Nofollow tags
-
So on the homepage, should all the links like privacy, contact us, etc...be rel="nofollow" ?
I want to get a better handle on passing as much link juice on homepage to important internal pages as I can, and want to get it right.
Thanks in advance.
-
What about 12 outbound links to external client sites not related to your service.
-
unfortunately, if you can't place a NOINDEX meta tag due to limitations of the CMS then you probably won't be able to place a rel=nofollow either... leaving you with a disallow in your robots.txt.
-
what if you can't place noindex into the html head (limitation of the cms) would a exclude in the robots be enough on its own? (or at least better than nofollow links to the page)
-
simply exclude or 'disallow' the file path in the Robots.txt. Then place NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW meta tag on those pages (in the HTML head before the body). If you have important links on those pages then use the meta tag NOINDEX, FOLLOW. I hope this helps... please ask for clarification if you need.
-
Yes - follow the link in my expanded answer above... the ink points to Matt Cutts original article from February 2009 explaining how/when/why the change was made.
-
"They changed this (I think in 2009) to : If you had 10 links on a page and 5 were nofollowed each link would still only pass on 1 PR point. The remaining 5 points essentially disappear into thin air."
R u 100% sure about this? any sources to back this up?
Thanks
-
You are "over my head" lol.
So for sitewide contact, privacy, etc...what is the best thing to do?
Thanks!
-
Haha! For some reason I didn't see the other post... thought I was the only responder.
Be well!
-
Anthony, I never said I disagree with you. I did not see your answer at first, I must have opened the thread before you posted your answer. reading your answer now yes, we are in agreement.
-
I'm confused about what you are disagreeing with me about... there is the meta NOFOLLOW tag that is placed at the page level and the more granular rel=nofollow attribute at the link level. They are not interchangeable but simply give more macro or micro control over links on a page. If you read my answer carefully you will see that we are in complete agreement over link decay using the rel=nofollow attribute on individual links.
-
No you should not.
When the nofollow tag first came out you could "sculpt" page rank by saying which pages you can pass it on to, this is no longer the case. Google made a change a few years back to stop people from doing this. An example would be:
When nofollow first came out: If you page had 10 links on it, each link would pass on 1 point of page rank (PR). If you nofollowed 5 of these links then each link without the nofollow tag would then pass on 2 points.
They changed this (I think in 2009) to : If you had 10 links on a page and 5 were nofollowed each link would still only pass on 1 PR point. The remaining 5 points essentially disappear into thin air.
So by adding nofollow to internal pages you are wasting your PR, rather let it be passed on to your less important pages which will return a certain amount back to the top level if you linking structure is correct. Only use nofollow for external links which you don't want to pass on PR to e.g. If it could be considered a bad neighbourhood etc. This may not be 100% how it works but the basic concept is correct, there are extensive explanations of this on Matt Cutts blog.
-
First there was the NOFOLLOW meta tag for page-level exclusion and then Google adopted the more granular rel=nofollow attribute for individual links on a page. I find that too many SEOs overuse the rel=nofollow attribute when there is a much more elegant solution available. The reason for this is now myth formerly known as the abused tactic called PageRank sculpting. I had a well-known culture/nightlife site in NYC as a client that had placed literally thousands of rel=nofollow attributes on links throughout the site... granted this does not seem to be your problem but I digress...
To illustrate my point, Matt Cutts discusses how rel=nofollow attributes affect how Google passes PageRank to other parts of your site (or more precisely how nofollows decay the amount of link juice passed). In the case of a few pages or even large directories, etc, I would do the following:
- Disallow crawling of less valuable pages via Robots.txt
- Use the meta exclusion NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW tag at the page level - unless these pages pass valuable link juice/anchor text to other parts of the site then use NOINDEX, FOLLOW (page is not indexed but important links are followed)
- Also, leave these pages out of your XML sitemap(s) - although you may want leave them in the HTML sitemap and place a granular rel=nofollow at link-level in the case of a 404 error page for usability purposes or required privacy statement for landing pages.
Saving your Googlebot crawl budget for only high value pages is a great way to get more of those pages in the Google index providing you with more opportunity to promote your products, services, etc. Also, limiting the number of rel=nofollows used and allowing link juice (or Page Rank) to flow more freely throughout your site will prove beneficial.
