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.
Does using data-href="" work more effectively than href="" rel="nofollow"?
-
I've been looking at some bigger enterprise sites and noticed some of them used HTML like this:
<a <="" span="">data-href="http://www.otherodmain.com/" class="nofollow" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>
<a <="" span="">Instead of a regular href=""
Does using data-href and some javascript help with shaping internal links, rather than just using a strict nofollow?</a>
-
I think this is actually a really good question. The main reason most SEOs these days don't "sculpt" or "shape" with nofollow links anymore has to do with the fact that they will still take away from the total amount of pagerank available to be passed on to other links on the page. So the question I'm reading above seems to be:
Do<a data-href...="" links="" still="" take="" a="" portion="" of="" pagerank="" away="" from="" the="" total="" pr="" available="" to="" be="" passed="" on="" other="" same="" page?<="" p=""></a>
<a data-href...="" links="" still="" take="" a="" portion="" of="" pagerank="" away="" from="" the="" total="" pr="" available="" to="" be="" passed="" on="" other="" same="" page?<="" p="">My answer is "I don't know" but I'd like to see a test if anyone can think of a way to try it out.</a>
<a data-href...="" links="" still="" take="" a="" portion="" of="" pagerank="" away="" from="" the="" total="" pr="" available="" to="" be="" passed="" on="" other="" same="" page?<="" p="">However, even if the test came back saying "No, these are treated differently and do not currently affect the total amount of PR available to other links on the page" I still would not use it for the purpose of pagerank sculpting. The reason is that how Google treats these links today can change tomorrow, making "tactics" like this a bad idea IMHO. It just leaves a mess for either you or some other poor SEO to cleanup later.
If I don't want pagerank to pass through a link on a page I simply don't put the link on the page. In extreme circumstances where there is no other way around it I might consider obfuscating the link with some javascript, for instance. However, even if you block the .js file that handles this "link" in the robots.txt file Google still executes it (as you can see when viewing the cached version on Google for pages that do this).</a>
-
Hi Jonathan,
I highly doubt it, you normally use the data-href to trigger some events with JavaScript and as these links still have the rel="nofollow" it probably will have the same value (0, as it's nofollow) to search engines.
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
-
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Quick Fix to "Duplicate page without canonical tag"?
When we pull up Google Search Console, in the Index Coverage section, under the category of Excluded, there is a sub-category called ‘Duplicate page without canonical tag’. The majority of the 665 pages in that section are from a test environment. If we were to include in the robots.txt file, a wildcard to cover every URL that started with the particular root URL ("www.domain.com/host/"), could we eliminate the majority of these errors? That solution is not one of the 5 or 6 recommended solutions that the Google Search Console Help section text suggests. It seems like a simple effective solution. Are we missing something?
Technical SEO | | CREW-MARKETING1 -
Should we nofollow footer social links?
Like most sites today we have a whole raft of social links in our footer, these are on every page of the site and link out to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc Should these links be nofollow to avoid juice leaving our site or would you recommend allowing them to be followed to increase the power of these social sites? Is there a definitive Yay or Na on these social links?
Technical SEO | | Twist3600 -
Rel = prev next AND canonical?
I have product category pages that correctly have the prev next but the moz crawl is giving me duplicate content errors. I would not think I also need to have canonical - but do I ?
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
Use webmaster tools "change of address" when doing rel=canonical
We are doing a "soft migration" of a website. (Actually it is a merger of two websites). We are doing cross site rel=canonical tags instead of 301's for the first 60-90 days. These have been done on a page by page basis for an entire site. Google states that a "change of address" should be done in webmaster tools for a site migration with 301's. Should this also be done when we are doing this soft move?
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0 -
MBG Tracker...how to use it?
So I am a new blogger that has been submitting guest blog posts to a number of different blogs. It was recommended that I use the MBG Tracker so I can track the back links. The problem is that I am totally lost on how to use this tool. As I said before I am new to this whole thing and I am not really sure what constitutes a "base link" and a "back link." In the author bylines we are linking to different pages within a larger website. If anyone can help me I would really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | Stroll0 -
Is using a Href in Div OK?
Hi, I was just wondering what your thoughts are on using a Href in a Div, which contains anchor text. We currently use the Href on the div, as opposed to just the anchor text as I want the whole div to be clickable as opposed to just the anchor text. So currently I have: Keword 1
Technical SEO | | James77
Keyword 2 Is this perfectly fine to do it like this as opposed to using <a tags="" ???<br="">I suppose there are various alternatives - if you must use the</a><a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a> <a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a> Keword 1
Keyword 2 However I would assume a search engine is smart enought to know its the same thing??? Thanks0 -
What is best practice for redirecting "secondary" domain names?
For sites with multiple top-level domains that have been secured for a business or organization, I'm curious as to what is considered best practice for setting up 301 redirects for secondary domains. Is it best to do the 301 redirects at the registrar level, or the hosting level? So that .net, .biz, or other secondary domains funnel visitors to the correct primary/main domain name. I'm looking for the "best practice" answer and want to avoid duplicate content problems, or penalties from the search engines. I'm not trying to game the system with dozens of domain names, simply the handful of domains that are important to the client. I've seen some registrars recommend hosting secondary domains, and doing redirects from the hosting level (and they use meta refresh for "domain forwarding," which I want to avoid). It seems rather wasteful to set up hosting for a secondary domain and then 301 each URL.
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0