To nofollow or follow internal links, that is the question...
-
"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff.
I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what?
Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages.
Thanks! Best... Darcy
-
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the info. To answer your question, the member profile pages are noindexed because there are 80,000 and most have little to no non-duplicate info. Some members fill in something. Most do not. Of the ones that do, they often pull the text from LinkedIn. Rather than have 80,000 duplicate or nearly duplicate pages in the index, we noindexed them.
Best... Darcy
-
What you're talking about is generally called Pagerank Sculpting and it's generally a bad idea:
http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/
The way it works, at least for distribution, is that the # of links is counted as a whole, not "number of followed links." That means you can't really help yourself this way. The article says it fairly clearly:
"Google has changed the way PageRank considers nofollowed links. Now, nofollowed links still count towards the distribution of PageRank, except the PageRank they would pass is reduced to zero. So your page A with 10 PR and five links, with four of them nofollowed, would pass 2 PR to the one followed link and 0 to the other four links."
So while you can, as Patrick pointed out, noindex them, let the juice flow everywhere.
-
Hi Darcy
Do not "nofollow" internal links to these pages - you want link equity to continue to move through your site. If you must noindex profile pages, leave the pages at least "noindex,follow" so that link equity can pass through those profile pages and continue to move through the site. Also, some members may have links from their site pointed at their profiles, I would check backlinks pointing to those pages if you get the opportunity.
You can do so through:
Majestic
OSEOut of curiosity, why did you noindex member profile pages if I may ask? Did you check and see if any of those pages get search traffic before noindexing? You might be missing an opportunity there. Hope this helps, good luck!
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
-
Breadcrumbs and internal links
Hello, I use to move up my site structure with links in content. I have now installed breadcrumbs, is it is useful to still keep the links in content or isn't there a need to duplicate those links ? and are the breadcrumbs links enough. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Cleaning up user generated nofollow broken links in content.
We have a question/answer section on our website, so it's user generated content. We've programmed all user generated links to be nofollow. Over time... we now have many broken links and some are even structurally invalid. Ex. 'http:///.'. I'm wanting to go in and clean up the links to improve user experience, but how do I justify it from an SEO standpoint and is it worth it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mysitesrock0 -
Can links be hidden?
I was wondering if anyone can help me with some advice on agency work. We have just employed a new SEO agency to conduct work on one of our websites. I took a look on OSE and GWT to see if we had any new links since the agency started working (1 month ago) but there's was nothing new. When l asked for an update as to what link building efforts had been completed last month, l was told they don't give out a list of links as it could compromise the agencies techniques. They told me that they use software to hide links form link aggregators so that our competitors don't know what we are doing. Can anybody confirm that such software exists or is this agency just taking us for a ride? If there is such a software, could this not hinder what links the search engines could see? Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Is this link follow or nofollow? Does it pass linkjuice?
I have been seeing conflicting opinions about how Google would treat links using 'onclick'. For the example provided below: Would Google follow this link and pass the appropriate linking metrics(it is internal and points to a deeper level in our visnav)? =-=-=-=-=-=-= <div id='<a class="attribute-value">navBoxContainer</a>' class="<a class="attribute-value">textClass</a>"> <div id="<a class="attribute-value">boxTitle</a>" onclick="<a class="attribute-value">location.href='bla</a>h.example.com"> <div class="<a class="attribute-value">boxTitleContent</a>" title="<a class="attribute-value">Text Here</a>"><a href<a class="attribute-value">Text Here</a>"><a ="blah.exam.cpleom">Text Herea>div> ``` =-=-=-=-=-=-= An simple yes/no would be alright, but any detail/explination you could provide would be helpful and very much appreciated. Thank you all for your time and responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TLM0 -
Links on My website
I am looking to create some more trust on my website by subscribing to BBB. I have heard that my site is penalized and loses "link juice" if I place the BBB logo link in my page footer on every page of my website. Does anyone know how much I am penalized? Should I only put it on my conversion pages and maybe my main 10 sub pages? My main goal is to assist in getting conversions but I don't want to do it at the expense of getting a penalty. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
What url should i link to?
Hi everybody, after some discussions i decided to keep my page on the old domain for better seo rankings; However, the new third level domain sounds better: poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it.... the question is: i'm going to recive a high value link and i don't know if i should link directly to the old adress ( www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.it ) where the page is located or to the new one by making a 301 redirect to the previous. what's best? and second question what's the way to keep the page on this adress ( www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.it ) but show poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it as url? thank you guido
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0 -
Do follow or no follow on wordpress site?
I have read many different opinions on what links to make do follow on a wordpress website versus which ones to leave as no follow. (internal and external) There does not seem to be any consensus among the inputs to date. Any perspectives on this would be appreciated. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Does a High percentage of nofollow inconming links, harm my campaign?
Hi all, and first of all, thanks in avant, my question is.... Does a High percentage of nofollow inconming links, harm my campaign? and when i mean a high percentage, i mean a 67% of all my incomings links, that are nofollow. Thanks! w7HDh.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ofuente0