Internal no follow links
-
I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog.
Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow.
What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?
-
Yeah that's pretty much overkill. "No-follow" isn't actually named very well as it doesn't prevent users or search engines from 'following' a hyperlink. I know, it was named really badly! In fact many people feel it's not even a directive to stop links from being 'followed' (or visited)
What the no-follow tag is commonly used for these days is to denote the difference between editorial and advertorial hyperlinks. It's only really an issue with external links, rather than internal ones. If you have placed content on another site (and you paid for it, like a sponsored post) with a link pointing back to your own site (to try and get referral traffic), the 'no-follow' tag lets Google know that the link is advertorial in nature and thus should not pass PageRank to the receiving domain / web-page
Because of this a lot of people believe that if you no-follow a link, it doesn't vent or lose any PageRank. This is false. If a link is default ('followed'), then an amount of PageRank will be lost from the linking page and donated to the receiving page. If a link is 'no-followed', the PageRank will still be lost by the linking page but the receiving page just won't get anything (so it gets vented into cyberspace). This is to stop "PageRank sculpting" using no-follow links from being a viable SEO manipulation tactic
As such, all no-following your duplicate internal links will do is vent tiny chunks of SEO authority without them then being appended to other pages on your site (so little bits of authority just get lost from your website's ecosystem)
It's not a huge problem that you should freak out about, in-fact the noticeable difference in performance via either implementation (I would guess) would be negligible to totally unnoticeable
But still - why chip away at yourself right? That's what your competitors are there for
-
Thanks, Roman,
You are echoing my sentiments. I'm glad I wasn't having a meltdown.
-
Based on my experience that is an Issues ....why?
Generally, with internal links, we want to link one page to another to help Google discover the content, while also creating a hierarchy to reflect which pages are more important than others. Internal linking fulfills different tasks.
- It ensures the accessibility of all documents.
- It prioritizes content and distributes link juice.
- It helps to cluster content and creates a context to explain what a page is supposed to rank for.
Basically, Google evaluates the priority of a page according to the quality and number of incoming links. Depending on your website, as well as say products or contents that you have on your domain, you need to understand what is most important from a business perspective.
If you have an online shop, you obviously will have lots of categories that usually target very generic, high volume keywords. Then you also have your product pages. These product pages usually target more specific, long tail keywords; therefore the search volume per URL and that of the keywords is usually lower. From a hierarchy perspective, you should ensure that the most important categories are very closely linked from the homepage.
Another important is the link juice. The main idea is that link juice is a kind of definer of all the positive and negative characteristics that can be passed by an internal or external link from one URL to another.
**IN SUMMARY **
- _Internal-links is one the best way to build a site structure _
- _Internal-links is also important to pass link juice from page to another _
- _with no follow tag on all the above explanation is almost useless _
**_"The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow." **seriouslyI don't understand what is he talking about _
Hope this info will help you
Regards and good luck
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
-
Regarding Internal Links
I analyse my Birthday Page "https://www.giftalove.com/birthday"with comapare link profiles and found that total Internal Link 47,234. How my internal link suddenly increse. Please provide my details about my internal links.
Technical SEO | | Packersmove0 -
Helping finding a link
Hi So Ive done a crawl of the site using screaming frog. There are a few old category and sub category pages which don't exist any more but somehow the crawler is finding them. An example is below: http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Home-Appliances/cat/Health-&-Beauty/subcat/Male-Grooming Just wondering if anybody had any ideas about how I could go and find these urls and remove them off the site. Any ideas would be really appreciated. Thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Will multiple internal links with the same anchor text hurt a site's ranking?
Hello, I just watched this video from the Google Webmasters channel at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ My question: If a site is built up on subdomains, will linking the different subdomains with exact anchor text hurt the site's ranking? Thanks
Technical SEO | | arnoldwender0 -
Why are these internal pages not showing any internal links?
If you look at Author profile pages like this one, http://experts.allbusiness.com/author/denise-oberry (THE top contributor on the site with over 82 posts under her belt), or any Author profile page, they show zero internal links or Page Authority. The same goes for most posts for each author on the site. Author pages should show internal links from every post the author has on the site. And specific posts should also have internal links from categories, etc. Yet they show zero. The only posts that show internal links and PA are ones that were either syndicated to the root domain's homepage, or syndicated to Fox Small Business. ZERO internal links. Does anyone know why this is? The root domain does not act this way with Author pages and posts. And I see nothing blocking links or indexing via the robots.txt file or page level nofollow tags. A real head scratcher for this SEO nerd, that I'm sure someone here will have a really simple answer to.
Technical SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
Rel no follow question
Hello, I probably already know the answer to this question. But, When you use a rel no follow tag on an internal link or external link. Will the google bot still navigate to the link, in question? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | PeterRota0 -
Unnatural links to your site--impacts links
Hi, I just recive a "nice" Massage at my WMT- Unnatural links to your site—impacts links _Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more._Did someone here came across any massage like this before?if so, any suggestion on what to so next?Whould love for some help! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Canonical Link Quesiton
I wrote an article that is a page article, but would also be a very good blog post - So my question is two things: 1. If i post it as a static page and syndicate it as a blog post and have it as a canonical link to the page, google will read see the blog and read the page _url as the one with credit correct? In turn not dinging me for duplicate content. 2. Given if the above statement is correct, should I write the blog and put it on my static page referencing the blog or the way i have it as a static page with the blog using a canonical reference back to the page. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0