Moving from no follow to follow links on our eCommerce site
-
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.
-
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
-
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:- Determine how many pages you have on your site, the number of your URLs in your XML sitemaps might be a good start.
- Go into Google Search Console.
- Go to Crawl -> Crawl stats and take note of the average pages crawled per day.
- Divide the number of pages by the “Average crawled per day” number.
- 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.
-
You can go for it.
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
-
Malicious Link
Hello all, We're doing an adwords campaign, and Google has said that there is a malicious link on the website we're looking to advertise - so cannot launch the campaign. I've tried to go through Search Console (I am a novice BTW). And it says that "Domain properties are not supported at this time". Which I don't understand. Any advice please?!
Technical SEO | | PartisanMCR0 -
Paypal instead of Merchant's account and will the site still move up?
Hello, Will an Ecommerce site still move up in a niche if it only accepts PayPal and doesn't have a merchant's account on it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Transferring link juice on a page with over 150 links
I'm building a resource section that will probably, hopefully, attract a lot of external links but the problem here is that on the main index page there will be a big number of links (around 150 internal links - 120 links pointing to resource sub-pages and 30 being the site's navigational links), so it will dilute the passed link juice and possibly waste some of it. Those 120 sub-pages will contain about 50-100 external links and 30 internal navigational links. In order to better visualise the matter think of this resource as a collection of hundreds of blogs categorised by domain on the index page (those 120 sub-pages). Those 120 sub-pages will contain 50-100 external links The question here is how to build the primary page (the one with 150 links) so it will pass the most link juice to the site or do you think this is OK and I shouldn't be worried about it (I know there used to be a roughly 100 links per page limit)? Any ideas? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | flo20 -
Site links show spam
Hi folks, I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al. I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware. I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Old massive site, should I nofollow all out going links?
The company I work for is in the process of rebuilding our entire website profile. Our biggest site, FrenchQuarter.com ranks pretty well for our main term "French Quarter Hotels" And we use that to drive business directly to our hotel businesses. The site is very old and one I inherited, rebuilding it won't be a priority for another 9 months or so. This site act's as a bit of a directory for the city. There are links everywhere and it's probably passing link juice to a lot of businesses scott free. In the mean time would it benefit or hurt us if I went through and no-followed most of the links? Would nofollowing links help frenchquarter.com to rank any better than it does? And could I then direct some of that link juice directly at our hotel websites to boost those as well? My goal is to get our hotel websites to rank 1st page, we get exposure in the locations pack, for 2 of our 5 hotels, but placing below that is impossible with all the competition from the OTA's (expecia, bookit.com, etc) Seems near impossible no matter what my backlink profile looks like. Thanks for any feedback, Cyril
Technical SEO | | Nola5041 -
What i should do about bad links ?
Hi, my blog is http://www.dota2club.com/ and i have many bad links to my blog what i should do about that and how ? i started 10 days ago guest blogging but my bad links from before are hurting my blog. please help 🙂 thank you !!!
Technical SEO | | wolfinjo0 -
Can I turn off Google site links?
I thought at one time I had turned off the option to have Google sitelinks. I did this so that each of our pages that had a strong presence would occupy a unique slot on the first and second page of Google. This was important to us as we were battling some reputation management issues and trying to push out negative listings from the front page. Recently I noticed sitelinks were back up and when going into Google Webmaster Tools, I could figure out how to opt out of them. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BRConsulting0 -
Time on site
From what I understand, if you search for a keyword say "blue widgets" and you click on a result, and then spend 10 seconds there, and go back to google and click on a different result google will track that first result as being not very relevant. What I don't understand is what happens when (and this happens all the time, i did it today) you click on a result go to that page, find it (not?) relevant and then get distracted, phone call, or someone calls you into another room in the office. You end up accidentally leaving the tab open all day long, and never go back to the google search. So your time on site to google is what? infinity? there must be an upper cap here? at some point they must say, ok, the user is gone, time on site = our maximum = 5 minutes?!? Get me? any insight?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0