Brand new website, should I nofollow almost all internal links?
-
Hi,
As I am creating a completely new website for my employer (she will have zero incoming links, even the URL will be different), would it be advantageous to allow follows to the other internal pages from the home page, but disallow follows on all other internal links on each subsequent page?
So, for example each page will have this many internal links:
Home page: 5 (all 5 service pages)
Recruiting: 1 (home link)
Services: 1 (home link)
Talent Assessment: 1 (home link)
etc.
Does this make sense to bolster the home page until we can get some links coming in?
-
Hi there,
As a general rule, you almost always want to "follow" internal links - this includes links between internal pages. To do otherwise could hurt your SEO.
Links do a lot of things. They create a path for search robots to crawl your site. They send off relevancy and popularity signals to ranking algorithms.
Is there any particular reason you thought of "nofollowing" your internal links?
About the only time you want to add nofollow to internal links is when doing so prevents search robots from going down the wrong path, such as so-called spider traps, or sometimes as a layer of protection to keep robots from crawling certain pages (not the best method to use)
Regardless, making sure your internal links are followed has many, many benefits. This is one of my favorite blog posts of all time - although a little dated, it applies to internal links as well as external: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
yes and from a content perspective , it looks sensible and goes with the flow.
-
If its a new web site best practise is not to no follow any pages you want indexed. That said internal no follows are ignored anyway nowadays. Internal link juice manipulation, like external is not a great idea.
-
You mean, as long as each link is its own keyword, but doesn't repeat the keyword from the homepage?
-
as long as they are not targeting one particular keyword, you should be ok
-
Well, I plan on having my internal links so that the visitors can go from one page to the next from any page. The layout of the website is rather simple. It will be a home page and 5 supporting pages as of now. So, each page would have a total of 6 internal links if they were followed. Is that okay or would it matter if I just made the home page the only followed link?
-
Not necessarily, if the internal links are correctly in place to guide visitors in the right direction , then you're ok having them on the internal pages. You mentioned only 1 internal link for the inner pages , which should be ok. The issue would be if you overdid it and had lots of keyword rich internal links created to link to other pages.
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
-
Poor Blog and Website DA and links
Hi There We have a mature website and a mature blog with over 500 genuine blogs written on it over 4 years. In terms of actual "people" value it has to be high. We used to get 1000 visitors per day, we now get 300. We still have 850 subscribers so its of a certain size. However we have been hit by the Penguin/Panda updates and our DA has dropped to what everyone is telling us is too low for a site like this and we still have a google backlink problem, unyet we only have 190 external links that we think are all OK now. The problem we have is that we seem to have too many links from the blog to the main website with the same anchor text. This has occurred with a blogroll style link to the home page which appears on every post/page of the blog, also I think we have too many anchor same anchor text links to product pages (Motorola ES400) and category pages (Tablet PC). We're going through changing these now so that we have the right mix but the specific questions I wanted to ask were: 1. Will loads of links with the same anchor text affect us if the blog is counted as internal links. Its on the same "blog" sub-domain as the main website. 2. Will this affect the DA of both sites? 3. Is Wordpress capable of damaging us with all the extra pages it creates automatically. We've done nothing but genuine content posting here and i'm sure we can get it back but it kind of really demotivates you when 2/3rds of your traffic goes overnight. Many thanks for any help.
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
First links for a new site?
What would be the first links you get for a new site? Yahoo and BOTW directory links? What are your favorites?
Link Building | | Mozzin0 -
Most OSE Top Links Are Internal
If I run an OSE report and check the 'top links' tab, I find that 95% of the links are internal pages on the same root domain. Can I deduce from this that my link profile sucks, and is in need of serious improvement? Thanks.
Link Building | | -Al-0 -
How Can a website with Far lower links and authority outrank me?
I Have a competitor clearly using incorrect methods to rank, How can they be coming in ahead of me? Pages are are all keyword stuffed, site is only 1 year old. It looks like their main source is Press Releases for backlinks. How long does it usually take google weed these people out? Thx!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Page links vs. domain links
Hello all, I am trying to find out how Google weighs page inbound links vs. domain inbound links. I have a domain with about 100,000 inbound links and am adding a new page to my domain which at this time has 0 links. I will be trying to outrank a competitors page that has 6,000 inbound links to the competitors page, but only has 26,000 inbound links to my competitors domain . Is there a formula or a way to know how Google values a page link vs. a domain link?
Link Building | | digitalops0 -
Looking at Page Authority of a link to our website... what Page Authority number should we use in deciding the link is junk?
What are the Page Authority ranges? 1. Excellent link 2. Moderate 3. Total junk link Of course you look at the anchor text you can use, how many links are on the site, how often it is cached. Thoughts?
Link Building | | RezStream80 -
Make a new page or more links to existing page for 2nd keyword?
We have a page optimized for 'blue widgets'. We rank in organic spot #3 or 4 for that (moves around from week to week). Fairly happy with that. We have another derivative term 'blue widgets small' (example, but it's same format: <original phrase="">+ <single word="">) where we currently rank #6 organic in Google when people search on the 3 word phrase.</single></original> We'd like to rank higher than #6 for the 3 word phrase. Should we: (1) Build a bunch of links with anchor text equal to the 3 word phrase and point to the existing page (which is optimized on-page for the first 2 of the 3 words) or (2) Make a new page optimized for the 3 word phrase and then start building links to it with anchor text equal to the 3 words (and non-cannibalizing variants of the 3 words)? The 2 word phrase is pretty competitive and it has taken us months to get that page to be #3 or 4 organic for that phrase. The 3 word phrase is much less competitive and we don't think it would take that long to make a dedicated page rank higher than #6 for the 3 words. Suggestions? Thanks.
Link Building | | scanlin0 -
Nofollow link from page rank 7?
What do you think about a nofollow link from page rank 7? will I see any results? how much is it worth?
Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0