Would it make sense to add no-follow on certain interlinks?
-
I run a job board and some results pages may display Page 1, 2, 3 last. Should I consider making those page numbers no-follow. What about sign in and join us pages? There is nothing of relevance on those pages. I have previously posted a similar question and was advised not to no-follow pages from my own site. However, I see very successful competitors no-following very few select interlinks (like the page 1, 2, 3 scenario). This does not mean their approach is the best, but it makes me question......
-
Hi Kristian,
Sorry this is a bit late - logged off when you posted this (I'm in the UK) and only just had chance to get my 'Moz fix
"non-pers google.com" just referred to using the SEOMoz Chrome Toolbar to do a 'Non personalised' check on Google.com for your keywords. If you want to check rankings compared to your competitors, use your SEOMoz Pro account (if you have one) or if you need something large scale and custom, get in touch with AuthorityLabs.
As for the no-follows, yeah - it would make sense to me. Again, depends on the exact situation but sounds like a sensible thing to do...
Matt
-
Matt, let me ask you 1 more: many of the employers posting on my site re-direct job seekers to their career websites. I have set up those external links (clients' career websites) as no-follow. This does make sense, right?
-
thx, Matt. Yes, rankings are pretty OK already (.7.5 months in to the project). I think you are right: focus on more content and outreach.......
what is a non-pers google.com check? I can check my ranking compared to my competitors? Let me know the site if you can
thank you
-
Mahalo!
I've had a -really- quick look and to me it seems that you're doing fairly well already! Being up against Career Builder, Monster and Indeed (I hope I'm seeing the correct results - did a non-pers Google.com check) is never going to be easy but the few rankings I checked look pretty good.
I'd probably leave it as it is and spend my time thinking about content creation and outreach as you've already got a great foundation
Good luck!
Matt
-
great answer, Matt. sub-pages should be indexed - they have SEO value. This is my site: www.hawaiijobengine.com.
Mahalo as we say in Hawaii -
As Luis says, the canonical tag would be your best bet, although that's more of a band aid than a complete fix as it's not guaranteed to be adhered to. In your example, I'd advise the following:
- Use a META Robots tag (http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html) to NOINDEX,FOLLOW any content that you don't want to be indexed. This could include your sign in / sign up pages, etc.
- Use rel=prev and rel=next on your pagination (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html) and canonicalise back to page 1 if and only if you genuinely don't want the subpages to be indexed.
The last of those two is completely dependent on your circumstances, and I'd advise looking and thinking about things like:
- Whether you're getting organic traffic to the sub-pages (a reason not to);
- Whether they sub-pages target a different keyword to the main one (a reason not to);
- Whether the sub-pages create any duplicate content issues (a reason to do so);
- Whether having the sub-pages affects your crawl quota (if so, a reason to do so).
Finally, on the note about your competitors... there's loads of stuff that will influence rankings so don't be guided by them too much
Hope that helps - let me know if you have any more questions, or just post a link here if you want me to take a (very) quick look at your site.
Matt
-
I would only use the no follow tag when i want to protect some information posted on the site from getting accessed by everyone. This includes any confidential internal info posted on the site or info that's behind a login. If you do not utilize the no follow attribute properly you can end up doing more harm than good. No harm in getting some additional pages indexed by Google as long as they don't compromise any data.
-
If the pages have relationship between them, you could use the rel canonical tag
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
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
-
Moving from no follow to follow links on our eCommerce site
Hi everyone, I recently taken on an SEO eCommerce account and found that all the footer links have a no follow attribute. I've requested that the no follow tags be removed as the pages are quite valuable (about us, finance, recycling, help centre etc). I've been asked what the risks are and all I can think of is a slightly increased number of pages for Google to Crawl. Are there any other risks you can think of? Does anyone have experience around making this type of change? For benefits, I believe that it will make our content look more trustworthy to Google and help with traffic through to those pages in the SERPs. Any other pros you can think of will be a great help.
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Sitemap_index.xml = noindex,follow
I was running a rapport with Sreaming Frog SEO Spider and i saw: (Tab) Directives > NOindex : https://compleetverkleed.nl/sitemap_index.xml/ is set on X-Robots-Tag 1 > noindex,follow Does this mean my sitemap isn't indexed? If anyone has some more tips for our website, feel free to give some suggestions 🙂 (Website is far from complete)
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Add Small Relevant Posts to website?
Hello Everyone, I'm starting a new WordPress-based community site WP Temple. As a part of this site, i'm going to be adding a "Code Snippets" Section which will show visitors how to do very specific things on their site. These snippets, by nature, will be small articles but contain highly-relevant for search. Should this content be indexed and followed, as well as added to my XML sitemap? I appreciate the feedback! Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?
I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML? I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Does Google monitor which links are actually followed?
If a link to my site is posted on another site and many people start following that link and they stay on my site for a while, and I also have GA set up, does Google factor that information back into the Google rankings? In other words, are there ways that Google tries to use clicks and bounce rates and other user behavior to determine page rank and domain rank? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher1 -
301 on certain url string
I have a few thousand old urls with the string /content/ in them and are looking for a way to 301 batch redirect them. So for all the urls that contain the word 'content' I would like to redirect to 1 specific page. I have tried the methods below without success. Regular 301's are working fine but this particular method is not working for me. I am running a Joomla site but I don't imagine that would have any impact. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Redirect 301 ^content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com Redirect 301 ^content/ http://www.mysite.com
Technical SEO | | omega0 -
Pinterist links no follow or followed?
in OSE it says we are getting lots of good links from pages like this on pinterest; pinterest.com/cbn456/inspiration-at-home However if you look at the code it says nofollow. Am I missing something or is OSE just missing it?
Technical SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Rel canonical with index follow on query string URLs
Hi guys, Quick question regarding the rel canonical tag. I have lots of links pointing at me with query strings and previously used some code to determine if query strings were in the URL and if they were then not to index that page. If there weren't query strings then the page would be indexed and followed. I assume I can now use the rel canonical tag on each of these pages so the value goes to the proper URL minus any query string. However do I need to have the rel canonical tag above the index, follow tag on the page? So URL is site.com/page.html?ref=ABC meta robots is "index, follow" Rel canonical is "site.com/page.html" Does the order of the meta robots and canonical tag matter? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | panini0