Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
-
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page
As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link?
Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute?
I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this
thanks in advance!
-
Thanks Maximise and Sven, both very informative answers.
I have changed the question to a discussion as it seems there may be no definitive answer to the above, so look forward to hopefully seeing further input from the Moz community.
-
Hi Justin,
I think you raise a very good point. It is known that nofollow links 'leak' linkjuice, because the linkjuice is not passed through the link, but it isn't distributed to other links on the same page either. The juice that would have been passed through a follow link simply vanishes when you add a nofollow tag.
As you said it is also suggested that Google does not count multiple instances of one link on one page. So the question that remains is: Are the second, third etc. instances of links treated as nofollow links (leaking linkjuice), or are they simply ignored (not leaking linkjuice)?
If they are treated as nofollow links and leak linkjuice anyway, you might as well add a nofollow-tag and make sure you don't get penalized for them either. On the other hand, if they are normally simply ignored by Google, but start leaking linkjuice with a nofollow tag, you might be doing some serious damage to your site.
Quite frankly, I don't know which is the case. However, my gut feeling says that the pagerank sculpting days are over so the above reasoning might not be the way to think about this.
I would simply try not to 'overdo' anything to much. Don't have pages with 200+ links all linking to perfectly optimised pages with perfectly optimised anchors. I suspect that internal linking is not the driving factor behind Penguin penalties anyway, but backlinks are.
Looking forward to see what other people think!
Greets,
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online -
I think they only pay attention to the anchor text of the first link, this would stop people from stuffing multiple links to the same page each targeting a different term. So if you have a few text links to the same page make sure the first one contains your primary key phrase.
Nofollowing the rest of the links wouldn't have any positive effect. The total link juice a page can pass on is divided by the total number of links on the page (regardless of follow or nofollow). In fact it can have a slightly negative effect as the juice from the nofollow links essentially evaporates instead of being passed to other pages on your site. Here is an article on how this works.
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
-
Same content, different languages. Duplicate content issue? | international SEO
Hi, If the "content" is the same, but is written in different languages, will Google see the articles as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chalet
If google won't see it as duplicate content. What is the profit of implementing the alternate lang tag?Kind regards,Jeroen0 -
Is there any ratio of dofollow and nofollow in back-links profile?
Hi, Is there any ratio between dofollow and nofollow back-links of a website? Do a website really need some nofollow back-links? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Rankings rise after improving internal linking - then drop again
I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position. My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely? Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hjsand1 -
Does Navigation Bar have an effect on the link juice and the number of internal links?
Hi Moz community, I am getting the "Avoid Too Many Internal Links" error from Moz for most of my pages and Google declared the max number as 100 internal links. However, most of my pages can't have internal links less than 100, since it is a commercial website and there are many categories that I have to show to my visitors by using the drop down navigation bar. Without counting the links in the navigation bar, the number of internal links is below 100. I am wondering if the navigation bar links affect the link juice and counted as internal links by Google. The Same question also applies to the links in the footer. Additionally, how about the products? I have hundreds of products in the category pages and even though I use pagination I still have many links in the category pages (probably more than 100 without even counting the navigation bar links). Does Google count the product links as internal links and how about the effect on the link juice? Here is the website if you want to take a look: http://www.goldstore.com.tr Thank you for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onurcan-ikiz0 -
Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio0 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0