Adding no follow links on my site
-
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
-
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.
-
Hi Gavin, a video of interest to you may be this one from Matt Cutts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0
-
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
-
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
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
-
Links disappeared
Hi, I am a wedding photographer based in Liverpool. I have been trying to do my own SEO for the last 6 months. I have been hovering around the top of page two for the main search terms for the past few years. I used an SEO company before christmas who got a lot of spammy links which resulted in my site dropping to page 4 of the SERPS. With the help of this forum I managed to locate them and disavow those links, and have tried to do it myself. I have managed to gain a few "featured weddings" on national wedding blogs and wrote a few articles for another wedding blog and also some forum comments. I have also got a few links for example from a wedding band in exchange for some photographs. I have got onto page 1 about 4 times, the best result was at position 6 on page 1 but every time I have slowly dropped out again. I have methodically (once a month) checked for any of the spammy links and updated the disavow list. My competitors have at best old forum comments and the like and on checking their websites with open site explorer are not actively link building at all. I have just checked my Webmaster tools and google is only recognising 51 links. (none of my good wedding blog links are there) I have an external links csv from the 28th June with 602 links on it. I changed my website around May of this year but it is still on the same domain name www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk. Can anybody help? Best wishes. David.
Technical SEO | | WallerD0 -
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Adding academic content for a school in a sub folder, sub domain, or different site?
I manage the website for a school and we are planning to put our academic policies/student handbook online. I’m curious if there is any SEO value to including this content in our main website? This isn’t stuff that anyone is going to link to externally (student orientation procedures, how to enroll/drop credits, academic warning policies etc) and there would be limited internal linking as well (someone looking for course information doesn’t want to see this type of stuff). I’m not interested in SERPs for this content, but I’m wondering if the additional content could help the site’s SEO overall? It is naturally rich with ‘academic’ keywords and the only websites that use this type of content are universities. On a similar note, I need to put up student profiles for potential employers to view. Like the policies, this is not priority content for someone visiting our website, but it is still keyword-rich content, which would add to the overall 'size' of the site. Should this stuff go in a folder, a subdomain, or in a different location altogether?
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Site rebuild without HTML extension = broken links?
I have a client and his site is pure HTML. He made huge amount of link building with some hundreds of links point to example.com/target.HTML Now we decided to use WordPress with the same site structure. If we use the exact same URLs but without the HTML ending will it cause broken links? Is there any best practice for this kind of change? Many thanks for any idea!
Technical SEO | | seozoltan0 -
Site Categorization?
I know getting site categories to appear under the site are dependent on a lot of factors including site mapping. We have a site that does the categorization thing when you type in the sites url name however more people search for the name of the talent to find the site and the short url on the site is just his name, but shorter. However I was just wondering is their a way to optimize the site so that way we could get categorization to show up under the sites URL when they search for the talents full name I ask because the amount of people looking for the talents full name rather than the short name is a lot larger and I would like to see if we can take advantage of the real estate, but I honestly don't think there is a way, however I figured I would open it up to discussion to see if anyone has any ideas. Example: Site name is ABCD you type this into Google and you get ABCD.com about blog how to contact However the actual person whose site it is is ABCDEF and when you type that in you just get: ABCD.com without any of the categories appearing below the url. And that is what I'm asking about. Thanks as I can't seem to find a lot of information on this. However if there is another spot on the site talking about this please let me know I may just not be searching with the right terms.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
Technical SEO | | JeanieWalker0