Nofollow in site archutecture. Good or bad in 2013?
-
We have been using nofollow links to create a silo architecture. is this a good idea or should we stay away from using this on our site. Its an eCommerce site with about 3000+ pages so not sure of the best architecture.
ideas and suggestions on best practice welcome!
-
That does answer your question, but you still have the issue of so many links on every page. In my experience you don't need to stick to the "guideline" of 100 links per page, especially on an eCommerce site with multiple sub-categories all linked to from the navigation.
However, there are many ways around this. For example, you can link to main category pages and sub-category pages from the top nav, and only show the further tertiary categories and drilldown / faceted links in the sidebar for that category if you are on of the pages within that category. Make sense? This puts some of your product pages one click further away from the home page, but that is fine. I tend to cringe when I see totally FLAT architecture on an eCommerce site that big anyway.
Use of breadcrumbs, related product links, footer links, sitemaps and good top-level and sidebar navigation will ensure your entire site gets crawled easily and pagerank distributed properly without having thousands of links in the header navigation.
Good luck!
-
I think that's answered my question with a resounding no!
Thanks.
-
Bad, bad, bad. Not me, that Matt Cutts guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bVOOB_Q0MZY -
It was all about link juice flow.
We were also trying to optimize for the user navigation but this created lots of links in the nav. I can't work out how to help user nav without creating loads of links on page.
we have unique but thin content on the site as we are eCommerce. We are working on this but it is taking a lot of time and effort to fill up the site with good quality content.
could the use of nofollow be hurting our rankings?
-
I wouldn't use nofollow links for this purpose. The links are still going to dilute the pagerank you'd be sending on to other URLs being linked to elsewhere on the page, and if Google sees one link "nofollow" on a page they are thought to ignore subsequent, followable links to the same URL elsewhere on the page. A nofollow tag on a link isn't going to keep the page from being indexed in other ways either.
If you don't want the pages indexed there are other, better ways to achieve that, including robots meta tags and robots.txt disallows.
If you just want to optimize how pagerank flows throughout the site it would be better to focus on how and where you link to. For instance, do you really need all 100 footer links to every category from every category, or can you just link to other pages within that parent category? I would build a silo by removing links rather than nofollowing them.
Regarding the amount of pages and best architecture, it depends on the quality of those pages and whether you want them indexed. Example: If they are all unique pages with exclusive content that you want to rank Vs. a problem with duplicate content, thin content, indexable search pages, etc...
-
it was for content siloing for keywords but I'm starting to question the advice i was given on the subject.
-
I'd probably look at sculpting using the sitemap - internally restricting flow can been seen as a little odd unless its for say documents, checkout or a login area type thing. what isn't clear is what it your objective in performing this task. Because even if you nofollow to that page others externally could and the equation alters a little - if you don't want a page found maybe look at robots.txt too
-
no its not for external links its for the menu system and for internal link flow. just not sure if its a good idea. my site is www.centralsaddlery.co.uk if you want to see what I'm doing
-
it depends what you are putting as a no follow, do you mean for just external links?
not passing link juice as a silo can cause issues as search engines tend to favour all round "good egg" websites who are part of their community ... aka both receive and give 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
-
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Why is my m-dot site outranking my main site in SERPs?
My client has a WP site and a Duda mobile site that we inherited. For some reason their m-dot site is ranking on P1 of Google for their top KWs instead of the main site which is much more robust. The main site might rank beyond page 5 when the generic home page for their m-dot site appears on P1. Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Site Interlinking - footer and menu - whether to nofollow/remove
Hello, We've got a bunch of interlinking going on between the following sites: nlpca(dot)com thewealthymind(dot)com shop.nlpca(dot)com dynamicspinrelease(dot)com These are all owned and operated by the same people. Some linking is in the footer and some is in the menu or header. Could you take a look and tell me which interlinks you'd recommend nofollowing and which you'd recommend deleting entirely? We can always place a home page single link to replace those sitewides we delete or nofollow. I'm thinking we should delete everything in the footers and nofollow those in the menu or headers, placing a single dofollow link on the home page when deleting/nofollowing a sitewide link.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is my site being penalized?
I launched http://rumma.ge in February of this year. Because I'm using a domain hack (the Georgian domain), I'd really like to rank for just the word "rummage". After launching, I was steady at around page 4/5 on searches for "rummage". However since then I've tumbled out of the first 100. In fact I can't even find the site in the first 20 pages on Google for that search. Even a search for my exact homepage title text doesn't bring up the site, despite the fact that the site is still in the index. I'm wondering if one of the following could be the root cause: We have a ccTLD (.ge)--not sure about the impacts of this, but seems like it might not be the root cause because we were ranking for "rummage" when we first launched. Tried running an Adwords campaign but the site was flagged as a "bridge page" (working on getting this addressed). I'm wondering if this could have carryover impacts into natural search rankings? We've tried doing some press and built up a decent number of backlinks over the past couple of months, many of which had "rummage" in the anchor text. This was all organic, but happened over the span of a month which may be too fast? Am I being penalized? Beyond checking indexing of the site, is there a way to tell if I've been flagged for some bad behavior? Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm really confused by this since I feel like I've been doing things right and my rankings have been travelling downward. Thanks!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | minouye0 -
Linking to bad sites
Hi, I just have a quick question. Is it very negative to link to "bad" sites, such as online pharmacies, dating, adult sites, that sort of stuff? How much does linking to a "bad" site negatively affect a "good" site? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
What is a good content for google?
When we start to study SEO and how google see our webpage, one important point is to have good content. But, for beginners like me, we get lost on this. Is not so black and white: what for you is a good content? the text amount matters? there is any trick that all good content websites need to have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0 -
Building a mobile site.
We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0