What type of links should be followed and nofollowed internally?
-
We have submitted our sitemap.xml to search engines so now that they have that should we use a nofollow attribute on the sitemap.html? Do we even need a sitemap.html?
For other links on the site such as:
Contact us
About Us
Locations
and other phrases that we are not trying to rank for should we set these to nofollow?
-
Not necessarily. Yes, you shouldn't automatically nofollow every external link; however, nofollowed external links versus followed external links have to be treated differently.
Especially in cases of online journalism and blogging, it's not unheard of to link to a site that might be unsavory. Using a nofollow in that case (where otherwise, external links are usually followed) would clue crawlers in that "this site might be bad, don't ding us for it".
If 95% of your external links are spam/porn, and you nofollow one of those links, then, yes, you should expect to get smacked down. But, when you have a slightly shady in-context link that's nofollowed, and plenty of other good links that are followed, it's not going to be an issue.
-
Good point
-
If you are writing an article on spam or malware, you may want to link to such a site, but not be associated with it.
-
Hi Donnie,
One of the occasions when you should use nofollow is paid links.
If you are offering sponsored links to you partners, Google demands that you nofollow those links.
Cornel
-
"The only time you should use a no-follow is when you are linking to a external site that has a bad reputation, suchas a porn site or spam site, that you do not want to be associated with."
In which case, you shouldn't be linking to those sites anyway.
the 'nofollow' attribute was created many years ago to be used within comment systems, and not within a website link structure.
In my opinion, I fail to see any time in which you feel you should be adding nofollow to any external link. If you are linking to an external site, it should ONLY be to a site that is relevant to your site and of a reputable nature. Adding nofollow to that seems redundant.
If you add nofollow to all your outgoing links, I could only imagine that Googlebot starts thinking, "why are these guys adding all these links to sites they don't trust?"
-
You should not use no-follow in internal links at all. you would simply be robbing yourself of link juice.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
The only time you should use a no-follow is when you are linking to a external site that has a bad reputation, such as a porn site or spam site, that you do not want to be associated with.
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
-
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
New link explorer
I was checking this new tool which is really cool by the way and was wondering if I can outrank big guys with just content. I have a Domain authority of 28 with a spam score of 28 % Can I outrank with amazing content a site that hase a domain authority of 50 and a spam score of 1 % ? Should I ask for all my bad links to be removed so that my spam score goes down or doesn't it matter anymore those days and what matters is good content, link just don't count anymore ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Should party services directory switch to nofollow links? What are the implications?
Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c). However, they're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords. I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu. I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together. Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County) I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google. I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text. When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu) Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rnperki
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about? A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them. Many Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
Link Building with a Scholarship
One of my clients is using a scholarship to build links. We have a nofollow PR campaign getting ready to start and are doing some social marketing for the scholarship page on the site. We are also trying to get backlinks from highschools and colleges that link to scholarship opportunities. So far this has been a slow process. Does anybody have any advice for speeding any of this up? Has somebody ever done a campaign like this before? Is there some kind of database with financial aid contact info for a lot of schools? I contact a lot of schools and always tend to get put on the backburner.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
To recover from Penguin update, shall i remove the links or disavow links?
Hi, One of our websites hit by Penguin update and I now know where the links are coming from. I have chance to remove the links from those incoming links but I am a little confused whether i should just remove the links from incoming links or disavow the links? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Heavy Internal Linking Help
One of the sites I work on is a home improvement ecommerce website that does fairly well for its niche. One of the biggest problems that we're not sure how to adequately handle is a heavy internal linking issue. The homepage (http://www.fauxpanels.com/) has approx. 226 internal links which is mainly due to the navigation structure. There are far worse pages though (the Samples page http://www.fauxpanels.com/samples.php has over 800 internal links). For the most part, management doesn't want any massive changes to the navigation layout. The Top navigation bar has a number of dropdown menus when you hover, the Left Navigation Bar expands to show more choices, and the Bottom navigation bar in many instances is just repeats of links that can be found elsewhere. Also, the product links in the body of the page can be found linked in the Left Navigation. This is not what I would personally consider the best way to handle navigation but the Customer Service Department has gotten numerous calls and emails over the years about how much people love our navigation and how easy it is to find things. My thought was trying to lessen the amount of links by having things grouped more often into Category pages/hub pages where applicable so we can remove some of the links. We've also considered NoFollowing links but my understanding is that even if you NoFollow the link equity is still divided by the number of on-page links. So, any of you much more experienced SEOs have any idea how I can lessen the heavy internal linking without completely re-doing the site's navigation layout and not harming link equity, ranking, etc.? Or, conversely, would you consider having an average 200-300 internal links per page not to be a real issue given the positive effect it has apparently had on user experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
Blog links - follow or nofollow?
I need my memory refreshed here! Say, I've got a blog and some of the posts have links to recommended external sites and content. Should these be nofollowed? They're not paid links or anything like that, simply things relevant to the post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0