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
-
URL Too Long vs. 301 Redirect
We have a small number of content pages where the urls paths were setup before we started looking really hard at SEO. The paths are longer than recommended (but not super crazy IMHO) and some of the pages get a decent amount of traffic. Moz suggests updating the URLs to make them shorter but I wonder if anyone has experience with the tradeoffs here. Is it better to mark those issues to be ignored and just use good URLs going forward or would you suggest updating the URLs to something shorter and implementing a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | russell_ms0 -
Should I have home listings not followed?
Hi, I currently am doing digital marketing for a home builder. Here is one of our challenges: we build homes, create the page to sell them, details on the house are put up, Google crawls them, and then the house sells and I need to take it off the site. This is just creating a constant redirect process that I'm OK with but I'm just thinking I'd rather have Google not know they exist and delete them. I have community pages and floor plan pages with evergreen content and a blog that's doing well. I'm OK with Google not seeing these pages, but I'd really like to know what others in the industry do and what Moz thinks is best. I have a working theory of creating 10-15 pages where I rotate the houses: house 1 is posted and once it sells replace site content with house 16 (assuming 15 pages already exist with 15 houses). Reason - none of my listing pages have any page authority and it overall just makes the site un-authoritative. I know the domain authority is a different ranking factor, but I need the pages to be stronger or just not there. I'd love confirmation that that shouldn't be a concern for me as it seems to be one that I've inherited through years of SEO marketing paranoia.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AvexHomes2 -
Value of no-follow links
I'm curious to understand roughly how much % of value a no-follow link has in building authority relative to a do-follow link? I understand that Google seems consistently and growingly focused on value - ie. is the link valuable in growing the business, irregardless of SEO - and perhaps therefore the no-follow / do-follow distinction is becoming a more unnecessary dichotomy. How does Google look at do-follow vs no-follow links? And how much weight now is really given to one compared to the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Domain Authority... http://www.domain.com/ vs. http://domain.com vs. http://domain.com/
Hey Guys, Looking at Page Authority for my Site and ranking them in Decending Order, I see these 3 http://www.domain.com/ | Authority 62 http://domain.com | Authority 52 http://domain.com/ | Authority 52 Since the first one listed has the highest Authority, should I be using a 301 redirects on the lower ranking variations (which I understand how works) or should I be using rel="canonical" (which I don't really understand how it works) Also, if this is a problem that I should address, should we see a significant boost if fixed? Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can help a lost sailor who doesn't know how to sail and probably shouldn't have left shore in the first place. Cheers ZP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr_Snack0 -
"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
Greetings MOZ community: If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"? My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense. What is proper form? As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Changeing Hyperlinks from Do Follow to Do Not Follow
I Have a blog on my website and we do guest post from time to time. I was contacted by a blogger to change the Back links on his Article from Do Follow to Do not Follow. His Article has been live for 5 Months. When I asked him of the reason for that his Answer was that he needs to comply with Google's New Alogarithm ! Has Anyone Had Similar situation or can shed more light on that issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sherohass0 -
Shared Hosting Vs VPS Hosting
From an SEO perspective what are the advantages of VPS Hosting VS Shared Hosting for a local website that has less that 200 pages and gets max 2000 hits per month? Is VPS Hosting worth the extra expense for a local Real Estate Website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
800 Number vs. Local Phone
I have a client with multiple locations throughout the US. They are currently using different 800 numbers on their site for their different locations. As they try to optimize their local presence but submitting to local directories, we are trying to determine two things: Does having a local number reroute to an 800 number devalue the significance of it being a local number (I've never heard of this, but someone told them it did) Locality and consistency are important. Assuming they can't remove the 800 numbers from the site, are they better off keeping the 800 numbers on their site and using local numbers every else online OR just using the 800 numbers for all of their local listings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caleone0