Still Use Nofollow Home?
-
I was wondering how many of you are still nofollowing the Home button or anything else for that matter?
I thought NoFollow was getting a little outdated, but I still see it lots of places.
Thoughts?
-
seomoz may script that nofollow because people always post url's with Q's ? True?
-
Right, but have you noticed seomoz has nofollow all over the place?
-
You shouldn't use nofollow for any links on your site to pages on your site, unless you really don't want that link followed. Even in that case, you should meta noindex that page, or disallow it in your robots.txt rather than nofollow the link.
You used to be able to do some pagerank sculpting with nofollow, but they changed it a few years ago so that nofollow burns pagerank, rather than sculpt it. For example, suppose you have page A has 6 link juice "votes" to pass, and links to 3 pages:
- page B
- page C
- page D
If you follow all the links, each page gets 2 votes. If you nofollowed the link to page D, then page D will get no votes, but page B and C still get only 2 votes each. So there's no reason to burn those votes to page D, right?
Back in the day in this example, page B and C would each get one of the extra votes that D didn't get (so, 3 votes each), but I guess Google didn't like people over-sculpting their sites to try to push just a few of their pages to #1, and ignoring the rest.
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 I nofollow/noindex the outgoing links in a news aggregator website?
We have a news aggregator site that has 2 types of pages: First Type:
Technical SEO | | undaranfahujakia
Category pages like economic, sports or political news and we intend to do SEO on these category pages to get organic traffic. These pages have pagination and show the latest and most viewed news on the corresponding category. Second Type:
News headlines from other sites are displayed on the category pages. The user will be directed to that news page on the main site by clicking on a link. These links are outgoing links and we redirect them by JavaScript (not 301).
In fact these are our websites articles that just have titles (linked to destination) and meta descriptions (reads from news RSS). Question:
Should we have to nofollow/noindex the second type of links? In fact, since the crawl budget of websites is limited, isn't it better to spend this budget on the pages we have invested in (first type)?0 -
Sitemap use for very large forum-based community site
I work on a very large site with two main types of content, static landing pages for products, and a forum & blogs (user created) under each product. Site has maybe 500k - 1 million pages. We do not have a sitemap at this time.
Technical SEO | | CommManager
Currently our SEO discoverability in general is good, Google is indexing new forum threads within 1-5 days roughly. Some of the "static" landing pages for our smaller, less visited products however do not have great SEO.
Question is, could our SEO be improved by creating a sitemap, and if so, how could it be implemented? I see a few ways to go about it: Sitemap includes "static" product category landing pages only - i.e., the product home pages, the forum landing pages, and blog list pages. This would probably end up being 100-200 URLs. Sitemap contains the above but is also dynamically updated with new threads & blog posts. Option 2 seems like it would mean the sitemap is unmanageably long (hundreds of thousands of forum URLs). Would a crawler even parse something that size? Or with Option 1, could it cause our organically ranked pages to change ranking due to Google re-prioritizing the pages within the sitemap?
Not a lot of information out there on this topic, appreciate any input. Thanks in advance.0 -
302 redirect used, submit old sitemap?
The website of a partner of mine was recently migrated to a new platform. Even though the content on the pages mostly stayed the same, both the HTML source (divs, meta data, headers, etc.) and URLs (removed index.php, removed capitalization, etc) changed heavily. Unfortunately, the URLs of ALL forum posts (150K+) were redirected using a 302 redirect, which was only recently discovered and swiftly changed to a 301 after the discovery. Several other important content pages (150+) weren't redirected at all at first, but most now have a 301 redirect as well. The 302 redirects and 404 content pages had been live for over 2 weeks at that point, and judging by the consistent day/day drop in organic traffic, I'm guessing Google didn't like the way this migration went. My best guess would be that Google is currently treating all these content pages as 'new' (after all, the source code changed 50%+, most of the meta data changed, the URL changed, and a 302 redirect was used). On top of that, the large number of 404's they've encountered (40K+) probably also fueled their belief of a now non-worthy-of-traffic website. Given that some of these pages had been online for almost a decade, I would love Google to see that these pages are actually new versions of the old page, and therefore pass on any link juice & authority. I had the idea of submitting a sitemap containing the most important URLs of the old website (as harvested from the Top Visited Pages from Google Analytics, because no old sitemap was ever generated...), thereby re-pointing Google to all these old pages, but presenting them with a nice 301 redirect this time instead, hopefully causing them to regain their rankings. To your best knowledge, would that help the problems I've outlined above? Could it hurt? Any other tips are welcome as well.
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Using Rel Nofollow on Duplicate Pages
Hi there, I have a rather large site that has duplicate content on many pages due to how it's being spidered by google. I was hoping I could set the internal link to this page as "nofollow." My question is that I have hundreds of other sites with backlinks to these duplicate content pages.. will this affect me negatively if I tell google not to index the duplicated pages?
Technical SEO | | trialminecraftserverfinder0 -
Hiding Duplicate Content using Javascript
We have e-commerce site selling books. Besides basic information on books, we have content for “About the book” , “Editorial Reviews”, “About the author” etc. But the content in all these section are duplicate and are available on all sites selling similar books. Our question is: 1.Should we worry about the content being duplicate?2.If yes, then will it by a good idea to hide this duplicate content using javascript or iframe?
Technical SEO | | CyrilWilson0 -
Is it better to guest post with or without using rel=author?
If I guest post on 50 blogs, all using rel=author so they are attributed to my Google Plus account, would the links be de-valued since they are self reference back to my own blog/website? Would it be better to guest post on a blog that doesn't use rel=author?
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Canonical tag used on several pages?
Is it a bad idea to use rel=canonical from several pages back to one (if you are planning on no-indexing them)? Does this concentrate the “link juice” from those several pages back to one?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0