Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Prevent link juice to flow on low-value pages
-
Hello there!
Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages.
I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO.
What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this?
- Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links?
- Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages?
- Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file?
- Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)
-
Mmh, good point. Never heard that "privacy policy page" could be a trust signal. Is there an article somewhere that talks about this?
Well, I took those two pages as an example... but my question was about avoiding link juice to flow on non-SEO pages in general.
Thanks a lot for your answers!
-
Exactly, and what I also try to explain to people is that privacy policy type page is additional signal for Google when they try to understand the type of site you are and how trustworthy it is. Why in the world would you noindex something like that?
-
As I understand it nofollow still dilutes your link juice even though it does not pass PR (theoretically).
Google made this announcement to combat PR sculpting in 2009. Here is a post from Rand about it.
Unlsee something has changed that I am not aware of you could link in an iFrame and Google will not see it, nor will it dilute your PR passed out.
-
Great suggestions. I've recently combined some pages (login/register, about/contact/ToS/privacy, and a few others) and have been very happy with the results. I removed 8 links from every page.
I am also thinking about removing some more links from my product pages, to try and keep the most juice on those pages. Those pages don't need the same navigation as the homepage.
-
It depends on what your purpose is.
If you want them totally block from being index then putting the page in the robots.tx fil or using a robots meta tag would work fine.
If you just want to de-emphasize the page to the search engines you can use nofollows or javascript links on footer/header links.
One thing that we have done is to combine some of these pages (terms and privacy) into one page to cut down on the number of total links on each page.
You could also not include the privacy page link on every page (depending on your site) but just link it from certain pages that collect sensitive data (near the form).
I hope this helps. The main thing to remember is that each site is different so you will have to adjust your tactics depending on precisely what you are trying to accomplish.
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
-
Shifting target keyword to a new page, how do we rank the internal page?
I have been targeting one keyword for home page that was ranking between the postilion 6-7 but was never ranking on 1st as there were 2 highly competitive keywords targeted on the same page, I changed the keyword to an internal service page to rank it on 1st, I have optimized the content as well but the home page is still ranking on 11th, how do I get the internal page rank on that keyword
On-Page Optimization | | GOMO-Gabriel0 -
Will Google Count Links Loaded from JavaScript Files After the Page Loads
Hi, I have a simple question. If I want to put an image with a link to another site like a banner ad on my page, but do not want it counted by Google. Can I simply load the link and banner using jQuery onload from a separate .js file? The ideal result would be for Google to index a script tag instead of a link.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com1 -
Category pages, should I noindex them?
Hi there, I have a question about my blog that I hope you guys can answer. Should I no index the category and tag pages of my blog? I understand they are considered as duplicate content, but what if I try to work the keyword of that category? What would you do? I am looking forward to reading your answers 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | lucywrites0 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Home page and category page target same keyword
Hi there, Several of our websites have a common problem - our main target keyword for the homepage is also the name of a product category we have within the website. There are seemingly two solutions to this problem, both of which not ideal: Do not target the keyword with the homepage. However, the homepage has the most authority and is our best shot at getting ranked for the main keyword. Reword and "de-optimise" the category page, so it doesn't target the keyword. This doesn't work well from UX point of view as the category needs to describe what it is and enable visitors to navigate to it. Anybody else gone through a similar conundrum? How did you end up going about it? Thanks Julian
On-Page Optimization | | tprg0 -
Footer link to home page?
Quick question - is it a best practice to add a footer link on each page of a website that points back to your home page, with the anchor text being your official brand name?
On-Page Optimization | | Bandicoot0 -
SEO value of "in the news" links on home page?
Notice more sites have an "in the News" section on the home page, or something similar like press releases... Apart from providing users fresh content, is there an SEO value to this? What is the explanation for this? Have a feeling the answer is obvious but just not too sure Thanks a lot.
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Passing value in a subdomain
Hi guys, I am planning of setting up a blog within a client's website, due to limitations to their server environment, I can only setup the blog in a subdomain, I have read in some articles saying subdomains don't pass value as well as subfolders. My questions are: Is it true that subdomains can't pass SEO value? For example, if I set up a blog (say blog.mydomain.com), will that improve long tail searches for my website (mydomain.com)? What are some recommendations for subdomains so that it passes more value back to the root domain (for example, internal linking from subdomain back to root domain) Thanks guys.
On-Page Optimization | | NextDigital510