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.
So You No-Follow Privacy Policy Pages etc?
-
site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp
Some people have recently suggested my homepage is giving out to much PR.
Do I need to no-follow the "about us", "Customer Service" and "contact us" pages?
-
Hi Rhys,
Taking a look at your site, your links all seemed natural and within reason. ( I did think the homepage was a little light on content - mostly just navigation and quick links to products. But that's another conversation.
"Best practice" is to consolidate your non-important links into a format that makes sense and is human friendly. Rand wrote a post about footer links awhile ago that still works today:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience
I wrote about this in another Q&A thread a short time back.
Today, you don't hear much about PageRank sculpting. Most SEOs don't bother with it, partly because of it's decreased effectiveness, but also in part because there are more effective ways of controlling the influence of links.
...Link "equity" or PageRank, (or MozRank), is only one small factor in the overall value of a link. Anchor text, position on the page, and a host of other factors all influence how much influence any given link can wield. Here's a good introduction on the subject (again from Rand)
If you "no-follow" your important contact pages (about us, etc) Google may have trouble finding and crawling those pages. Because these are both valuable pieces of content and trust signals for your site, this probably isn't the outcome you want.
To summarize: Adding nofollow in your case doesn't make sense. It really only makes sense in a very few cases, and isn't as effective in controlling ranking signals as many people would like to believe.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Did you read through all the comments? There is a lot of useful information in there. Here is another article by Rand shortly after the update that describes how this will affect websites:
Here's a simplified example: Say you have a page with 10 links on it, this page is essentially passing on 10 points of Page Rank (PR) to other pages on your site. If you nofollow 3 of the links you are only passing on 7 points to the rest of your site, the remaining 3 points evaporate. If you have 500 pages on your site and you nofollow just 3 links on each page then how much of your PR are you wasting in total?
This is why Matt recommends that you let your PR flow freely through your site. PR sculpting using this strategy used to work before they made this change in 2009.
Of course this is still down to interpretation and how much you believe what Google says, obviously they don't give away too many secrets. This question gets asked in this forum every week and I would say the vast majority of the SEO experts here advise against this practice.
I hope that helps
-
heya
I read the whole post but couldn't find a single point which says that "This strategy died years ago"
Even matt uses nofollow for RSS/Atom to not pass PageRank and showing RSS/Atom in SERPs
I am really interested in knowing if it has really died. please guys provide some more credible and straight posts/information.
-
nofollowing no longer works, and although Google can read some javascript, you can obfuscate the js links and conserve pr from leaking that way
-
Todd is right, this won't save your PR from leaking. This strategy died years ago. Have a look at a similar topic here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-internal-links-on-page-any-benefit-to-nofollow
or here Matt Cutts describes how 'Page Rank Sculpting' no longer works:
-
Sorry Khem I do not agree.
The nofollow attribute doesn't stop a page from being pulled in a search engine. It also doesn't stop the flow of PR (Sure that's what Google says it does, but it definitely does not work that way). The only time you should be using a nofollow is for links you either:
1. Don't trust
2.links that lead to pages that search engines cannot understand
in regard to number 2, if you have a 'sign in' link on your homepage you should put a nofollow on that. Search engines cannot sign in to your website. There is no reason for a search engine to follow that link. All other links - just keep them dofollow. You're not 'sculpting' your PR by using nofollow links.
You should switch your concern away from nofollow and focus on site speed. Your site seems slow to me.
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
-
Images on their own page?
Hi Mozers, We have images on their own separate pages that are then pulled onto content pages. Should the standalone pages be indexable? On the one hand, it seems good to have an image on it's own page, with it's own title. On the other hand, it may be better SEO for crawler to find the image on a content page dedicated to that topic. Unsure. Would appreciate any guidance! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
Using hreflang for international pages - is this how you do it?
My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics. The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up. I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc. What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple 🙂 Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /1 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Does an H1 have to be at the top of a page?
Because H1 "may" carry some weight with Google does it have to be placed at the top of the page? Can I place it towards the bottom of the page instead in normal body size? My goal is to keep the main keywords in the H1 but create a much friendlier title for the customer to read at the top of the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe0