"Equity sculpting" with internal nofollow links
-
I’ve been trying a couple of new site auditor services this week and they have both flagged the fact that I have some nofollow links to internal pages.
I see this subject has popped up from time to time in this community. I also found a 2013 Matt Cutts video on the subject:
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links
At a couple of SEO conferences I’ve attended this year, I was advised that nofollow on internal links can be useful so as not to squander link juice on secondary (but necessary) pages. I suspect many websites have a lot of internal links in their footers and are sharing the love with pages which don’t really need to be boosted. These pages can still be indexed but not given a helping hand to rank by strong pages. This “equity sculpting” (I made that up) seems to make sense to me, but am I missing something?
Examples of these secondary pages include login pages, site maps (human readable), policies – arguably even the general contact page.
Thoughts?
Regards,
Warren -
Useful reference links. Many thanks, Mike.
-
Here's a bit more on the subject.
Matt Cutts PageRank Sculpting 2009
TheSEMPost 2015 - Pagerank sculpting
The SEOBlog Pagerank Sculpting 2014
It just feels like every other year or so, this concept starts coming back up. Except as much as it does work, it also doesn't. Personally I think its a better use of time and effort to look at your site navigation & see if it's user friendly, intuitive, and natural in order to direct flow better and also to work on linkbuilding efforts to increase authority.
-
Thanks, Mike.
Just to be clear, I still want those non-primary internal pages (maybe not human sitemap and login) to be indexed so a robots.txt approach will not completely solve the problem. I just don't want to potentially squander link juice on secondary pages. Footers tend to have quite a bulk of link so there is a lot of dilution there. I had hoped that by halving my links, I'd be doubling the outbound link equity.
The first reference was useful, but only mentions my sculpting goal in the very last sentence without elaborating. The thing I found most interesting was the first comment from Mark Traphagen:
So, if this is true, there's absolutely no equity saving to be had from nofollow'ing internal links to my non-primary pages. But... is it true?! Any experiment results out there?
Finally, with regards to old versions of policies being published, I can't see how that would cause any legal problems. It's the version that is published that is important and, while I can set directives on cache expiry, nobody can be responsible for out-of-date information stored in a third-party cache (unless, of course, it was unlawful at the time of publishing).
-
Adding Nofollow to a handful of links on your site will not magically sculpt link equity in such a way as to create a noticeable improvement like that. If anything, you could just use robots.txt to remove those pages from being crawled. The bots don't necessarily need to index your login page, your human sitemap (if they already have their own), policies (which can change and cause legal issues if an older version is cached), and a few others.
And just a few months ago Gary Illyes stated that there's no good reason to nofollow internal links:
http://www.thesempost.com/google-dont-ever-nofollow-your-own-internal-links/
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
-
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")
Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael
Technical SEO | | TogetherCare0 -
Webmaster internal links issue
Hi All, In webmaster > Internal links https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/internal-links?hl=en&siteUrl= I get counts as in the image http://imgur.com/9bO5H0f is this logical and ok or should i work on finding why so many links and reduce them? Thanks Martin
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
Internal Link Analysis Tool
I want to get a better handle on what internal link text (and co-occurance if possible) my site currently has. We have a lot of old blog articles that provide link juice back to the main site, but with thousands of pages, we never kept track of when we internally link to a page. Are there any tools that will provide an analysis of this? OpenSiteExplorer seems like a very tedious way to do it and it didn't appear to be 100% accurate. Also, are there any tools that will provide analysis and recommendations based on keywords targeted?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Should I change these "Overly dynamic URLs" ?
Hello, My client have pages that look like this: www.domain.com/blog/index.aspx?blogmonth=1&blogday=10&blogyear=2012&blogid=256 Question 1: SEOMoz say they are overly dynamic. Is it really in this case as the numbers indicate the year, month and day and do not change? Question 2: Should we change the URLs to proper SEO friendly URLs such as www.domain.com/keywords1-keyword2? The pages are already ranking well and we worry that changing the URL may damage the ranking? Do we risk the page to go down in ranking by creating SEO friendly URLs? (and using a 301 to redirect from the old URL)
Technical SEO | | DavidSpivac0 -
302 vs. a href="nofollow"
we came across one thing the we did not asked to programm by our intention. we have a magento shop and on the produktpage we have those "compare" buttons. these link have a session id and the follow a 302 back onto the same page. so i beleive the idea is that google will just not follow 302s and thats it. so my questions is: is this right what we beleive if so why is a 302 better compared to a a href="nofollow" ???
Technical SEO | | kynop0 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0