Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
To NoFollow or to NoIndex internal links
-
I all, I have recently taken over a fairly large e-commerce site that I am trying to "fix" and have come across something that I need a second opinion on.
A Semrush audit has revealed that there are a heck of a lot of internal nofollow links (over 90 000) that point to predominantly 4 pages from the Header of each page in the site, these are change currency pages to show clients different currencies and a members login page. The pages are:
/?action=changecurrency¤cy=EUR
/?action=changecurrency¤cy=USD
/?action=changecurrency¤cy=GBP
/members/
My opinion is that these pages should just be no index pages and they should be followed. instead of being indexed and no followed?
Any thoughts on this out there?
-
Glad to help!
-
You're awesome! Thanks a million
-
Yea, I wouldn't worry too much about those. You should however, specify the purpose of those parameters in Google Search Console - it'll help Google better understand their function. Here's a good guide on how to do that: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/google-webmaster-tool-added-url-parameter-option-seo.html
-
Thats a great help thanks Logan... Yes the Members area is account-level so I will de-index that. With regards to the other Currency thing, should I just ignore those "Error Warnings" then?
Cheers
-
Hi,
I wouldn't recommend the noindex approach here. Three of your four URLs are parameter'd versions of the homepage; meta tags are applied at the page level, not by parameters. This means your noindex tag would apply to the homepage - no good!! You could put a nofollow attribute on the links that point to those parameter URLs, but don't expect it to have a huge impact on your SEO efforts. Your /members/ folder might be worth de-indexing via a noindex tag, depends on what is contained in that folder. It sounds like it's probably account-level pages, if that's the case, you can and should keep those pages out of the index.
Hope that's helpful!
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
-
NoIndex or Rel=Canonical Pagination
Hello, I had a question about noindex and Rel=Canonical on category page pagination. On my site, the category page the meta="robots" has "Index,Follow" tags and the rel="canonical" is the main category page, but when a user sorts the page the meta="robots" changes to "NoIndex, Follow." My question is should the sorted page be name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" /> since the rel="canonical" is pointing to the main page?? Or does it matter that it is NoIndex?? Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks. Main Category Page
On-Page Optimization | | chuck-layton
https://www.site.com/category/
name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" />
rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/"/> Name Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?dir=asc&order=name
name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" />
rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/">0 -
City and state link stuffing in footer
A competitor has links to every state in the U.S., every county in our state and nearby states, and every city in those nearby states. All with corresponding link text and titles that lead to pages with thin, duplicate content. They consistently rank high in the SERPS and have for years. What gives--I mean, isn't this something that should get you penalized?
On-Page Optimization | | nkolson0 -
After HTTPS upgrade, should I change all internal links, or a general 301 redirect is better?
I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | micvitale0 -
Meta Robots index & noindex Both Implemented on Website
I don't want few of the pages of website to get indexed by Google, thus I have implemented meta robots noindex code on those specific pages. Due to some complications I am not able to remove meta robots index from header of every page Now, on specific pages I have both codes 'index & noindex' implemented. Question is: Will Google crawl/index pages which have noindex code along with index code? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Exa0 -
Do a bunch of footer internal links help or hurt?
We are an ecommerce site... In days gone by, having a bunch of footer links with your top products / categories was a good idea - as it created a ton of internal links to these products. Now, I am hearing that those links "dilute" the value of our other links on a page - and essentially, there is more harm than good from these. Does anyone know what I am talking about (the olds days) and should we still be doing this? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Ted_Cullen0 -
NOINDEX, FOLLOW on product page - how about images indexing?
Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird12290 -
Should i remove the nofollow from mediawiki?
We have a website which uses mediawiki for public documentation. The moz crawler keeps nagging us that 50% of our sites have the nofollow-metatag. (And noindex for that matter). This is information pages and such in mediawiki. From a SEO perspective: Should we remove these tags? I assume they probably do not hurt? If we shouldn't remove the tags: Is there any way to get moz to ignore these pages so we can get rid of this "noise" in the moz-panel?
On-Page Optimization | | Host10 -
Best practice for Portfolio Links
I have a client with a really large project portfolio (over 500 project images), which causes their portfolio page to have well over the 100 links that are recommended. How can I reduce this without reducing the number of photos they can upload?
On-Page Optimization | | HochKaren0