Pyramid link structure - how to noindex, nofollow
-
I'm talking about this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link
Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1
Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?
-
Hi there,
I see what you're trying to do, and I think I understand it. You're attempting to conserve your link equity and flow it only to the most important pages, or what we use to call "pagerank sculpting."
The good news is you don't really need to worry about it. These days, adding nofollow to your links doesn't really increase the equity flowing through the followed links. And in fact, you could be shooting yourself in the proverbial foot by denying equity passing links to your lower product pages.
Best time to use nofollow for internal pages is typically to increase crawling efficiency, or to prevent bots from visiting pages you don't want indexed anyway. Attempting to scuplt link equity in this way could cause lots of unintended negative consequences and my advice would be in most cases to let your link equity flow freely throughout your site in a way that was natural to both humans and bots alike.
Best of luck!
-
I agree with Nitin here.
I think the confusion is perhaps that you're taking the pyramid structure in that Moz article too literally? There is nothing wrong with linking between different pages as Nitin said. In fact, by linking to related/relevant content on your website, you are enforcing the context and the meaning of the pages' content. The diagram in the Moz article is just showing how you should have the minimum number of links possible between the homepage and any given "deep" page on the website. So, using Moz's diagram as an example, from that website's homepage, you can get to their deepest page in only three clicks. The more clicks (or links) the harder the page is to find, and therefore less likely to be found and crawled by Google. Remember that Google has a crawl budget.
So long as you don't have hundreds of links on any one page you are trying to rank and it doesn't take too many links to get to any one page, I wouldn't worry too much it. The nofollow attribute is only to be used when you don't want Google to follow that link and pass link juice between the pages.
-
Well, these aren't "useless" links. After all, they're linking your categories/sub-categories etc. and should be followed by bots even if a HTML snapshot of any page captures 2-3 follow links (from flyout/menu navigation, breadcrumbs etc.) of another page.
Hope this helps!
-
No, I just want get rid of million useless links from both menus and make clean pyramid structure with plain link flow:
(product have only 1 link to subcategory, subcategory have 1 link to category and few links to products and so on). -
No! Don't "nofollow" them. Why do you want to nofollow them now?
You're not spamming here, inter-linking from flyout-navigation/header/footer/on-page-navigation/breadcrumbs are the natural ways people use for internal-linking, that won't hurt you for sure.
-
Alright, I got it, lets forget about noindex, left nofollow only.
Now to have pyramid scheme my plan should look like this, right?
Product page: nofollow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).
SubCategory page (plain shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.
Category page (shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.
Front page: nofollow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)
-
Are you trying to say that you're planning to have multiple URLs for a single product page here? For instance, if you have a product which can be reached from multiple navigation paths, so you want to have those multiple URLs for it?
Like if a product is tagged in category "x" and "x" is a sub-category of category "y", then the number of possible URLs for product page "p" would be
So, here these 2 URLs are candidates of duplicate content penalty and hence, you want to noindex them? Is this what you're trying to explain?
-
Hi,
Well, following "pyramid" scheme and noindexing pages are two different things altogether. Let's not mix them, its creating confusion actually. So, tell me why do you want to noindex your pages?
Using pyramid scheme and optimizing your site's architecture the best possible way can be done independently.
-
If you noindex a page, you are telling Google that you don't want the page to be indexed and it will disappear from Google Search. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? Maybe you are thinking of index, nofollow on Recommended Products instead to reduce the number of links that Google will follow?
-
I just want to follow "pyramid" scheme (see pic in article). If not use noindex, how to do this pyramide?
-
Oh, sorry, I mean product page have lot of links from top, left menu, from "recommended" products. My offer is left only 1 "way out" - to parent category (in this case it Plain shirts).
But if I will noindex "recommended" products, are they will disappear from G. search?..
-
I'm confused. Why would you want to noindex all of those pages? If you don't want those pages to be indexed by Google, tagging them noindex is not harmful at all. But why would you want to noindex the front page, category, subcategory and product page?
-
Hi,
Could you please help me understand your concern here? What do you mean by "noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs"?
May be you need to elaborate your concern or share some screenshots to help me understand it.
P.S noindexing a subset of pages is not harmful for sure.
