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
-
Should we Nofollow Social Links?
I've been asked the question of whether if we should nofollow all of our social links, would this be a wise thing to do? I'm not exactly getting a clear answer from search results and thought you guys would be best to ask 🙂 Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
"5XX (Server Error)" - How can I fix this?
Hey Mozers! Moz Crawl tells me I am having an issue with my Wordpress category - it is returning a 5XX error and i'm not sure why? Can anyone help me determine the issue? Crawl Issues and Notices for: http://www.refusedcarfinance.com/news/category/news We found 1 crawler issue(s) for this page. High Priority Issues 1 5XX (Server Error) 5XX errors (e.g., a 503 Service Unavailable error) are shown when a valid request was made by the client, but the server failed to complete the request. This can indicate a problem with the server, and should be investigated and fixed.
Technical SEO | | RocketStats0 -
Where did the "Location" go, on Google SERP?
In order to emulate different locations, I've always done a Google query, then used the "Location" button under "Search Tools" at the top of the SERP to define my preferred location. It seems to have disappeared in the past few days? Anyone know where it went, or if it's gone forever? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Schema markup for products is missing "price": Is this bad?
Hey guys, So a current client of mine has an e-commerce shop with a few hundred products. They purposely choose to keep the prices off of their website, which is causing errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Basically the error shows: Error: Structured Data > Product (markup: schema.org) Error type: missing price 208 items with error Is this a huge deal? Or are we allowed to have non-numerical prices for schema ie. "call for quote"
Technical SEO | | tbinga1 -
Using the word "FREE" in domain name
Hi, This may seem like a simple question but a new client of mine wishes to use a domain name with the word "free" in it. The website will offer free activity vouchers. I couldn't see this being a problem as there a lot of websites that do this although he was told it may present a problem with the search engines thinking the site was spammy. It won't be and will be offering information and vouchers on local sporting activities. I was wondering if anybody could clarify this please so I can give him a more definitive answer to his question. Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | malinkymedia0 -
Google is Showing Website as "Untitled"
My freelance designer made some changes to my website and all of a sudden my homepage was showing the title I have in Dmoz. We thought maybe the NOODP tag was not correct, so we edited that a little and now the site is showing as "Untitled". The website is http://www.chemistrystore.com/. Of course he didn't save an old copy that we can revert to. That is a practice that will end. I have no idea why the title and description that we have set for the homepage is not showing in google when it previously was. Another weird thing that I noticed is that when I do ( site:chemistrystore.com ) in Google I get the https version of the site showing with the correct title and description. When I do ( site:www.chemistrystore.com ) in Google I don't have the hompage showing up from what I can tell, but there are 4,000+ pages to the site. My guess is that if it is showing up, it is showing up as "Untitled". My question is.... How can we get Google to start displaying the proper title and description again?
Technical SEO | | slangdon0 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreat
MaeM3.png TLcD8.png
0 -
Secondary Menu - nofollow or other strategy?
We have a "secondary main menu" on a site that displays some popular pages of the site. They are in the main navigation of the site as subpages but we wanted to highlight them on every page of the site through this secondary menu. so this secondary menu is the same on every page of the site. So we have the main menu on the top of the site, subpages on the left and this secondary menu below the subpages (in a blue box so they stand out). Is this secondary menu confusing for the structure of the site or negative at all (in relation to robots, not UX)? Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu? thanks for replies!
Technical SEO | | Motava0