-
There was a time I would have said yes. Nowadays its hardly worth the trouble.
However, if its easy to implement, why not? You might get some marginal benefit out of it.
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-return tag error
Am receiving a no-return tag error on Search Console for pages in our site that are unrelated. Originating Page: https://www.eginnovations.com/in-the-news/performance-assurance-a-key-to-virtual-desktop-success Alternate URL: https://www.eginnovations.com/fr/ There is a link to the /fr/ page in the language version at the top of the page but I can't figure out why this would be throwing an error from the originating page. Any help would be appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | eGInnovations0 -
Ratio follow/nofollow outbound links
Dear all, So far, I couldn't find any satisfying answer to my problem - I hope you might be able to help: Due to the fact that our website consists of user-generated content, we've got many many outbound links to other sites. Until now, it was possible to assign a follow-attribute to these links. In the ages of "pandas" however, we realised we had to limit this possibility as well as the amount of outbound follow links already published. My question now is whether there is some kind of rule of thumb as to what ratio of outbound follow and nofollow links is advisable. I'd appreciate any ideas or comments. Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | Mulle0 -
Penalty for Changing Home Page Title Tags
Hey Mozzers I'm certain of the answer to this question, however I wanted to get some input from the experts in Moz-land to hopefully provide some additional perspective. I recently disagree with a client's assertion that there is some penalty Google levels for changing the title tags of your home page. Now, I understand changing the title tags can influence serp rankings, however, is anyone aware of some penalty Google levels for simply changing the title tags? Most of what I've read and experienced has people changing them all the time without some phantom penalty. It seems to me a problem of correlation = causality, in that people often attribute a drop to an action that may not have actually been the cause. Anyway, if you have any particular insight on this top I would appreciate it greatly. thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BrandLabs0 -
Wordpress Title Element tag too long?
So apparently when I add the name of the blog within Wordpress, the name of the blog shows up after the the main title of each blog post and page. So trying to keep the title element >70 characters, how does one name the Wordpress blog as mine is/was: Lake Tahoe wedding photographer / Heidi Huber Photography and keep that only on the intro page and leave each page of the blog and the titles of the blog posts to not have "Lake Tahoe wedding photographer added to the end of the Title Element? Anyone have any idea? I also had gone in at one point and updated every single Title on each page/post using Yoast's SEO and the SEOMOZ crawl is still coming up with over 216 caution errors for the title page. Thank you so much for any advice! Heidi
On-Page Optimization | | hmhuber0 -
I am optimizing title tags and was wondering if it makes a difference if I use "commas" in between keywords that are synonyms or should I use "and" instead?
For example: "pants, trousers at pants.com" or "pants and trousers at pants.com".
On-Page Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
tagged as duplicate content?
Hello folks, I'm new to SEOmoz . I was looking at our Crawl Diagnostics and found that some of our blog posts that have been commented on were tagged as duplicate content. For example: http://thankyouregistry.com/blog/remarriages-and-gift-registries/ http://thankyouregistry.com/blog/remarriages-and-gift-registries/comment-page-1/ I'm unsure how to fix these, so any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | GiftReg0 -
Fixing Wordpress Title and Description Tag Placement
I know how important the title and description tag are and I know it is important to have them place at the top of the code. However, when I view the source on a Wordpress template, I see it looks messy. Here is an example of what the source looks like. Is there a plugin or an adjustment to be made so the code is cleaner? To get rid of spaces and blank lines in code. Or should I just not worry about the way the code looks? Notice the first example has a break after the <title>, then after the title there is this</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><strong><em><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> </em></strong></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><strong><em> </em></strong>then the description? Can that be moved?</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span><head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span><title></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span>tite text goes here <span> </span></title> " /> Here there are no breaks after <title>and the <title> is directly above the description</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><title>tite text goes here</title>
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0 -
Canonical Tag for a 404 page
Hi i have a got a 404 page for example : www.example.com/404.aspx can i use canonical tag on this page so that when the search engine hits the page www.example.com/123123123 13123 it will say Will this be right method ?
On-Page Optimization | | usef4u0