Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?

[qgairsoft]

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?

[RyanPurkey]

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.

[qgairsoft]

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

[RyanPurkey]

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.

[Stramark]

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)

[RyanPurkey]

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!

[qgairsoft]

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?

[RyanPurkey]

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!