Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. So You No-Follow Privacy Policy Pages etc?

    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?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    6
    7
    3491
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • RichardTaylor
      RichardTaylor last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Cyrus-Shepard
        Cyrus-Shepard last edited by

        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!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Maximise
          Maximise @Maximise last edited by

          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:

          http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Khem_Raj7
            Khem_Raj7 @Maximise last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
            • irvingw
              irvingw last edited by

              nofollowing no longer works, and although Google can read some javascript, you can obfuscate the js links and conserve pr from leaking that way

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
              • Maximise
                Maximise @EvolveCreative last edited by

                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:

                http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

                Khem_Raj7 Maximise 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote -1
                • EvolveCreative
                  EvolveCreative last edited by

                  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.

                  Maximise 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • THandorf

                    Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?

                    My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf
                    0
                  • shauna7084

                    Multiple Landing Pages and Backlinks

                    I have a client that does website contract work for about 50 governmental county websites.  The client has the ability to add a link back in the footer of each of these websites.  I am wanting my client to get backlink juice for a different key phrase from each of the 50 agencies (basically just my keyphrase with the different county name in it).  I also want a different landing page to rank for each term.  The 50 different landing pages would be a bit like location pages for local search.  Each one targets a different county.  However, I do not have a lot of unique content for each page.  Basically each page would follow the same format (but reference a different county name, and 10 different links from each county website). Is this a good SEO back link strategy?  Do I need more unique content for each landing page in order to prevent duplicate content flags?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shauna7084
                    0
                  • Michael_Rock

                    Should I set up no index no follow on low quality pages?

                    I know it is a good idea for duplicate pages, blog tags, etc. but I remember somewhere that you can help the overall link juice of a website by adding no index no follow or no index follow low quality content pages of your website. Is it still a good idea to do this or was it never a good idea to begin with? Michael

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael_Rock
                    0
                  • Kingalan1

                    Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page

                    Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
                    Alan

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                    0
                  • fablau

                    Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?

                    Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
                    9
                  • Prime85

                    Stuck on Page 2 - What Would You Do?!?

                    My site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e My main keyword is : Plastic Bins i have been going back and forth between page 1 and 2 for this keyword and i was wondering if any of you could provide any guidance as to why i can't get on the top of page 1, and stay there... My site has been around for a while, we believe we have a great user experience, all unique, fresh content, and the lowest prices... I must be missing out on something major if I cannot get a steady page 1 ranking... Any thoughts? Thanks in advance...

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime85
                    0
                  • MyNet

                    How To 301 Redirect .html pages

                    I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location.  I don't know how to do this.  All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc.  From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file.  I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php.  I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server.  I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet
                    0
                  • donthe

                    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 | | donthe
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.