Pyramid link structure - how to noindex, nofollow
-
I'm talking about this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link
Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1
Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?
-
Hi there,
I see what you're trying to do, and I think I understand it. You're attempting to conserve your link equity and flow it only to the most important pages, or what we use to call "pagerank sculpting."
The good news is you don't really need to worry about it. These days, adding nofollow to your links doesn't really increase the equity flowing through the followed links. And in fact, you could be shooting yourself in the proverbial foot by denying equity passing links to your lower product pages.
Best time to use nofollow for internal pages is typically to increase crawling efficiency, or to prevent bots from visiting pages you don't want indexed anyway. Attempting to scuplt link equity in this way could cause lots of unintended negative consequences and my advice would be in most cases to let your link equity flow freely throughout your site in a way that was natural to both humans and bots alike.
Best of luck!
-
I agree with Nitin here.
I think the confusion is perhaps that you're taking the pyramid structure in that Moz article too literally? There is nothing wrong with linking between different pages as Nitin said. In fact, by linking to related/relevant content on your website, you are enforcing the context and the meaning of the pages' content. The diagram in the Moz article is just showing how you should have the minimum number of links possible between the homepage and any given "deep" page on the website. So, using Moz's diagram as an example, from that website's homepage, you can get to their deepest page in only three clicks. The more clicks (or links) the harder the page is to find, and therefore less likely to be found and crawled by Google. Remember that Google has a crawl budget.
So long as you don't have hundreds of links on any one page you are trying to rank and it doesn't take too many links to get to any one page, I wouldn't worry too much it. The nofollow attribute is only to be used when you don't want Google to follow that link and pass link juice between the pages.
-
Well, these aren't "useless" links. After all, they're linking your categories/sub-categories etc. and should be followed by bots even if a HTML snapshot of any page captures 2-3 follow links (from flyout/menu navigation, breadcrumbs etc.) of another page.
Hope this helps!
-
No, I just want get rid of million useless links from both menus and make clean pyramid structure with plain link flow:
(product have only 1 link to subcategory, subcategory have 1 link to category and few links to products and so on). -
No! Don't "nofollow" them. Why do you want to nofollow them now?
You're not spamming here, inter-linking from flyout-navigation/header/footer/on-page-navigation/breadcrumbs are the natural ways people use for internal-linking, that won't hurt you for sure.
-
Alright, I got it, lets forget about noindex, left nofollow only.
Now to have pyramid scheme my plan should look like this, right?
Product page: nofollow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: nofollow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
-
Are you trying to say that you're planning to have multiple URLs for a single product page here? For instance, if you have a product which can be reached from multiple navigation paths, so you want to have those multiple URLs for it?
Like if a product is tagged in category "x" and "x" is a sub-category of category "y", then the number of possible URLs for product page "p" would be
So, here these 2 URLs are candidates of duplicate content penalty and hence, you want to noindex them? Is this what you're trying to explain?
-
Hi,
Well, following "pyramid" scheme and noindexing pages are two different things altogether. Let's not mix them, its creating confusion actually. So, tell me why do you want to noindex your pages?
Using pyramid scheme and optimizing your site's architecture the best possible way can be done independently.
-
If you noindex a page, you are telling Google that you don't want the page to be indexed and it will disappear from Google Search. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? Maybe you are thinking of index, nofollow on Recommended Products instead to reduce the number of links that Google will follow?
-
I just want to follow "pyramid" scheme (see pic in article). If not use noindex, how to do this pyramide?
-
Oh, sorry, I mean product page have lot of links from top, left menu, from "recommended" products. My offer is left only 1 "way out" - to parent category (in this case it Plain shirts).
But if I will noindex "recommended" products, are they will disappear from G. search?..
-
I'm confused. Why would you want to noindex all of those pages? If you don't want those pages to be indexed by Google, tagging them noindex is not harmful at all. But why would you want to noindex the front page, category, subcategory and product page?
-
Hi,
Could you please help me understand your concern here? What do you mean by "noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs"?
May be you need to elaborate your concern or share some screenshots to help me understand it.
P.S noindexing a subset of pages is not harmful for sure.
