Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?
-
My website is an ecommerce and we have on homepage about 470 links !
1. We have a top bar with my account, login, faq, home, contact us and link to a content page.
2 . Then we have multistore selection
3. Then we have the departament menu, with several parants + child category links
4. Then we have a banner
5. Then we have a list of the recently sold and new products.
6. then we have an image grid with the most important cms/content pages (like faq, about us, etc)
7. then we have footer, with all info pages, contact us, about us, my account etc.
There are some links that are repeted 2, 3 times. For a user it is easier to find the informations but I'm not sure how search bots (google) deal with that.
So I was thinking on how can I have around 150 links to be followed. To remove the links from the page is not possible. What about to add nofollow to repeted links and some child category, as the spider will crawl the father and will access child on the next page?
Is this a good strategy?
-
That's something you'd want to test with your users. Generally though, the easier it is to get from Point A to Point B to Sale the better.
-
But what is better? user experiance (offering easiest way to find products on menu) or less links (users will have to throught 2 page levels to find the products) ?
Menu > category 2 > product
Menu > category 1 > category 2 > product
-
I think Wikipedia does alright using nofollow... ;^) Still, Paulo would probably be better served by limiting the number of links on a given page, preferably by design to promote certain aspects and conversion paths. All in all though, this is likely a pretty minimal expected improvement.
-
DO NOT use nofollow within a website. You will bleed PageRank.
If you have 5 links dividing 100% pagerank. each will have 20%. if you nofollow one the resulting pagerank from your 5 links is only 80%. This means that you bleed 20% from that page alone.
If you use noindex, please do use dofollow. This way the link value will be reused (in menu and footer pages)
-
Sure, you can nofollow duplicate links, but the benefits are fairly minimal. Gaining domain and page authority and making sure page load speeds are at their fastest possible levels will go a lot farther than nofollow, in terms of priorities. Cheers!
-
Thanks for the coments. I've checked the links you sent me. I have made noindex the pages you said, like cart, checkout, login...
My question is related to too many links on a page. Can I reduce it nofollowing links that appear more than once?
-
Hi Paulo. Typically allowing links to be followed is fine, but you might consider using noindex instead for pages that would be drawing search equity away from your target landing pages. Good candidates for noindex would be: my account, login, duplicate / close to duplicate category listings, and so on. If you really want to limit your links, it's best to do so from design and CRO point so that people are better using and converting within your site.
Another thing to consider is setting up canonical tags for your root product and category pages. Lindsay Wassell wrote a nice article discussing pros and cons of this technique in addition to others here: https://moz.com/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo
Still another resource--while specifically for Magento--is here: https://moz.com/ugc/setting-up-magento-for-the-search-engines You'll find a lot of parallels though between the settings discussed there and your own ecommerce implementation. Hopefully these help point you in the right direction. Best of 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
-
Does using Yoast variables for meta content overwrite any pages that already have custom meta content?
The question is about the Yoast plugin for WP sites. Let's say I have a site with 200 pages and custom meta descriptions / title tags already in place for the top 30 pages. If I use the Yoast variable tool to complete meta content for the remaining pages (and make my Moz issue tracker look happier), will that only affect the pages without custom meta descriptions or will it overwrite even the pages with the custom meta content that I want? In this situation, I do want to keep the meta content that is already in place on select pages. Thanks! Zack
On-Page Optimization | | rootandbranch0 -
Too many on-page links
Hi, I've apparently got too many on-page links on 79 of my webpages. The majority of these pages are category pages, like this: https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk/mortgage-advice/mortgages/... so, what's a person to do? Obviously the page would be useless without the links. Should I just ignore these 'errors'? Or is there something else I should do? I don't want to appear manipulative by labelling them nofollow... Thanks, Amelia
On-Page Optimization | | CommT0 -
How to optimize WordPress Pages with Duplicate Page Content?
I found the non WWW ans WWW duplicate pages URL only, more than thousand pages.
On-Page Optimization | | eigital0 -
Too many outbound links on a page?
We have a "Clients" page on our site with approximately 125 of our clients listed. We have a link to each client's website, so that's 125 links. I am rethinking this approach. Is there any value to having these outbound links? The SEOmoz PRO analysis tells me I have too many links on this page. I have read that more than 100 links on a page is too many, but that seemed to be referring to internal links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Opinions please on Duplicate page titles & too many on-page links warnings.-
Hello folks, I'm a total SEO newbe but totally enjoying
On-Page Optimization | | CSC
using SEOmoz to learn more. We have ecommerce sites and the 1st crawl flags – as appears typical too many on-page links. We display up to 20 products (each with three links!)
and I’m trying to push to have fewer but meeting resistance from colleagues.
We have links duplicated all over the site believing it eases navigation. My question is just how critical is the number of products displayed
and the resulting volume of links to SEO results? Also we currently have collections of products displayed
across several pages which of course have the same page title and this is flagged
as a duplication error. I wonder if product auto-scrolling help as this means only a certain number of products are displayed at one time on one page thus reducing links and the need for duplicate page titles? My superiors are resisting change (perhaps nervous of spoiling
what already works) and I need to know where to direct my persuasive powers! Many thanks in anticipation, Spence0 -
If i only want to rank for one specific keyword and use it in all my page titles, will it negatively affect my rankings?
If i want to rank highest for one specific keyword (virtualization management, for example) and use that keyword in all the titles on my website, will that negatively affect my search rankings? SEOmoz is telling me that i should use unique titles for my different pages to ensure that they describe each page uniquely and don't compete with each other for keyword relevance.
On-Page Optimization | | foonista0 -
Page Shaping - No Follow Links
It's my understanding that adding a nofollow tag to pages that aren't of significance to users can help with page shaping and directing google to the most important links on my home page. I have 4 links on my home page that I'm considering adding a nofollow tag to: Privacy Policy, Legal Policy, Anti-Trust Policy, and Help-Desk Because these links are in the footer on every page I think they're probably sucking up some useful link juice. It's doubtful that anyone would actually search for our privacy policy or legal policy to find our site. I'd rather the juice to spread to other pages of use. What do you guys recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Can I have a strong brand category page and a strong product page?
It seems Google base and other Comparison Shopping Engines like to see the brand in the product name. But, on my category page for that brand, website optimizer tells me including the brand name with each product is cannabilizes links. For example; I have a page for jewelerABC with 20 pieces of jewelry listed as well as original content about jewelerABC. I do not currently name these products as xyz by jewelerABC. This page comes up nicely in the serps. But in Google base The top listings for jewelry by jewelerABC seem to have every product named xyz by jewelerABC or JewelerABC xyzs. What is the best way to optimize.for both? Stephen
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0