Should I add rel=nofollow ?
-
Say I have an article that includes a list of many websites with ressources for the articles topic.
From a SEO perspective, should I add nofollow to them? some of them? all of them?
-
HI Alberto,
Keep in mind I have not seen your page. I am talking in general specifics. The over all point is if you have a link to another site which is there for reference the user there is no reason to not make it an actual link. Any reason you can think of not to make it a link would also be a reason to remove it.
If you feel you have too many links on a specific page then you probably do! Pick the most pertinent ones and axe the others.
There are ways to maximize link juice and page authority by using some more advanced SEO tactics, See Rand's post about link sculpting. I will say this is some advanced level planing and not something you would just single out one page to do.
Remember SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. White hat SEO deals with how you can best present your page to search engines with out frustrating your users. When you purposely make a change that negatively effects your users and possibly tricks search engines to rank you better you have crossed into grey or black hat SEO. Something that will eventually bit you in the ass.
The choice is of course yours, and if you would like me to look at the page in question you can PM me a link I will be happy to do so. I do stand by everything I said in all my replies while speaking in general terms.
Don
-
I agree from a user point of view, it should be a link. The links are all relevant, and high PR sites. But from a pure SERP/SEO point of view, it would be more beneficial to not link them (pain text), isn't that so?
thanks
-
Actually no I wouldn't recommend that.
The reason is if the link is helpful it should be a link right? From a users point of view do you not find it frustrating to see a link that is not a link?
My suggestion is to evaluate each site you're linking to, if they deserve the link leave it in. Otherwise simply remove the link.
The reason behind my suggestion is the way the internet and page rank / authority is supposed to work. When a web master find a link to a site that is beneficial to their sites users, then they link to them. This generates page authority to the linked site but also helps the web master serve their users. In turn it also associates the web masters site with the linked site.
The web has taken many twist and turns since the original method of passing link juice was developed. Tools such as robots.txt, nofollow noindex, and disavow have been added to deal with the changing environment. But, the core of the system still remains.
Hope this make sense,
Don
-
so would you recommend puting those websites in plain text (no link at all)? That seems to be the best option, from an SEO point of view, right?
-
If you mean a link like:
VS
Then yes, because the first one is not technically a link.
-
thanks of the answer. Question: If I just put the links in plain text, would that increase the linkjuice that is passed in my internal links, since I'm not passing any to those external sites?
-
HI Alberto,
Understanding the purpose of the NOFOLLOW tag is what would make your decision. In general you should NOFOLLOW.
Edit for Reference: Google NoFollow Tag
- Untrusted Content (like user generated un-moderated)
- Paid Links Or Paid Advertisements
- Links to Pages That Serve No Search Engine Value (sign up, registration, etc..)
In your case you have "resources" which in theory adds value to the page and the users experience. A single page with resource links is not going to hurt your site at all. Without seeing the exact page I would lean to say it would be fine as follow links. That being said, you want it to be tasteful non-spammy and indeed a boon to the user experience and not just a big list of garbage.
Hope this helps,
Don
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
-
Does we need to add a canonical tag with the mobile url in each desktop version as a result of mobile first index?
Hi, Does we need to add a canonical tag with the mobile url in each desktop version as a result of mobile first index? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut0 -
Add versioning to an xml sitemap?
Is there a way to add versioning to an xml sitemap? Something like <version>x.x</version> outside of the <urlset>?</urlset> I've looked at a bunch of sitemaps for various sites and don't see anyone adding versioning information, but it seems like it would be a common issue - I can't believe someone hasn't come up with some way to do it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATT_SEO0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags
Given that google have stated that duplicate content is not penalised is this really something that will give sufficient benefits for the time involved?Also, reading some of the articles on moz.com they seem very ambivalent about its use – for example http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsWill any page with a canonical link normally NOT be indexed by google?Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
Rel=canonical on image pages
Hi, Im working on a Wordpress hosted blog site. I recently did a "site:search" in Google for a specific article page to make sure it was getting crawled, and it returned three separate URLs in the search results. One was the article page, and the other two were the URLs that hosted the images that are found in the article. Would you suggest adding the rel=canonical tag to the pages that host the images so they point back to the actual context article page? Or are they fine being left alone? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Should I NoIndex NoFollow my BUYNOW page?
Hi, As stated in the title, I am wondering if I should NOINDEX NOFOLLOW my shopping cart page - it is actually a buy now page that receives in the URL the Item ID - only one item per purchase. I received duplication errors so now I added canonical and I wonder if I should simply remove it altogether. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Any idea why I can't add a Panoramio image link to my Google Places page?
Hey guys & gals! Last week, I watched one of the Pro Webinars on here related to Google Places. Since then, I have begun to help one of my friends with his GP page to get my feet wet. One of the tips from the webinar was to geotag images in Panoramio to use for your images on the Places page. However, when I try to do this, I just get an error that says they can't upload it at this time. I tried searching online for answers, but the G support pages that I have found where someone asks the same question, there is no resolution. Can anyone help? PS - I would prefer not to post publicly the business name, URL, etc. So, if that info is needed, I can PM. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | strong11 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0