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
-
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Ecommerce category pages
Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise. They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'. So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes. Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's. I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on. Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools. Any opinions on this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Show parts of page A on page B & C?
Good afternoon,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
A quick question. I am working on a website which has a large page with different sections. Lets say: Page 1
SECTION A
SECTION B
SECTION C Now, they are adding a new area where they want to show only certain sections, so it would look like this: Page 2
SECTION A Page 3
SECTION C Page 4
SECTION D So my question is, would a rel='canonical' tag back to Page 1 be the correct way of preempting any duplicate content issues? I do not need Page 2-4 to even be indexed, it is just a matter of usability and giving the users what they are looking for without all the rest of the extra stuff. Gracias. Tesekürler. Salamat Ko. Thanks. (bonus thumbs up for anybody who knows which languages each of those are) 🙂0 -
Is it OK to Delete a Page and Move Content to a Another Page without 301 re-direct
I have a page "A" that I want to completely delete and move the written content from A" to page "B". Since I am deleting "A" (not keeping page) is it OK to upload the content from "A" to page "B" and search engines will give "B" credit for the unique content? Or, since the content has already once been indexed on "A", "B" may struggle to get full credit for this new unique content, even though page "A" is deleted?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Please help with page
We used to use this page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html to rank for the words vinyl banner and PVC banner but we have tried to focus the page only on PVC banners and move the vinyl banners word to http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/ yet for some reason even though they have both been spidered google has now chosen to rank this page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/stickers/vinyl-stickers.html for the vinyl banner words- how do I stop this from happening I thought the home page would be powerful enough to rank for the word with a title inclusion and a spread of the word on the page. Also if anyone can give their opinion on why they thinkhttp://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html does not rank very well I would be truly appreciative.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Why Would This Old Page Be Penalized?
Here's an old page on a trustworthy domain with no apparent negative SEO activity according to OSE and ahrefs: http://www.gptours.com/Monaco-Grand-Prix They went from page 1 to page 13 for "monaco grand prix" within about 4 weeks. Week 2 we pulled out all the duplicate content in the history section. When rank slipped further, we put it back. Yet it's still moving down, while other pages on the website are holding strong. Next steps will be to add some schema.org/Event microformats, but beyond that, do you have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0 -
We will be switching our shopping cart platform from volusion to magento and really cautious / nervous about our rankings / seo stuff. any advice for anyone that has migrated stores, etc. these urls are years old, etc.
shopping cart platform switch and SEO. What do you suggest? What's the best way to ensure we keep rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0