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
-
My website have h1 tags , but still crawlers can't find them?
crawlers can't crawl my meta description and h1 tags even when they are present.
On-Page Optimization | | Green_Beauty0 -
Head description tag, what now
Recently I heard Google virtually dropping the description tag for seo scoring? and it takes the data off the page, however one of my clients description is just pulling a url rather than any content from the page. is there some way thats ethical to suggest a description to google?
On-Page Optimization | | Shuffled0 -
Which Meta Tags would you recommend having on the pages?
Hello, There are so many different meta tags which you can implement to the header of your website and I'm wanting to get people's opinions on which you feel are worth putting in and which are completely pointless? For example: Author Copyright Language Content-Type Content-Language Distribution Abstract Keywords Description Classification Canonical Expires Revisit-after Rating I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions. Kind Regards, Shaun Swales Twitter: Https://www.twitter.com/CryptCommerce
On-Page Optimization | | ShaunSwales0 -
Does Title Tag have to be in the HEAD tag?
We are using templates that load the same header for every page. I'd like to just include a different title tag in the "body" template of each page. If I was to do this, does it affect SEO at all?
On-Page Optimization | | moziodavid0 -
Does my actual blog post title have any effect once I create a title tag for SEO purposes?
A little confused about this. Reason I ask is that using my actual title for my title tag sometimes isn't the best for getting ranked, so the title and title tag are sometimes not the same.
On-Page Optimization | | seo_f20120 -
Do NoFollow links still split link equity?
So I realize that Google will split link equity between all links on any given page. Example, if a landing page has 10 links then the authority from the landing page is split into 10 and each link given its own smaller amount of equity from that landing page. My question is if I were to turn 9 of the 10 links on this page to NoFollow links would the equity still remain split 10 ways or would it simply pass all of it to the one DoFollow link left on the page?
On-Page Optimization | | PageOnePowerGang0 -
Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site
My client has an ecommerce site with over 1,000 products. We have a ton of duplicates because of how their ecommerce system handles product pages. Each time a new product is added, there is a default product page created (/product/12345-product-name.aspx). Each time that product is added to a specific product category, another, separate URL is created (/product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx). The site has over 1,000 duplicates (at least one for each product) because of how the ecommerce system structures URLs. We are unable to have unique content on /products/12345-product-name.aspx and /product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx because both pages pull from the same database. Their webteam informed me that they can't implement canonical tags on individual pages, they must be dynamically added to the site all at once. Thus forcing me to choose all of the default product pages as primary URLs. Both types of URLs are getting indexed and the product URLs that were added to the categories are SEO friendly so I'm leary to eliminate one or the other with a canonical tag or a no index. Suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | DynoSaur0 -
Is it better to include the secondary keyword or site name in a title tag?
When I add a site name to my title tag with long-tailed primary and secondary keywords the title tag is longer than 70 characters. I need to include all three parts, so what should I do? At 70 characters the site name is usually partially cut off. I do not want to get penalized by Google, but I need to include the site name to have consistency. I am using the format Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Site name
On-Page Optimization | | lwilkins0