Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
-
Hello everyone.
I have searched on these forums for an answer to my concerns, and despite I found many discussions and questions about applying or not applying "nofollow" to internal links, I couldn't find an answer specific to my particular scenarios.
Here is my first scenario: I have an e-commerce site selling digital sheet music, and on my category pages our products are shown typically with the following format:
-
PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page
-
Short description text
-
"more info" link that takes to the same product page again
As you may notice, the "more info" link takes at the very same page of the PRODUCT TITLE link. So, my question is: is there any benefit to "nofollow" the "more info" link to tell SEs to "ignore" that link? Or should I leave the way it is and let the SE figure it out? My biggest concern by leaving the "nofollow" out is that the "more info" generic and repetitive anchor text could dilute or "compete" with the keyword content of the PRODUCT TITLE anchor text.... but maybe that doesn't really matter!
Here a typical category page from my site;
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html
My second scenario: on our product pages, we have several different links that take to the very same "preview page" of the product we sell. Each link has a different anchor text, and some other links are just images, all taking to the same page. Here are the anchor texts or ALT text of such same links:
"Download Free Sample" (text link)
"Cover of the [product title]" (ALT image text)
"Look inside this title" (ALT image text)
"[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text)
"This item contains one high quality PDF sheet music file ready to download and print." (ALT image text)
"PDF" (text link)
"[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text)
So, I have 7 links on the same product page taking the user to the same "product preview page" which is, by the way, canonicalized to the "main" product page we are talking about.
Here is an example of product page on my site:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html
My instinct is to tell SEs to take into account just the links with the "[product title] PDF file" anchor text, and then add a "nofollow" to the other links... but may that hurting in some way? Is that irrelevant? Doesn't matter? How should I move? Just ignore this issue and let the SEs figure it out?
Any thoughts are very welcome!
Thank you in advance.
-
-
Thank you guys,
I got it. I will remove all the internal nofollows from my site!
-
Paddy is right not to nofollow internal links (Actually Matt Cutts just addressed this a day or two ago in a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86GHCVRReJs
And Elias is absolutely right about the first link.
Sage advice gentlemen.
-
I agree with Paddy, don't use nofollow on internal links.
Google follows the first link to a page and ignores subsequent links according to a matt cutts web master video.
My advice would be to make sure that the first link in the page (code view) is the a rich link i.e. the name of the product rather than a 'more info' link.
-
As you said this has come up many times and my answer is always the same, NEVER use No-follow on internal links... ever. No-follow just throws page authority out the window. I haven't seen a good argument for using no-follow on internal links (bar on pages like "create account" that you don't want to index, but I think no-index on the pages themselves is a better option)
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
-
How to deal with parameter URLs as primary internal links and not canonicals? Weird situation inside...
So I have a weird situation, and I was hoping someone could help. This is for an ecommerce site. 1. Parameters are used to tie Product Detail Pages (PDP) to individual categories. This is represented in the breadcrumbs for the page and the use of a categoryid. One product can thus be included in multiple categories. 2. All of these PDPs have a canonical that does not include the parameter / categoryid. 3. With very few exceptions, the canonical URL for the PDPs are not linked to. Instead, the parameter URL is to tie it to a specific category. This is done primarily for the sake of breadcrumbs it seems. One of the big issues we've been having is the canonical URLs not being indexed for a lot of the products. In some instances, the canonicals _are _indexed alongside parameters, or just parameter URLs are indexed. It's all very...mixed up, I suppose. My theory is that the majority of canonical URLs not being linked to anywhere on the site is forcing Google to put preference on the internal link instead. My problem? **I have no idea what to recommend to the client (who will not change the parameter setup). ** One of our Technical SEOs recommended we "Use cookies instead of parameters to assign breadcrumbs based on how the PDP is accessed." I have no experience this. So....yeah. Any thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Google WMT/search console showing thousands of links in "Internal Links"
Hi, One of our blog-post has been interlinked with thousands of internal links as per search console; but lists only 2 links it got connected from. How come so many links it got connected internally? I don't see any. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How to best add affiliate links in a way that minimizes panda risk?
We have a site of about 100.000 pages that is getting several million of visitors per year via organic search. We plan to add about 50.000 new pages gradually in the next couple of months and would like to add affiliate links to the new pages. All these 50.000 new pages will have unique quality data that a team has been researching for a while. I would like to add in the area under the fold or towards the end of the pages in an unobstrusive way affiliate links to about 5 different affiliate programs with affiliate links customized to page content and of real value to visitors. Since affiliate links are one of the factors that may trigger panda I am a bit nervous whether we should add the affiliate links and if there is any way of implementing the affiliate links in a way that they may be less likely to trigger panda. E.g. would you consider hiding affiliate links from google by linking to intermediate URL (which I would mark as noindex nofolllow) on our domain which then redirects to the final affiliate landing page (but google may notice via chrome or android data) ? Any other idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
HTTPS website migration and internal links
Hey Moz! I read Moz's guide on migrating websites from http to https, and it seems changing all relative internal links to absolute https is recommended (we currently use relative internal links). But is doing this absolutely necessary if we will already have a redirect in our .htaccess file forcing all http pages to https? Changing all of our internal links to absolute https will be very time consuming, and I'd like to hear your thoughts as to whether it's absolutely recommended/necessary; and if so, why? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Internal links and URL shortners
Hi guys, what are your thoughts using bit.ly links as internal links on blog posts of a website? Some posts have 4/5 bit.ly links going to other pages of our website (noindexed pages). I have nofollowed them so no seo value is lost, also the links are going to noindexed pages so no need to pass seo value directly. However what are your thoughts on how Google will see internal links which have essential become re-direct links? They are bit.ly links going to result pages basically. Am I also to assume the tracking for internal links would also be better using google analytics functionality? is bit.ly accurate for tracking clicks? Any advice much appreciated, I just wanted to double check this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Duplicate Title - Magento Products / Kunena Forum - Nofollow vs. Follow
Hello Mozzers! This is my first post so hopefully I can explain this in a way that is clear! I just signed up for my PRO membership and wanted to finally start hacking away at this companies site that I work for. I ran my report and noticed my Crawl Diagnostics: 715 Dupliate Page Titles I noticed that a lot those were coming from the customer login in magento. So I added the: User-agent: *Disallow:/customer/ as mentioned in this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10742052/duplicate-content-issues-for-login-page Any suggestions on that? Also, We have a Kunena forum on our site and have noticed all of the nofollow links. People say I should change them to follow links, but other people say leave them or I will get penalized. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NRMWEBWORKS0 -
How to handle "2" homepages?
Came across an interesting problem. A site has the traditional homepage of site.com and ranks okay. Later I found that another "homepage", site.com/home.html that ranks well for several terms but actually has old branding and semi-up-to-date content. Site.com/home.html has a solid linking profile but not as strong as the current homepage (site.com). The question I have is should I try to salvage the page or 301 redirect to site.com? Thank for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2comarketing0 -
Outgoing affiliate links and link juice
I have some affiliate websites which have loads of outgoing affiliate links. I've discussed this with a SEO friend and talked about the effect of the link juice going out to the affiliate sites. To minimize this I've put "no follows" on the affiliate links but my friend says that even if you have no follow Google still then diminishes the amount of juice that goes to internal pages, for example if the page has 10 links, 9 are affiliate with no follow - Google will only give 10% of the juice to the 1 internal page. Does anyone know if this is the case? and whether there are any good techniques to keep as much link juice on the site as possible without transferring to affiliate links? Appreciate any thoughts on this! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ventura0