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
-
Optimizing a URL/menu structure
Hi Mozzers, I'm working on Content Strategy at my job, and I'm close to making some recommendations on short/long-term direction. While I'm there, I want to tackle the URL/menu structure (correct term?), which is a bit of a mess as pages have been created without any consideration for it over time. For ease, let's just say we have 3 main subdirectories of the site (Section A-C), and let's also say that section A also has 3 important subdirectories. From a UX perspective at least, we want a page to look like: example.com/sectionA/subsectionAA/page1 but currently it's example.com/page1 We have dozens and dozens of these examples. To complicate matters a little further, Sections B and C have been earmarked to be consolidated into a new section (D), as they're currently confusing and overlapping, and create roadblocks in user journeys. So a page that is, say: example.com/sectionB/page2 may well want to be: example.com/sectionD/subsectionDA/page2 I'm comfortable enough with technically doing this, as I'm experienced enough in Drupal and have an agency on hand too, BUT - I don't know if there are any SEO pitfalls I need to be wary of when I'm doing this, beyond resubmitting sitemaps, and the trickle-down effects of redirects. Any advice, wise forum? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | joberts0 -
Designing path structure - readability or keyword density
We are looking at redesigning our URL structure to accommodate our expansion. This gives us a chance to change the path, but we have found conflicting advice on readability vs. keyword density. These are our three options. mywebsite.com/s/birmingham/restaurants (Keep it short so that the keywords dominate the path) or mywebsite.com/search/birmingham/restaurants (Accurately describe the content on the page) or mywebsite.com/top/birmingham/restaurants (Be a bit spammy and include a word often associated with our inbound searches) Does anyone have any experience on what works best?
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
Linking from Subfolders
Hi, on my new theme there are a bunch of links from subfolders to pages that aren't in a sub folder, these pages also don't have links on the home page. Is there an seo issue when linking from subfolders to pages that aren't. I don't know if I'm wording this properly but what I mean is, mysite/project/project1 linking to mysite/post.
On-Page Optimization | | FPK0 -
Reducing number crawl-able links?
Hello, I just like to ask for best practice when it comes to reduce number of internal links on a site with a mega menu. Since the mega menu lists all categories and all their subcategories it creates a problem when all categories are linking to all categories directly.. Would the method below reduce the number of links and preventing the link juice flowing directly from category to category? [(link built with JavaScript and the html5 "data-" attribute) Thinking of using these links to categories in the menu not directly below the parent category.](#)
On-Page Optimization | | AJPro0 -
Should I have content on my home page or links to my articles
Hi, i have asked this question a couple of times without any luck so i am hoping third time lucky. My site www.in2town.co.uk has dropped in the rankings for two of my important keywords, lifestyle magazine and lifestyle news, so i am just wondering if i have to much content on the page for google to understand what the page is about. i am thinking to just have the links on my page instead of the intro to the articles, for example another online magazine does this, http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ Can anyone please let me know if i should keep the intro to the articles or if i should go with the links idea like femalefirst does to help google understand that we are a lifestyle magazine any advice would be great
On-Page Optimization | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How many outbound links is too many outbound links?
As a part of our SEO strategy, we have been focusing on writing several high quality articles with unique content. In these articles we regularly link to other websites when they are high quality, authoritative sites. Typically, the articles are 500 words or more and have 3-5 outbound links, but in some cases there are as many as 7 or 8 outbound links. Before we get too carried away with outbound links, I wanted to get some opinions on how many outbound links we should be trying to include and more information on how the outbound links work. Do they pass our website's authority on to the other website? Could our current linking strategy cause future SEO problems? Finally, do you have any suggestions for guidelines we should be using? Thank you for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | airnwater0 -
Question Regarding Site Structure
I have a quick question regarding site structure that I hope some of you guys could share your opinion on. I watched a white board friday from Rand a little while back where he explains that you need to try and make the site structure as flat as possible. He was saying try having no more that 3 links from the home page to get to the desired location. My question is this. I am looking at a site that has a pretty complex structure that I am trying to clear up as much as possible without making any of there rankings suffer. So they have www.domian.com/general-category/district/town/ and sometimes www.domian.com/general-category/district/town/item-specifics Now i know it is not good as it is, but they are dubious about changing too much as they have some serious traffic coming to the site. But, my question is that all the pages can be found from the home page through the menus/sub-menus. But do these count as a direct link from the home page. Also a problem is that because of this mozbot has detected that there are too many links from the home page and suggested that it should be below 200. But should I make these menu links no index or no follow. Obviously, by doing this, if the link does count as direct from the home page it wont after doing this. Thanks Jenson
On-Page Optimization | | jensonseo0 -
Should I put a No follow on each link in a Javascript dropdown menu?
I have a javascript dropdown menu on every page of my site. It lists all the wineries I write about and sell. About 300 links. I've been told that google doesn't like so many links on a page, but that it doesn't spider javascrpt. Then I hear that it does. Am I being penalized by all the links? Or does the spider really not see them? I don't want to give up my javascript menus, unless I have to. Should I put a no follow on each link inside the code? And on the other hand, am I losing google juice by not letting it see all the pages on my site that I link to in the javascript menu? Thanks in advance for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | JeanYates0