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 Website Linking from Syndicated Blog Posts
Does it help, hurt, or do nothing for my website's SEO if I do internal linking from syndicated blog posts (on my blog) to my website pages? For example, a syndicated blog post on winterizing your house has instances of "homeowners insurance" linking to my webpage on homeowners insurance. Proper canonicalization is done as well.
On-Page Optimization | | BFMichael0 -
Potential new URL structure for my ecommerce site
At the moment my site suffers from a flat product category structure where over 600 items fall into one category alone. This category is then filtered using a faceted search which appends query strings to the category URL and changes the products displayed on the page. At the moment our product category URL is as follows, www.domain.com/category/greeting-cards and this holds all cards including occasions such as anniversary, birthdays etc and also themes such as animal cards, contemporary cards etc I have proposed changes to my developer to change this structure to include subcategories. I can now go two subcategories deep. For example, "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" or "greeting cards > themes > animals". This is reflected in the new URL structure, which has been proposed, www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards. In this URL do I need "occasions" in the URL as I don't think it adds much value to the user? Would I be better of having www.domain.com/greeting-cards/birthday-cards. If a user searches for "birthday cards" then I think this would be more relevant?
On-Page Optimization | | joe-ainswoth0 -
Link flow for multiple links to same URL
Hi there,
On-Page Optimization | | doctecs
my question is as follows: How does Google handle link flow if two links in a given page point to the same URL? (do they flow link individually or not?) This seems to be a newbie question, but actually it seems that there is little evidence and even also little consensus in the SEO community about this detail. Answers should include source Information about the current state of art at Google is preferable The question is not about anchor text, general best practises for linking, "PageRank is dead" etc. We do know that the "historical" PageRank was implemented (a long time ago) without special handling for multiple links, as e.g. last stated by Matt Cutts in this video: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 On the other hand, many people from the SEO community say that only the first link counts. But so far I could not find any data to back this up, which is quite surprising.0 -
Site Structure. Which is better?
Ideally, which model is better for site structure: 1. Homepage -> Categories -> Individual Pages (See example here http://www.wordtracker.com/attachments/bead-site-structure.gif) OR 2. Homepage -> Categories -> Sub-categories -> Indicidual Pages In the 2nd model, are the individual pages too far away from the homepage?
On-Page Optimization | | brianflannery0 -
PANDA Attack: Too many on page links
Hey guys! I have a bit of a dilemma...one of my sites got hit by Panda 😞 The content itself contains about 10 links, however since the site is a process directory, at the bottom of the page you will find that the visitor can also browse process directory by name or page and then beneath this there are 80 links :s My concern is that if i remove this I will lose internal link juice! HELP! What approach should I take? I was thinking of either reducing the number of links OR hiding it by using Java ORRRR removing the links entirely. Advice anyone? This is a page as an example: http://www.processlibrary.com/directory/files/csrsc/25349/ All pages are like this!
On-Page Optimization | | OrangeGuys0 -
Internal Linking - in content vs navigation menu
Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
Lists of Product Links: What is good, what is bad?
I am a web designer but a bit of an SEO noob (trying to get better at both). I am working with one particular client on a site I inherited with existing structure. This client has about 10 products on 2 pages. On every page there is a product list that is basically the same list sorted in 2 ways: 1st by product, 2nd by usage. These all link to internal anchors so this might be an example on www.site.com Cleaner X1 - links to www.site.com/cleaners.php#x1
On-Page Optimization | | mparry9
Cleaner X2 - links to www.site.com/cleaners.php#x2
Cleaner X3 - links to www.site.com/cleaners.php#x3
...
Cleaner For Brick - links to www.site.com/cleaners.php#x1
Cleaner For Marble - links to www.site.com/cleaners.php#x2
Cleaner For Stone - links to www.site.com/cleaners.php#x3 Obviously this adds about 20 links on every page on the site (including the actual pages these products are on). What are your thoughts on this? Good idea or bad to have on the site? Should I remove the redundant links on the actual page that product falls on...or is this bad and should be removed altogether?0 -
Links from my homepage
I am redesigning my homepage completely. What criteria should I use to decide which pages to link to from the homepage?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0