To nofollow or follow internal links, that is the question...
-
"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff.
I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what?
Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages.
Thanks! Best... Darcy
-
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the info. To answer your question, the member profile pages are noindexed because there are 80,000 and most have little to no non-duplicate info. Some members fill in something. Most do not. Of the ones that do, they often pull the text from LinkedIn. Rather than have 80,000 duplicate or nearly duplicate pages in the index, we noindexed them.
Best... Darcy
-
What you're talking about is generally called Pagerank Sculpting and it's generally a bad idea:
http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/
The way it works, at least for distribution, is that the # of links is counted as a whole, not "number of followed links." That means you can't really help yourself this way. The article says it fairly clearly:
"Google has changed the way PageRank considers nofollowed links. Now, nofollowed links still count towards the distribution of PageRank, except the PageRank they would pass is reduced to zero. So your page A with 10 PR and five links, with four of them nofollowed, would pass 2 PR to the one followed link and 0 to the other four links."
So while you can, as Patrick pointed out, noindex them, let the juice flow everywhere.
-
Hi Darcy
Do not "nofollow" internal links to these pages - you want link equity to continue to move through your site. If you must noindex profile pages, leave the pages at least "noindex,follow" so that link equity can pass through those profile pages and continue to move through the site. Also, some members may have links from their site pointed at their profiles, I would check backlinks pointing to those pages if you get the opportunity.
You can do so through:
Majestic
OSEOut of curiosity, why did you noindex member profile pages if I may ask? Did you check and see if any of those pages get search traffic before noindexing? You might be missing an opportunity there. Hope this helps, good luck!
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
-
An External link question? based on relevancy
hi lets suppose we have backlinks from these sites page a has 10 ext links. and all external links are industry/niche relevant, one of them points to my site page b has 1 ext link , which points to my site. which one is giving more seo boost.?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
meta robots no follow on page for paid links
Hi I have a page containing paid links. i would like to add no follow attribute to these links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda
but from technical reasons, i can only place meta robots no follow on page level (
is that enough for telling Google that the links in this page are paid and and to prevent Google penlizling the sites that the page link to? Thanks!0 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
Community question- Penguin 2.0 link types?
What type of links do you think Penguin 2.0 targeted most - anchor text abuse , directory links, paid links, low quality guest posts, article directories etc????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Incoming affiliate links: is it better to follow or nofollow?
Hello here, this question is from a merchant stand point, and here is a typical scenario: this merchant has thousand of affiliate incoming links. Affiliates link to specific product pages with their affiliate ID passed as a parameter as: http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id] and users get 301 redirected to a clean URL like: http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/ after that a cookie is stored into the user's browser for tracking purposes. Now, my question is the following: is for the merchant more convenient to have its affiliates linking with follow or nofollow links? Is that actually relevant? What are the pros and cons? Thank you in advance for any insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Internal competition
If we have two different sub domain pages that talk about the same service but with different content, how will Google react while ranking? Example : xxxx.abc.com/company/solutions/service1 yyyy.abc.com/service1 Suppose if www.abc.com has good authority, which URL will be more benefited?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gmk15670 -
Site Wide Internal Navigation links
Hello all, All our category pages www.pitchcare.com/shop are linked to from every product page via the sidebar navigation. Which results in every category page having over 1700 links with the same anchor text. I have noticed that the category pages dont appear to be ranked when they most definately should be. For example http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html is not ranked for the term "moss control" instead another of our deeper pages is ranked on page 1. Reading a previous SEO MOZ article · Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | toddyC
I recently had my second run-in with a penalty at Google that appears to punish sites for excessive internal linking with "optimized" (or "keyword stuffed anchor text") links. When the links were removed (in both cases, they were found in the footer of the website sitewide), the rankings were restored immediately following Google's next crawl, indicating a fully automated filter (rather than a manual penalty requiring a re-consideration request). Do you think we may have triggered a penalty? If so what would be the best way to tackle this? Could we add no follows on the product pages? Cheers Todd0