Internal nofollows?
-
We have a profile page on our site for members who join. The profile page has child pages that are simply more specific drill-downs of what you get on the main profile page. For example: /roger displays all of roger's posts, questions, and favorites and then there are /roger/posts, /roger/questions, /roger/favorites.
Since the child pages contain subsets of the content on the main profile page, we canonical them back to the main profile page.
Here's my question:
The main profile page has navigation links to take you to the child pages. On /roger, there are links to: /roger/posts, /roger/questions, and /roger/favorites. Currently, we nofollow these links. Is this the right way to do it? It seems to me that it's a mistake, since the bots will still crawl those pages but will not transfer PR. What should we do instead:
1. Make the links js links so the child pages won't be crawled at all?
2. Make the links follow so that PR will flow (see Matt Cutts' advice here)? Apprehension about doing this: won't it dilute crawl budget (as opposed to #1)?
3. Something else?
In case the question wasn't confusing enough... here's another piece:
We also have a child page of the profile that is simply a list of members (/roger/friends). Since this page does not have any real content, we are currently noindex/nofollow -ing it and the link to this page is also nofollow. I'm thinking that there's a better solution for this as well. Would love your input!
-
Hello Yair,
I think you're fine with NOINDEX, FOLLOW robots meta tags on those pages and either rel="nofollow" in the links to them or using javascript instead. Keep in mind that Google is getting pretty good at parsing javascript so they'll still crawl those pages (which means they'll still be using crawl budget), making it necessary to have the noindex tag on those pages.
Providing those pages aren't already in Google's index, I would consider adding a robots.txt file disallow, similar to the one below...
Disallow: /user//favorites
Disallow: /user//posts
Disallow: /user//questions
Disallow: /user//friendsThe * is a wildcard that should apply this to every profile. You may or may not have a /user/ folder but I put it in there as an example.
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
-
Internal Linking
Hi, I'm doing internal anchor text links. Relative path. if I use /destination-page instead of https://website.com/destination-page will I still receive a transfer of internal Google trust to the destination page? Does google treat just the / url the same as full url??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scotty_Wilson0 -
Which One Would You Suggest Me in Terms of Internalization?
Hi Friends, This is my website http://goo.gl/fYndv. As of now, we have only one domain and we have contents in both English & Arabic. Arabic is translated content from English. So, we use alternate tags to indicate Google about that. We mostly receive traffic from Saudi Arabia because we are based out there. Now, we are planning to target major countries like India, Australia & So on. We know like creating sub-folders over sub-domains would be good like example.com/in/ over in.exmaple.com. But we are not going to change any contents only currency gets changed in those geo-graphic sub-domains or sub-folders. I just want to know, since I am not going to change the contents will it be good if I go with sub-folder like example.com/in. Is there any chance for Google penalization?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prabhu.Sundar0 -
Ranking problems with international website
Hey there, we have some ranking issues with our international website. It would be great if any of you could share their thoughts on that. The website uses subfolders for country and language (i.e. .com/uk/en) for the website of the UK branch in English. As the company has branches all over the world and also offers their content in many languages the url structure is quite complex. A recent problem we have seen is that in certain markets the website is not ranking with the correct country. Especially in the UK and the US, Google prefers the country subfolder for Ghana (.com/gh/en) over the .com/us/en and .com/uk/en versions. We have hreflang setup and should also have some local backlinks pointing to the correct subfolders as we switched from many ccTLDs to one gTLD. What confuses me is that when I check for incoming links (Links to your site) with GWT, the subfolder (.com/gh/en) is listed quite high in the column (Your most linked content). However the listed linking domains are not linking at all to this folder as far as I am aware. If I check them with a redirect checker they all link to different subfolders. So I have now idea why Google gives such high authority to this subfolder over the specific country subfolders. The content is pretty much identical at this stage. Has any of you experienced similar behaviour and could point me in a promising direction? Thanks a lot. Regards, Jochen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy0 -
Internal Links Query - What should be use as anchor text
Hello All, We are looking at our internal links and most of them say "More" or "View All" The "more" anchor Text links - are usually positioned on the Body Content as we only display a portion of the content and then the user clicks more to see all the content ? - Should we be changing the "More" Text to something more keyword /phrase friendly i.e " more information about carpet cleaning" or "more information on Tool hire" or would that be deemed as spammy ? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should I NoFollow Links Between Our Company Websites?
The company I work for owns and operates hundreds of websites throughout the United States. Each of these is tied to a legitimate local business many times with specific regional branding and mostly unique content. All of our domains are in pretty good shape and have not ever participated in any shady link building/SEO. These sites currently are often linking together between the other sites within their market. It makes perfect sense from a user standpoint since they would have an interest in each of the sites if they were interested in the specific offering that business had. My question is whether or not we should nofollow the links to our other sites. Nothing has happened from Google in terms of penalties and they don't seem to be hurting our sites now as they are all currently followed, but I also don't want to be on the false positive side of any future algorithm updates surrounding link quality. What do you think? Keep them followed or introduce nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
To follow or nofollow paid internal links?
I am having an internal debate on the need to use nofollow tags on sponsored internal links that link to internal pages. One thought is based on this Matt Cutts video (Should internal links use rel="nofollow"?) in which he says that there is never a need to use a nofollow tag on an internal link. The other school of thought is that paid links with follow tags are a violation of Google policy and it does not matter if they link internally or externally. Matt was just not thinking of this scenario in his short video. Would love to hear if anyone has had any manual action from Google based on their internal links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
Rankings for Home vs. Internal Pages - Potential 301?
Hi everyone: A site I'm working with until recently was ranking page 1 for its primary keyword. For the last month, they've dropped to page 4. One thing we've noticed is that the page that is ranking is an internal page (http://www.example.com/keyword-string) and at this point, everything ranking above us is ranking based on the root domain (http://www.competitor.com). We've eliminated Panda, penalties, and any other obvious causes for the drop in rankings. We have similar or better page rank, external links, domain trust, etc. in comparison to the sites still ranking page 1. We think this may be part of our problem. Has anyone else dealt with this? What did you do to change it and how did it work? We're considering eliminating the existing internal page and 301'ing to the home page. The keyword in question is the core of the business, so this is a natural change, but we're loath to lose years of investment in promoting the internal page. Also, the site was originally optimized with the primary keyword throughout (appears in META tags, headers on multiple pages). How important is it to clear these out to make Google see the home page as most relevant? Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdcomms0