Establishing if links are 'nofollow'
-
Wonder if any of you guys can tell me if there is any other way to tell google links are nofollow other than in the html (ie can you tell google to nofollow every link in a subdomain or something). I'm trying to establish if a couple of links on a very high ranking site are passing me pagerank or not without asking them directly and looking silly! Within the source code for the page they are NOT tagged as nofollow at present.
Hope that all makes sense
-
If you mean links to your site from some URL not on your site then you could do the following:
- Do a site:somesite.com/page to see if it is indexed, plus try and find in results
- Check the URL to you is clean - no redirects, no js, no frame etc
- Check their URL in OSE to see if there is any authority.
Otherwise if Google is not blocked from the other URL and there is no no-follow links on the page then Google is not instructed to no-follow. Therefore a small amount of link equity will pass - unless made negligible by
- The page authority is very poor
- there are multiple links on the page
-
You can also use Screaming Frog to look at the linking page--look in the "Meta & Canonical" tab to see if it's nofollow or not. [It is free for a limited number of pages.]
-
There is a neat tool for Firefox called "Highlight No-follow links" it does what it says and just puts a red highlight on no-follow links which is very handy. other suggestions above are really good too.
You can also use tools like Ahrefs, OSE, Majestic etc. to see no-follow links pointing towards you. Regards to the robots (meta or file) if it has "no-follow in there as seen here - http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt but this isn't completely the case. If you are worried don't be a few follow links won't do you a massive amount of hard if you're worried (not to mention you can always disavow).
-
My fault for muddying the waters sorry! It's not the page I am worried about but rather the links on the page to my site. They are not tagged as nofollow in HTML but I wondered if there was a way to check on the other methods of 'nofollowing' like using the robots.txt?
-
What's led you to think that, Mat?
-
quick way would be to type the url into the Google and see if it appears in SEPs or if you don't want to type in the url the article name and site:example.com
If the page has been around a while you can check to see its PA in Moz - but as the last Moz update was a while ago it won't have updated any new pages (not a great solution, but its a quick and easy - not always correct).
Alternatively send me a private message / post the url on here and I will have a look for you.
-
Thanks all! There is no mention of nofollow tags in the source but am still not sure if the page itself has been disallowed or nofollowed via the robots.txt file - anyone come across this before?
-
SEOquake is the other one I use, besides the Mozbar, btw.
-
Hi
Mozbar as mentioned above is the best tool. Its simple and easy to use.
But the source code is always the best.
Thanks
Andy
-
There are a number of ways, along with the source code. Open Site Explorer will tell you, as will the Mozbar. There are also browser plugins you can use.
-
If you're using Chrome, there are a few decent extensions for this. They highlight nofollow links with a red border or something similar but they aren't always 100%. Hope this helps.
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
-
NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW Mistake
One of our top organic landing page was set as "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" by "mistake". I took me about a week to realize this after I saw a drop of traffic on that page. I looked on Google to see if it was indexed and my fear were confirmed! After finding our that it was switched to "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" I switched it back to "INDEX,FOLLOW" and did an index request in our Google Search Console. Anyone else has run into a similar issue? Did you ever got the page inxed again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrankViolette2 -
Should party services directory switch to nofollow links? What are the implications?
Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c). However, they're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page?
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page? If I have 4 or 5 different hashtag link section pages , consolidated into one HTML Page, no chance to get one of the Hashtag Pages to appear as a search result? like, if under one Single Page Travel Guide I have two essential sections: #Attractions #Visa no chance to direct search queries for Visa directly to the Hashtag Link Section of #Visa? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
How hard would it be to take a well-linked site, completely change the subject matter & still retain link authority?
So, this would be taking a domain with a domain authority of 50 (200 root domains, 3500 total links) and, for fictitious example, going from a subject matter like "Online Deals" to "The History Of Dentistry"... just totally unrelated new subject for the old/re-purposed domain. The old content goes away entirely. The domain name itself is a super vague .com name and has no exact match to anything either way. I'm wondering, if the DNS changed to different servers, it went from 1000 pages to a blog, ownership/contacts stayed the same, the missing pages were 301'd to the homepage, how would that fare in Google for the new homepage focus and over what time frame? Assume the new terms are a reasonable match to the old domain authority and compete U.S.-wide... not local or international. Bonus points for answers from folks who have actually done this. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Is there any SEO advantage to sharing links on twitter using google's url shortener goo.gl/
Hi is there any advantage to using <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> to shorten a URL for Twitter instead of other ones? I had a thought that <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> might allow google to track click throughs and hence judge popularity.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Internal Javascript Links
Hi, We have a client who has internal links pointing to some relatively new pages that we asked them to implement. The problem is that instead of using standard HTML links, their developers have used javascript - e.g. javascript:GoTo... The new pages have links from the homepage (among others) and have been live for about 3-4 weeks now - yet are still to be indexed by Google, Bing & Yahoo. Is it possibe that Javascript links are making them difficult to be found? Thanks in advance for any tips.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasarrow0 -
Where to link to HTML Sitemap?
After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290