Why are the bots still picking up so many links on our page despite us adding nofollow?

[tonykelly]

We have been working to reduce our on-page links issue. On a particular type of page the problem arose because we automatically link out to relevant content. When we added nofollows to this content it resolved the issue for some but not all and we can't figure out why is was not successful for every one. Can you see any issues?

Example of a page where nofollow did not work for...

http://www.andor.com/learning-academy/4-5d-microscopy-an-overview-of-andor's-solutions-for-4-5d-microscopy

[DanaLookadoo]

ahhh, duh! Dr. Pete shed light on what we should be thinking about here. You're not getting messages for sending out too much PR but for too many links. He's right; nofollow will not remove them from being counted. Nofollow stops PR from being passed.

Link equity is a broader concept than PageRank. Link equity considers relevance, authority and trust, link placement, accessibility, any value of relevant outbound links, etc.  It sounds as if you need to focus more on how you implement the links on your site.

If you need to reduce links, as mentioned earlier, use AJAX as an external file if those links are needed on the page. If they don't offer any value, then remove them. I viewed your page earlier but cannot access it now. They didn't appear to help the user experience anyway. Often what's good for the user is good for Google.

[Dr-Pete]

The main issue with too many on-page links is just dilution - there's not a hard limit, but the more links you have, the less value each one has. It's an unavoidable reality of internal site architecture and SEO.

Nofollow has no impact on this problem - link equity is still used up, even if the links aren't follow'ed. Google changed this a couple of years back due to abuse of nofollow for PageRank sculpting.

Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of issues loading your site, even from Google's cache, so I'm not able to see the source code first-hand.

[jws8118]

I don't see 197 on that page I only see 42 external followed links.  See the screenshot below:

http://screencast.com/t/1p11W4jQkU

[DanaLookadoo]

This suggestion for AJAXing the tabs would put the content in a separate file. Such would be a great way to guarantee a reduction in on-page links!

Also, the suggestions to clean up those meta tags and the massive VIEW STATE are spot on. A little optimization will go a long way to ensuring the bots crawl all your pages. If you do have speed issues and crawl errors, it could be that the bots are not getting to subsequent pages to read your nofollows. Just a consideration of the whole pie.

[DanaLookadoo]

Yes, would nofollow all the links.

To address the mystery, are you sure your other pages have since been crawled? Or is it that you are still getting warnings after subsequent crawls?

[sprynewmedia]

Whoa! Your view state is HUGE (That's what she said).

I couldn't decode it but somewhere along the lines the programmer didn't turn off session management and, likely, the entire copy of the page is encoded in the view state.  This is causing load speed issues.

[sprynewmedia]

You meta tags are in more trouble then your link count:

id="MetaDescription" name="DESCRIPTION" content="Page Details" />

AND

name="Description" />

I see you are using DNN: what version and what module are you using?  There are a ton of things one can do to DNN to make it SEO enhanced.

[sprynewmedia]

My suggestion is to try AJAXing the tabs.  If the outbound links are more of a concern then the keywords of the link, AJAX loading of the tab content would remove them from consideration.  Google won't index content pulled in from an external source.

However, be careful to put a rel="nofollow" on the link that loads the content as you don't want SEs indexing the source.

Do not put a meta nofollow in the head, it will kill all links on the page and seriously mess up your link flow.  Your use of rel="nofollow" is correct in the context of the specific link tags.

I wouldn't sweat the shear number of links - the 100 count is a left over from the days when spiders only downloaded 100k from the page.  It has since risen to the point that the practical limitations of over 100 links is more pressing (IE, do you visitors actually value and use that many links?)

If each link is valuable and usable, no need to worry.  If not, perhaps there is a structural way to reduce the count.

Also, load the footer by AJAX  onscroll or on demand.  Assuming all of the pages can be found in the top navigation, the bottom links are just exacerbating  your issues.  Primarily, this section is giving far too much weight to secondary or auxiliary pages.

For instance, your Privacy Policy only needs to be linked to where privacy is a concern (ie the contact form).  Good to put it on the home or about pages too if you have a cookie policy.

[tonykelly]

Hi Karl,

Would this suggestion not stop crawling to all links on the page?

Also, the issue is we have seen the rel='nofollow' work on other pages and reduce our warnings but then for some pages it has not. This is where the mystery lies.

[KarlBantleman]

it may be how the nofollow tag is formated? It should be;

and yours is rel='nofollow'

[tonykelly]

Hi James,

Thanks for responding. The issue is that we are still getting a link count of 197 on page links when there is not this many links on the page.

[jws8118]

What do you mean the nofollow did not work?  I noticed on the example page that some of your external links in the papers section are nofollow while the videos are not nofollowed.