Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
-
Hello everyone.
I have searched on these forums for an answer to my concerns, and despite I found many discussions and questions about applying or not applying "nofollow" to internal links, I couldn't find an answer specific to my particular scenarios.
Here is my first scenario: I have an e-commerce site selling digital sheet music, and on my category pages our products are shown typically with the following format:
-
PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page
-
Short description text
-
"more info" link that takes to the same product page again
As you may notice, the "more info" link takes at the very same page of the PRODUCT TITLE link. So, my question is: is there any benefit to "nofollow" the "more info" link to tell SEs to "ignore" that link? Or should I leave the way it is and let the SE figure it out? My biggest concern by leaving the "nofollow" out is that the "more info" generic and repetitive anchor text could dilute or "compete" with the keyword content of the PRODUCT TITLE anchor text.... but maybe that doesn't really matter!
Here a typical category page from my site;
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html
My second scenario: on our product pages, we have several different links that take to the very same "preview page" of the product we sell. Each link has a different anchor text, and some other links are just images, all taking to the same page. Here are the anchor texts or ALT text of such same links:
"Download Free Sample" (text link)
"Cover of the [product title]" (ALT image text)
"Look inside this title" (ALT image text)
"[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text)
"This item contains one high quality PDF sheet music file ready to download and print." (ALT image text)
"PDF" (text link)
"[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text)
So, I have 7 links on the same product page taking the user to the same "product preview page" which is, by the way, canonicalized to the "main" product page we are talking about.
Here is an example of product page on my site:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html
My instinct is to tell SEs to take into account just the links with the "[product title] PDF file" anchor text, and then add a "nofollow" to the other links... but may that hurting in some way? Is that irrelevant? Doesn't matter? How should I move? Just ignore this issue and let the SEs figure it out?
Any thoughts are very welcome!
Thank you in advance.
-
-
Thank you guys,
I got it. I will remove all the internal nofollows from my site!
-
Paddy is right not to nofollow internal links (Actually Matt Cutts just addressed this a day or two ago in a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86GHCVRReJs
And Elias is absolutely right about the first link.
Sage advice gentlemen.
-
I agree with Paddy, don't use nofollow on internal links.
Google follows the first link to a page and ignores subsequent links according to a matt cutts web master video.
My advice would be to make sure that the first link in the page (code view) is the a rich link i.e. the name of the product rather than a 'more info' link.
-
As you said this has come up many times and my answer is always the same, NEVER use No-follow on internal links... ever. No-follow just throws page authority out the window. I haven't seen a good argument for using no-follow on internal links (bar on pages like "create account" that you don't want to index, but I think no-index on the pages themselves is a better option)
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
-
Optimization for "Search by Photos" feature
Howdy, fellow mozzers, Does anyone know what affects a given company photos show up in the "Search by Photos" section? I can't find any decent info.. Here is the link to SEL, describing the feature (not even google themselves seem to have an announcement about it). https://searchengineland.com/google-showing-mobile-search-by-photos-option-in-selected-local-verticals-323237 Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Software "card" carousel results
Hi all! Does anyone have advice for getting a software product to appear in the card results at the top of SERPs? Example https://www.google.com/search?q=budgeting+software&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS784US784&oq=budgeting+software&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2194j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 dzTpe2B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
Huge spike in "access denied" in search console
Hey Guys, We have seen a huge spike in "Access Denied" status in the google search console for our website and I have no idea why that would be the case. Is there anyone that can shed some light on what is going on or who can point me in the direction of an SEO specialist that we can pay to fix the issue?? Thanks denied.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fbchris0 -
I have implemented rel = "next" and rel = "prev" but google console is picking up pages as being duplicate. Can anyone tell me what is going on?
I have implemented rel="next" and rel = "prev" across our site but google console is picking it up as duplications. Also individual pages show up in search result too. Here is an example linkhttp://www.empowher.com/mental-health/content/sizeismweightism-how-cope-it-and-how-it-affects-mental-healthhttp://www.empowher.com/mental-health/content/sizeismweightism-how-cope-it-and-how-it-affects-mental-health?page=0,3The second link shows up as duplicate. What can i do to fix this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akih0 -
Nofollow links & nofollow blog comments - Should I remove
Hello, One of my website has quite a lot (~1000) nofollow blog comment links. Is it worth getting them removed if they are nofollow, could they be dragging the metric of my website down. Does anyone have any experience of this? The site only has about 5 follow links, something seems to be dragging the domain metrics down. Thanks Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomfifteen0 -
What are the ranking factors for "Google News"? How can we compete?
We have a few sport news websites that are picked up by Google News. Once in a blue moon, one of our articles ranks for a great keyword and shows in one of the 3 listings that Google News has in SERPS. Any tips on how we can we optimise more of our articles to compete in these 3 positions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betnl0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?
Howdy, I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues. The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below. We also use a Google shopping feed. I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0