Should i remove the nofollow from mediawiki?
-
We have a website which uses mediawiki for public documentation. The moz crawler keeps nagging us that 50% of our sites have the nofollow-metatag. (And noindex for that matter). This is information pages and such in mediawiki.
From a SEO perspective: Should we remove these tags? I assume they probably do not hurt?
If we shouldn't remove the tags: Is there any way to get moz to ignore these pages so we can get rid of this "noise" in the moz-panel?
-
The nofollows are automatically created by mediawiki.
I'll try to find a solution for removing them i guess. Thank you for your input.
-
Ahh ok I see now.
Even though you have a nofollow on your link in the navigation from your url to your wiki, the pages will still be indexed! Even if the links are not being followed by search engines they are still being indexed by them-just want to make that clear. Also, it's important to note that even if Google reads a nofollow tag they still have an option to follow it anyway. Because of the open source platform you are using, I'm not sure if there's a way to stop the crawl from indexing the link between your url and your wiki. That might take some fancy foot work. That would be the only way to get the nofollow percentage removed…but you really don't want your wiki pages to not be indexed anyway.
Moz is reflecting what the crawl bots see…such as Google. You can't tell it to not show you certain things unless you alter your code, .htaccss, or robots files to change the way the site is being crawled.
As I stated earlier…having a lot of nofollows doesn't necessarily hurt your SEO, but it will not bring you the benefits of followed links that pass link juice and page rank.
I understand it's hard to see the real issues to address when you are flooded with this other stuff, but I'm not sure you have many other options unless you want to remove the nofollows.
Just curious…why do you use so many nofollows anyway? Or is it automatically generated by wiki?
-
Hi Adam.
Thank you for the good replies.
The url to the wiki: http://docs.host1.no/wiki
Url to main page: https://host1.no
"Complaints" from the moz.com-engine:
#1: (mediawiki-problem)
Crawl Issue Found: Use of 'nofollow' Tag
49% of site pages are tagged with the nofollow META attribute#2: (mediawiki-problem)
Crawl Issue Found: 404 Errors
8% of site pages served 404 errors during the last crawlExample of sites Moz.com complains about noindex/nofollow on:http://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=infohttp://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=historyhttp://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=editAnd so on.I assume google won't mind this as it's pages that really don't need to be indexed. But it would be nice to get moz' crawler to ignore these errors as they might mask other actual problems by the amount of errors i get. When i get 1000+ errors from this it's hard to find the real problems.
-
I'm still not entirely sure about how your site is structured but I'll give it a shot…
Firstly, the noindex tag is only for pages. It tells the crawl to not index an entire page and stops it from ranking. That tag is meant for the section of the page. Nofollow tags are found within the link and are meant to stop the transfer of page authority…so you are essentially telling the crawler bots that the links are external and/or not totally relevant/trustworthy. Nofollow shouldn't be used really on internal links within your site pages because you want to spread the page rank and authority and receive the SEO benefits of that.
It's probably telling you there is a problem because you are essentially stopping the flow of link juice within your site and from sharing page rank and authority with other trustworthy/relevant sites.
So why have you made them nofollow in the first place? Maybe you can assess why and where to use the nofollow so that it is beneficial. I guess it's not necessarily a "problem" …but you are not receiving any possible benefits from limiting your nofollow links.
Hope that helps!
-
The links within the site (within mediawiki to be specific) is noindex + nofollow. This due to it being information-sites and such in mediawiki.
Not sure what to do with them, but it's fairly annoying that moz lists it as a problem with "1000 internal links having nofollow" if it's not really a problem at all.
-
Are you saying that your sites are noindex/nofollow or are the links within the site nofollow?
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
-
Remove all stop words from permalink?
I saw many websites theses days remove stop words from the URL, How important is to remove stop words from the URL?
On-Page Optimization | | varunrupal0 -
Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?
My website is an ecommerce and we have on homepage about 470 links ! 1. We have a top bar with my account, login, faq, home, contact us and link to a content page. 2 . Then we have multistore selection 3. Then we have the departament menu, with several parants + child category links 4. Then we have a banner 5. Then we have a list of the recently sold and new products. 6. then we have an image grid with the most important cms/content pages (like faq, about us, etc) 7. then we have footer, with all info pages, contact us, about us, my account etc. There are some links that are repeted 2, 3 times. For a user it is easier to find the informations but I'm not sure how search bots (google) deal with that. So I was thinking on how can I have around 150 links to be followed. To remove the links from the page is not possible. What about to add nofollow to repeted links and some child category, as the spider will crawl the father and will access child on the next page? Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | qgairsoft0 -
What to do with removed pages and 404 error
I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Should I use nofollow when interlinking large, networked sites?
My company runs a network of very large networked sites, each with thousands of content pages. In our main navigation we are currently not nofollowing links between these networked sites. The links appear on every single page in the top navigation, and there are thousands of pages on each site. I am worried this will look to Google like we have suspiciously received thousands of links from one domain - one link from every page on the domain. Should we be nofollowing these navigation links between the different sites in our network?
On-Page Optimization | | Natasha90040 -
Removing text from Homepage - Bad idea?
Hi Mozzers, I've just read this great article: http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-build-a-great-online-fashion-brand-34-things-that-really-amazing-fashion-retailers-do I'm working with my wife on a small (hopefully, growing) fashion website www.vintageeheirloom.com One of the points was not to directly sell on the homepage, rather draw customers into different areas of the site. Seems good advice and it's followed by many big brands online. As a small company, doing fairly well for some targeted keywords, do you think it would be a good or bad idea for me to remove most, or all of the text on my homepage. The main emphasis of our site is vintage Chanel and using the tool nTopic I score 99% relevancy for 'Vintage Chanel'. Removing would certainly affect this. Obviously I could amend my Vintage Chanel shopping category to include all this. I'd be grateful if you have any thoughts / similar experience. Thanks ! Kevin
On-Page Optimization | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Removing old URLs that are being used for my on page optimization?
Is there a way to remove old URL's that are still being used for my keywords for my on page optimization? They are giving me grades of F since they no longer exist and if I change the URL to the current one, the grade becomes an A, but they are still showing after the new crawl.
On-Page Optimization | | Dirty0 -
It has been recommended that we remove the number of links in our footer, should we?
We have a pretty user friendly footer with almost an entire site-map on it. It's similar to many e-commerce company footers, and I think it's useful to the user. SEO professionals have recommended that to reduce the number of links on any given page on our site we should compress our footer and only show the headers, thus removing many links. This in my opinion is a disservice to the user and makes the site not look as good, but maybe it's a good idea for SEO to get rid of so many links per page? What do you think? (pic attached) Screen_shot_2011-08-05_at_3.54.53_PM.png
On-Page Optimization | | aran0881 -
Removed listings: 404, internal links or redirect?
For a classifieds web site with medium/high turnover for the various listings: How would you deal with pages of removed listings? a) would you be "honest" and return a 404 since the listing is not available anymore? b) would you maintain historical data about deleted listings so that you can try and 301 redirect to a relevant search results page? c) would you keep the page alive (maybe add a noindex meta tag?) and show links to multiple relevant search results pages in an effort to strengthen internal linking?
On-Page Optimization | | seo-cat0