"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
-
Should internal links in my table of contents be tagged as nofollow?
Hi All, I have the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin installed. I recently noticed that you can tag your internal links with and nofollow. I understand that it's always a good idea to link internally and to pass link juice to my own content. But with detailed posts that have over 20 headings, I'm thinking that internal linking for headings may actually hurt me because it takes my links well above 100. Any ideas what the best practises are in this scenario? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
Internal Links - Absolute Better Then Relative for SEO
Hi All Currently my site has a mixture of relative and absolute links for internal links. Could I just ask two questions? 1. Is it better for SEO for the site to feature only one method of internal links?
Technical SEO | | ruislip18
2. If this is the case, is it better for the links to be absolute? I'm reaching the conclusion that I should review all internal links and set them to be absolute, but wanted to check. Including blog posts, this is a 70-80 page wordpress site, it wouldn't take too long to check the links Many Thanks0 -
Links below linking (not sitelinks)
Hi All, Please can you let me know the name and / or point me at an article / blog / directory on how best to achieve additional links under a search engine listing (I don't mean site links) e.g. I do a search for 'home insurance' on Google.co.uk and under the listing for Compare the Market it has - home insurance, building insurance and landlords insurance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Vodafone0 -
Which forum platform has the best "SEO Functionality"?
I have used vBulletin with vBSEO for a number of years and have been happy with the SEO results that I have achieved. However, vBulletin's recent releases have become unstable, full of bugs and are not secure. I am intending on starting some new forums in the near future and would like to move away from vBulletin. I have heard good things about Xenforo and IP Boards. Does anybody have any experience with either platforms built in SEO functionality?
Technical SEO | | statman870 -
Choosing the right page for rel="canonical"
I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ? All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page. My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category. For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section : http://www.bdc.ca/EN/advice_centre/expand_your_sales/going_global_or_international_markets/Pages/RelatedArticles.aspx?PATH=/EN/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place. For this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories. If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated ! Thanks
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
I always get this error "We have detected that the domain or subfolder does not respond to web requests." I don't know why. PLEASE help
subdomain www.nwexterminating.com subfolder www.nwexterminating.com/pest_control www.nwexterminating.com/termite_services www.nwexterminating.com/bed_bug_services
Technical SEO | | NWExterminating0 -
Do we know if inbalanced anchor text distribution also applies to internal links?
I have the pages of my site linked together very well with editorial links in my copy and blog posts. But now I'm starting to wonder post-penguin if it's a problem if all my internal links to a certain page have the same anchor text? Or is my internal link juice not powerful enough to set off a red flag? I don't think I've seen this addressed anywhere or if we even know the answer to this or can only speculate.
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
.Nofollow and link count
If i use nofollow on links ( internal or external ), will it reduce the link count as regard to Google. If there are 50 external links, and i nofollow 20 of them, will Google count this as 30 external links.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050