Maximum of 100 links on a page vs rel="nofollow"
-
All,
I read within the SEOmoz blog that search engines consider 100 links on a page to be plenty, and we should try (where possible) to keep within the 100 limit.
My question is; when a rel="nofollow" attribute is given to a link, does that link still count towards your maximum 100?
Many thanks
Guy
-
Thanks bootleg - appreciate the external links.
Guy
-
Yes it still counts. Google changed that some years ago. For more info see this blog entry and also Matt Cutts take on this (both articles are about 2 years old, that's when the change happened).
Sorry for editing a third time, but please also have a look at Google's newest statement about the 100 links per site guideline on youtube.
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
-
HELP: Why do I have a 61% score for "% of total links, external + follow"?
Firstly, I understand what this percentage is. It's the ratio of external links that are "follow" -> compared to the links that are "no-follow". Four questions: This is definitely not accurate! I have loads of no-follow links Does anyone have ideas or techniques to add more healthy no-follow links? Am I completely misunderstanding this? Will this high score negatively affect my ranking? I could definitely use some help. Thanks so much in advance. I don't think my website address should help, but if you need it for context, it's estatediamondjewely.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCitron0 -
Index, follow on a paginated page with a different rel=canonical URL
Hello, I have a question about meta robots ="index, follow" and rel=canonical on category page pagination. Should the sorted page be <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> since the rel="canonical" is pointing to a separate page that is different from the URL? Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks. Main Category Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice
https://www.site.com/category/
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" "=""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"=""><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" ?p="2""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,> As you can see, the meta robots is telling Google to index https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name , yet saying the canonical page is https://www.site.com/category/?p=2 .0 -
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://moz.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Pagination new pages vs parameters
I'm working on a site that currently handles pagination like this cars-page?p=1 cars-page?p=2 In webmaster tools I can then tell ?p= designates pagination However I have a plugin I want to add to fix other seo issues, among those it adds rel="prev" rel="next" and it modifies the pagination to this cars-page-1.html cars-page2.html Notice I lost the parameter here and now each page is a different page url, pagination is no longer a parameter. I will not longer be able to specify the pagination parameter in webmaster tools. Would this confuse google as the pagination is no longer a parameter and there will now be multiple urls instead of one page with parameters? My gut says this would be bad, as I haven't seen this approach often on ecommerce site, but I wanted to see what the community thought?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Rel Canonical for HTTP and HTTPS pages
My website has a login that has HTTPS pages. If the visitors doesn't log in they are given an HTTP page that is similar, but slightly different. Should I sure a Rel Canonical for these similar pages and how should that be set up? HTTP to HTTPS version or the other way around? Thank you, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeyGedgaud1 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
"Duplicate" Page Titles and Content
Hi All, This is a rather lengthy one, so please bear with me! SEOmoz has recently crawled 10,000 webpages from my site, FrenchEntree, and has returned 8,000 errors of duplicate page content. The main reason I have so many is because of the directories I have on site. The site is broken down into 2 levels of hierachy. "Weblets" and "Articles". A weblet is a landing page, and articles are created within these weblets. Weblets can hold any number of articles - 0 - 1,000,000 (in theory) and an article must be assigned to a weblet in order for it to work. Here's how it roughly looks in URL form - http://www.mysite.com/[weblet]/[articleID]/ Now; our directory results pages are weblets with standard content in the left and right hand columns, but the information in the middle column is pulled in from our directory database following a user query. This happens by adding the query string to the end of the URL. We have 3 main directory databases, but perhaps around 100 weblets promoting various 'canned' queries that users may want to navigate straight into. However, any one of the 100 directory promoting weblets could return any query from the parent directory database with the correct query string. The problem with this method (as pointed out by the 8,000 errors) is that each possible permutation of search is considered to be it's own URL, and therefore, it's own page. The example I will use is the first alphabetically. "Activity Holidays in France": http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/ - This link shows you a results weblet without the query at the end, and therefore only displays the left and right hand columns as populated. http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?CategoryFilter= - This link shows you the same weblet with the an 'open' query on the end. I.e. display all results from this database. Listings are displayed in the middle. There are around 500 different URL permutations for this weblet alone when you take into account the various categories and cities a user may want to search in. What I'd like to do is to prevent SEOmoz (and therefore search engines) from counting each individual query permutation as a unique page, without harming the visibility that the directory results received in SERPs. We often appear in the top 5 for quite competitive keywords and we'd like it to stay that way. I also wouldn't want the search engine results to only display (and therefore direct the user through to) an empty weblet by some sort of robot exclusion or canonical classification. Does anyone have any advice on how best to remove the "duplication" problem, whilst keeping the search visibility? All advice welcome. Thanks Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0