Follow or no follow?
-
Should I add NOFOLLOW to the links in the footer of my site like "about us", "Contact us" etc because they are in the footer they are on every page so would this harm SEO in any way?
-
No need to add nofollow to the footer links. Keep it natural.
-
Oh and one final thing, I have a menu system that uses ajax, Google reports too many links on the page because it has the main link eg ceiling-lighting.html but then you can choose things like colour so it would change it to ceiling-lighting.html?colour=brass+supplier=another etc is this damaging to the site?
-
Thanks for the replies, I will leave them as they are, one other thing with regards to nofollow, does having more than one link to a page cause problems? for example on my product page the product title leads to the product so does clicking on the image and there is also a "more info" link that has the same url
-
Is page sculpting basicaly trying to manipulate crawlers into roaming your site more to specific pages to boost their rankings?
-
The only pages you should be using nofollow on would be any pages you don't want to be found in Google. PageRank sculpting is long dead (or so Google says) so you won't be able to horde your page strength.
Matt Cutts does use nofollow on his website, but only on his RSS feed. I go a step further and also nofollow any cart pages for ecommerce stores and any login/auth pages. Just anything that shouldn't be in search results.
I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I don’t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results. Even that’s not strictly necessary, because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages.
--Matt Cutts
-
Pages such as the about us page can have real value to your readers so definitely leave these as followed links. Likewise, if your contact page has important information such as telephone numbers or physical address, you want these pages indexed.
Rand wrote a post on NoFollow sculpting which dates back to 2008 but is still pretty relevant.
-
I don't see why you would want to do that; I would assume you would want the link juice on your site to spread freely through all the links so that each page is benefiting. If you nofollow the links then any links you follow will still be devalued by the nofollow links and the nofollow links themselves will not provide any juice to the rest of your site.
I would say that nofollowing your navigation links is therefore a bad idea
-
I would leave these as normal links.
No-follow is designed for links that you don't want to pass value. This could include advertisements (Google wants paid advertisements to be no-follow) and comments on your blog.
There was a previous theory that no-following internal links would result in the other links on the page passing more value (page sculpting) but this was debunked by Google. An internal link with a no-follow would not pass link value and the link value would be lost (not funneled to the do-follow links).
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
-
Rel=canonical vs noindex/follow - tabs with individual URLs
Hi everyone I've got a situation that I haven't seen in quite this way before. I would like some advice on whether I should be rel=canonicalzing of noindexing/following a range of pages on a clients website. I've just started working on a website that creates individual URLs for tabs within each page which has resulted in several URLs being created for each listing: Example URLs: hotel-downtown-calgary hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery?tab hotel-downtown-calgary?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/map?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area?tab Google has indexed over 1500 pages with the "?tab" parameter (there are 4380 page indexed for the site in total), and also seems to be indexing some of these pages without the "?tab" parameter i.e. ("hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews" instead of "hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab") so the amount of potential duplication could be more. These tabbed pages are getting minimal traffic from organic search, so I've got no issues with taking them out of the index - the question is how. There are the issues I see: Each tab has the same title as the other tabs for each location, so lots of title duplication. Each individual tab doesn't have much content (although the content each tab has is unique). I would usually expect the tabs to be distinguished by the parameters only, not have unique URLs - if that was the case we wouldn't have a duplication issue. So the question is: rel=canonical or noindex/follow? I can see benefits of both. Looking forward to your thoughts!
On-Page Optimization | | Digitator0 -
Can we use internal no-follow links without negatively affecting rankings
we are creating a site structure for a travel website. the site homepage has a top navigation bar with 8 top level links and a total link count of 33 links in this (within menus). There are also 10 footer and ad-hoc links As this top navigation bar is a site-wide navigation, when entering s specific "travel destination" page, the "travel destination" page has its own contextual links and reference links, making the total inks on the destination page approx 107. do you think its ok to make all links in the top navigation bar no follow on all pages except the homepage? how would you approach this to create less links to maintain effective link-juice flow to required pages
On-Page Optimization | | Direct_Ram0 -
NOINDEX, FOLLOW on product page - how about images indexing?
Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird12290 -
How to re-follow using the WPSEO plugin
Hello, I unindexed numerous blog low quality blog posts and nofollowed them at the same time using the Advanced meta tab for the Yoast WPSEO plugin. I am trying to reindex them, which I figured out and can successfully do, What I cannot figure out is these posts will not return to follow status and remain nofollow. I have been recreating the blog posts, but this is very time consuming. Is there some way to do this without have to reduplicate a new blog post? I Googled this and searched MOZ with no luck. thank you Mike
On-Page Optimization | | crazymikesapps10 -
Best Way To Pass Rank To Follow Up Article?
What is the best way to pass rank to a follow-up article? For example, we write an article "Product A Rumors" that ends up ranking #1. When Product A is released, we write an article called "Product A Review". What is the best way to pass rank from the first pre-release article to the second post-release article? We don't want to do a simple 301 redirect as we want readers to be able to go back to the first article to see the progression of the Product A life-cycle. Also, should we go back and edit the old article to add a link to the new? Should we add a link in the new article to the old? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
Should "contact" and "Privacy Policy" pages be no-followed?
I have a few pages like the contact and privacy policy page that I could really care less about as far as whether people visit them, or whether the search engines index them. They also don't have any sort of unique content on them... pretty much duplicates of what you'd probably find on hundreds of other websites. Would it be logical then to just nofollow those pages? I just don't know if maybe there's something hidden that I'm not thinking of. For example, maybe Google wants to see that your website has a privacy policy, and by excluding it, you're actually hurting yourself.
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
Internal Followed Links:
Ran Open site explorer on my site: www.psbsperakers.com It is saying that I only have "1" Internal followed link could somebody tell me what that means... and maybe take a look at my site and see it this is a quick fix?
On-Page Optimization | | kevin48030 -
Follow up on "Canonical Tag Placement - Every Page?"
But if it is like Pete said, I don't understand why e.g. SEO Moz has a Canonical Tag on this Page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps Which leads to the exact same page!? What is the benefit of doing so? Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Here4You0