Adding no follow links on my site
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I am getting a warning about having too many links on my page www.accessoriesonline.co.uk (152) but I don't want to remove any links from the site. Its an ecommerce site with categories across the top, featured products and then a further category navigation in the footer.
Would it be beneficial if I added a rel="nofollow" to the links in the footer as these are duplicates of the one's in the header or would this harm the links in the header and the destination URL's which I definitely want to be crawled?
Also, does anyone know if SEOMOZ considers links with a rel=nofollow as an actually link when they calculate their overview?
Thanks in advance
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My understanding of nofollow is that you really shouldn't be using it for links to other pages on your site. There's no benefit to it. You used to be able to sculpt the flow of pagerank, but they changed how it worked awhile ago to make it so it's not beneficial to do this to your own links. For example, suppose page A has 6 units of pagerank to pass, and links out to the following pages:
- page B
- Page C
- Page D
Normally, each of the pages would get 2 units of pagerank. Suppose you nofollow the link to page D. What will happen is that page B and page C will continue to get 2 units of pagerank, and page D will get none. It didn't increase the pagerank passed to pages B and C.
So, nofollowing a link will prevent pagerank from getting passed to that page, but won't increase the pagerank passed to the other linked pages from that page, so I wouldn't do it.
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Hi Gavin, a video of interest to you may be this one from Matt Cutts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0
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I'm trying to think of what links to sacrifice then without effecting the user experience too much. When you actually look at the links, there are two for each product on the page, the image links to the same page as the product title. Its the same with the navigation, the nav in the header is pretty much the same as the nav in the footer and then every other link is essential for conversions I feel.
I've just done a quick analysis of other sites and I know most of these don't need the SEO but it seems to be a trend with ecommerce to have more than 100, probably because its almost necessary?
Amazon.co.uk - 166 Links
Play.com - 278 Links
asos.com - 175 Links
johnlewis.com - 467 Links
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I actually don't have an answer for if Google will still crawl internal links with a NOFOLLOW attribute, but my guessing is that they would ignore it, but I could be off the ball there.
However, 152 links is far too many for one page and this should be stripped down, unless they all go somewhere different. Google will see this as a waste and will no doubt mark you down for doing so.
Remove duplicates going to the same page and re-design the page layout to achieve this is required. You won't be helping yourself.
Andy
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