How to minimalise links in your footer
-
Hi guys,
I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at.
Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website.
I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/
and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links.
because I do found also some negative comments on this approach
http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow
I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.
-
Hi Letty,
I agree with the others here. There are exceptions, but for the most part you want Google to be able to follow most of the links on your site. The rule can be broken, but as a best practice there's usually no harm in following your links.
That said, I'm a big, huge fan of link consolidation and faceted navigation.
I've seen a lot of positive results from sites that have cleaned up and consolidated thier footer links, so I'm hopeful about what you're doing!
-
I second the dofollow advice from Oleg. Nofollow is not the way to go here.
I just want to add that your footer links need to be "relevant" to a person coming in to ANY page on your site. That's how I try to build them. Obviously there are some common ones, home, contact, etc. If the link in the footer is only specific to a particular part of your website and wouldn't be helpful to someone coming into a different section, then remove them. If it will help ANYONE no matter what page they are on, then keep them.
-
The opinions about the usage of internal nofollow links are mixed, but since Google changed how they treat nofollowed links using nofollow for internal links is not such a good idea.
Basically you are loosing link juice.
Now, what you can do, is to have (if possible) targeted links in the footer (if you are using WP you can accomplish that by using conditional tags).
The idea is to let PR flow naturally. This is the conclusion of my readings.
Spare 2 minutes and check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4SAPUx4Beh8
-
If you are trying to consolidate link authority by changing some links to be nofollow, that won't work. This would have worked a few years back when nofollow was used for pagerank sculpting, but G has changed the way these links are treated.
I would dofollow all the internal links on your site.
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Directory links with no follow
Hi I'm researching competitor backlinks & they have a lot of directory links which are no follow - but they rank very well. Is this type of link building even allowed by google? I know they they aren't allowed followed directory links, but will no following them help with rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Disavowing Affiliate Links - Domain or Actual Affiliate Link?
Hi everyone, Hope you're all having a great day, I have a question in regards to a site which I am about to disavow. Over the past 2 months a certain page of ours has dropped from the 2nd page, all the way to the 7th. I haven't been able to diagnose why, however, yesterday I discovered that a site has been using an Lafitte link on his sidebar, the link is a do-follow. Webmaster tools indicates that this site has linked to us over 24,000 times. I understand that this link could potentially ruin our rankings - however, in terms of disavowing, what is the best approach here? Do I disavow their domain, or do I disavow the actual affiliate link also? The link is placed within an image, once the image is clicked it redirects you to another link for a second then redirects to our money site. We have got in touch with our affiliate program and they have made the link a no-follow, however, we are pretty certain this site is causing issues for us and we want to go ahead and disavow. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Should I have as few internal links as possible?
On most pages of my site i have a Quick Links section, which gives x3 cross sales links to other products, a newsletter sign up link, link to Blog, x4 links from images to surveys, newsletters, feedback etc. Will these links be hurting my optimal SEO juice between pages, should the number of internal links be kept to a minimum? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk if that helps. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash0 -
Different Hosting Accounts for Linking?
I have several different sites which link to each other (for valid reasons...sister companies etc). Would it be better if these were hosted from different web hosting firms? And if they are hosted by the same hosting company would it be better if they had different accounts and different IP addresses? Not sure I understand C blocks etc. Any tutorial on here about that? I wouls assume it would look better to Google if the links were not from the same IP address. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0 -
Linking and non-linking root domains
Hi, Is there any affect on SEO based on the ratio of linking root domains to non-linking root domains and if so what is the affect? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Should I remove all rel=nofollow links?
I have a 60 page site that had some nofollow links sprinkled throughout, 50% of which are probably on its mailto: email links. Should I remove all nofollows all in one go, or just the mailto links first, and later the others? Or has anyone had any negative effects in 2012 from this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0