Why are the bots still picking up so many links on our page despite us adding nofollow?
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
I don't see 197 on that page I only see 42 external followed links. See the screenshot below:
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
it may be how the nofollow tag is formated? It should be;
and yours is rel='nofollow'
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Can I still monitor noindex, nofollow pages with Google Analytics?
I have a private/login site where all pages are noindex, nofollow. Can I still monitor external site links with Google Analytics?
Technical SEO | | jasmine.silver0 -
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Does adding subcategory pages to an commerce site limit the link juice to the product pages?
I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages. Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
If the order of products on a page changes each time the page is loaded, does this have a negative effect on the SEO of those pages?
Hello, a client of mine has a number of category pages that each have a list of products. Each time the page is reloaded the order of those products changes. Does this have a negative effect on the pages' rankings? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kerry_Jones2 -
Duplicate pages in Google index despite canonical tag and URL Parameter in GWMT
Good morning Moz... This is a weird one. It seems to be a "bug" with Google, honest... We migrated our site www.three-clearance.co.uk to a Drupal platform over the new year. The old site used URL-based tracking for heat map purposes, so for instance www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html ..could be reached via www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=menu or www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=sidebar and so on. GWMT was told of the ref parameter and the canonical meta tag used to indicate our preference. As expected we encountered no duplicate content issues and everything was good. This is the chain of events: Site migrated to new platform following best practice, as far as I can attest to. Only known issue was that the verification for both google analytics (meta tag) and GWMT (HTML file) didn't transfer as expected so between relaunch on the 22nd Dec and the fix on 2nd Jan we have no GA data, and presumably there was a period where GWMT became unverified. URL structure and URIs were maintained 100% (which may be a problem, now) Yesterday I discovered 200-ish 'duplicate meta titles' and 'duplicate meta descriptions' in GWMT. Uh oh, thought I. Expand the report out and the duplicates are in fact ?ref= versions of the same root URL. Double uh oh, thought I. Run, not walk, to google and do some Fu: http://is.gd/yJ3U24 (9 versions of the same page, in the index, the only variation being the ?ref= URI) Checked BING and it has indexed each root URL once, as it should. Situation now: Site no longer uses ?ref= parameter, although of course there still exists some external backlinks that use it. This was intentional and happened when we migrated. I 'reset' the URL parameter in GWMT yesterday, given that there's no "delete" option. The "URLs monitored" count went from 900 to 0, but today is at over 1,000 (another wtf moment) I also resubmitted the XML sitemap and fetched 5 'hub' pages as Google, including the homepage and HTML site-map page. The ?ref= URls in the index have the disadvantage of actually working, given that we transferred the URL structure and of course the webserver just ignores the nonsense arguments and serves the page. So I assume Google assumes the pages still exist, and won't drop them from the index but will instead apply a dupe content penalty. Or maybe call us a spam farm. Who knows. Options that occurred to me (other than maybe making our canonical tags bold or locating a Google bug submission form 😄 ) include A) robots.txt-ing .?ref=. but to me this says "you can't see these pages", not "these pages don't exist", so isn't correct B) Hand-removing the URLs from the index through a page removal request per indexed URL C) Apply 301 to each indexed URL (hello BING dirty sitemap penalty) D) Post on SEOMoz because I genuinely can't understand this. Even if the gap in verification caused GWMT to forget that we had set ?ref= as a URL parameter, the parameter was no longer in use because the verification only went missing when we relaunched the site without this tracking. Google is seemingly 100% ignoring our canonical tags as well as the GWMT URL setting - I have no idea why and can't think of the best way to correct the situation. Do you? 🙂 Edited To Add: As of this morning the "edit/reset" buttons have disappeared from GWMT URL Parameters page, along with the option to add a new one. There's no messages explaining why and of course the Google help page doesn't mention disappearing buttons (it doesn't even explain what 'reset' does, or why there's no 'remove' option).
Technical SEO | | Tinhat0 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Settle an argument re first links from a page? Anyone?
If we accept "the first link from a page to another is the one that transfers anchor text and PR" - does that then apply just the same for internal linking as it does with linking from domain to domain?
Technical SEO | | AidanMcCarthy0 -
How to measure number of links out from a page
Following on from earlier Q, what do you all use to count links out from a page. I believe there is a bing tool which does this, though rather than a list of sites a simple number would be ideal?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0