urls of the product pages and the entry pages to the class pages. We attempted to use 301 redirects to redirect to the new url and prevent the draining of link juice. In the end, according to the developer, it just isn't going to be possible without losing all the existing link juice. So its lose all the link juice at once (a scary thought) or try canonicals. I am told canonicals would work - and we can switch to that. My questions are the following: 1. Does anyone know of a way that might make the 301's work with the URL rewrite? 2. With canonicals and Google parameters, are we safe to delete the parameters after we have ensures everything has a canonical url (parameter pages included)? 3. If we continue forward with 301's and lose all the existing links, since this only half of the pages in the site (if you don't count the parameter pages) and there are only a few links per page if that, how much of an impact would it have on the site and how can I avoid that impact? 4. Canonicals seem to be recommended heavily these days, would the canonical urls be a better way to go than sticking with 301's. Thank you all in advance for helping! I sincerely appreciate any insight you might have. Sue (aka Trudy)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TStorm1 -
Index, follow on a paginated page with a different rel=canonical URL
Hello, I have a question about meta robots ="index, follow" and rel=canonical on category page pagination. Should the sorted page be <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> since the rel="canonical" is pointing to a separate page that is different from the URL? Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks. Main Category Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice
https://www.site.com/category/
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" "=""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"=""><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" ?p="2""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,> As you can see, the meta robots is telling Google to index https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name , yet saying the canonical page is https://www.site.com/category/?p=2 .0 -
Footer no follow links
Just interested to know when putting links at the foot of the site some people use no-follow tags. I'm thinking about internal pages and social networks. Is this still necessary or is it an old-fashioned idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Should I add no-follow tags to my widget links?
Matt Cutts recommended in a video in 2013 to add rel="nofollow" on widget links that link back to your website. Some background of my company: We're a software company for website chat. There's a 'powered by' link in our widgets that links back from our users' websites to our website. Currently these are all follow links. I checked out the links of our competitors, and it seems none of them have no follow on their widget backlinks. This, together with the fact that the video is quite old and information on this issue rather scarce, makes me doubt whether we should change our widget backlinks to no follow. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximuxxx0 -
Should I Keep adding 301s or use a noindex,follow/canonical or a 404 in this situation?
Hi Mozzers, I feel I am facing a double edge sword situation. I am in the process of migrating 4 domains into one. I am in the process of creating URL redirect mapping The pages I am having the most issues are the event pages that are past due but carry some value as they generally have one external followed link. www.example.com/event-2008 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2007 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2006 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 Again these old events aren't necessarily important in terms of link equity but do carry some and at the same time keep adding multiple 301s pointing to the same page may not be a good ideas as it will increase the page speed load time which will affect the new site's performance. If i add a 404 I will lose the bit of equity in those. No index,follow may work since it won't index the old domain nor the page itself but still not 100% sure about it. I am not sure how a canonical would work since it would keep the old domain live. At this point I am not sure which direction I should follow? Thanks for your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Universal Search vs Local Organic
Hi, My web site has high rankings in universal SERP's. However, in my city organic search the competitors’ web sites that even don’t show up in universal Serp’s have higher rankings than mine. Not sure what I’m doing wrong. Thanks for any insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zlhe0 -
Does having a file type on the end of a url affect rankings (example www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards.php VS www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards)????
Does having a file type on the end of a url affect rankings (example www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards.php VS www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards)????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0