Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?
-
My website is an ecommerce and we have on homepage about 470 links !
1. We have a top bar with my account, login, faq, home, contact us and link to a content page.
2 . Then we have multistore selection
3. Then we have the departament menu, with several parants + child category links
4. Then we have a banner
5. Then we have a list of the recently sold and new products.
6. then we have an image grid with the most important cms/content pages (like faq, about us, etc)
7. then we have footer, with all info pages, contact us, about us, my account etc.
There are some links that are repeted 2, 3 times. For a user it is easier to find the informations but I'm not sure how search bots (google) deal with that.
So I was thinking on how can I have around 150 links to be followed. To remove the links from the page is not possible. What about to add nofollow to repeted links and some child category, as the spider will crawl the father and will access child on the next page?
Is this a good strategy?
-
That's something you'd want to test with your users. Generally though, the easier it is to get from Point A to Point B to Sale the better.
-
But what is better? user experiance (offering easiest way to find products on menu) or less links (users will have to throught 2 page levels to find the products) ?
Menu > category 2 > product
Menu > category 1 > category 2 > product
-
I think Wikipedia does alright using nofollow... ;^) Still, Paulo would probably be better served by limiting the number of links on a given page, preferably by design to promote certain aspects and conversion paths. All in all though, this is likely a pretty minimal expected improvement.
-
DO NOT use nofollow within a website. You will bleed PageRank.
If you have 5 links dividing 100% pagerank. each will have 20%. if you nofollow one the resulting pagerank from your 5 links is only 80%. This means that you bleed 20% from that page alone.
If you use noindex, please do use dofollow. This way the link value will be reused (in menu and footer pages)
-
Sure, you can nofollow duplicate links, but the benefits are fairly minimal. Gaining domain and page authority and making sure page load speeds are at their fastest possible levels will go a lot farther than nofollow, in terms of priorities. Cheers!
-
Thanks for the coments. I've checked the links you sent me. I have made noindex the pages you said, like cart, checkout, login...
My question is related to too many links on a page. Can I reduce it nofollowing links that appear more than once?
-
Hi Paulo. Typically allowing links to be followed is fine, but you might consider using noindex instead for pages that would be drawing search equity away from your target landing pages. Good candidates for noindex would be: my account, login, duplicate / close to duplicate category listings, and so on. If you really want to limit your links, it's best to do so from design and CRO point so that people are better using and converting within your site.
Another thing to consider is setting up canonical tags for your root product and category pages. Lindsay Wassell wrote a nice article discussing pros and cons of this technique in addition to others here: https://moz.com/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo
Still another resource--while specifically for Magento--is here: https://moz.com/ugc/setting-up-magento-for-the-search-engines You'll find a lot of parallels though between the settings discussed there and your own ecommerce implementation. Hopefully these help point you in the right direction. Best of 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
-
Keywords in site maps. Can there be too many? Can they be considered to be stuffed?
Hi everyone,
On-Page Optimization | | TheJewelleryEd
I'd appreciate some insight on a keyword stuffed site map I've seen on a site similar to ours (we don't have this kind of menu ourselves).
https://www.1stdibs.com/sitemap/jewelry/stone/pink-diamond/
This is accessed from a site map. Do you think it's too blatant / keyword stuffed? I haven't done this with our site, but am interested to see a big reputable site doing something so clearly just for SEO.
Would it work? Or would search engines dislike it? I'd really appreciate your thoughts.
Thank you.0 -
Is it convinient to use No-Index, Follow to my Paginated Pages?
I have a website http://www.naukrigulf.com and it has a lot of Paginated pages on its SERP and most of paginated pages are getting indexed in Google SERP. Is it beneficial to use No-Index, Follow to keep the link equity to main (first page), although we have already used rel=next and rel=prev. If Answer is "yes" is their any harm by using no-index, follow with rel=next, rel=prev.
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Cornerstone Page And Outbound Links
I have a cornerstone page and 10 related articles that all have links to the cornerstone page. My question is, should the cornerstone page link back to those 10 articles as well or will it lose juice by doing so? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
[HTML Gurus] Is the only nofollow = rel="nofollow"?
From my knowledge only way an HTML link is nofollow is using rel="nofollow". I was wondering if you have a link , is there anything you can put OTHER than rel="nofollow" within the <a></a>tags that make a link nofollow?
On-Page Optimization | | William.Lau0 -
Impact of nofollow links
Does anyone know what the impact of a nofollowed link is on the ranking value any given page has to distribute? For example, if I have 2 links on a page, both followed, I know those links each distribute nearly 50% of the total ranking value the current page has to offer. However, if one of those links is nofollowed, does that automatically mean the other link gets the ranking value cast off by the nofollowed link? In other words, the single followed link now distributes nearly 100% of the ranking value the page has to offer? It seems to me I remember hearing this was not the case and that the ranking value a nofollowed link would have if it were followed just evaporates. This would mean the single followed link still only passes on around 50%...not 100%. Is the effect different if the links are internal vs. external? If any citations are available to justify knowledge here, that would be great. I know a lot of people have opinions about this subject, but I'm not sure anyone knows Google's position. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | RyanOD0 -
Would removing high dynamic pages though nofollow help or hurt?
We have a sub-domain that is hosted by a third party. These pages are highly dynamic (change daily or more often) as they are product search results. Unfortunately they are raising several errors and warnings including duplicate page content, title missing or empty, long URLs, overly dynamic URL Would putting nofollows on the links to this sub-domain help, hurt or not affect page rank? As an example: Links in the middle of this page (prices) http://targetvacations.ca go to a page such as this http://travel.targetvacations.ca/cgi-bin/resultadv.cgi?id=16294922&code_ag=tgv&alias=tgv which is then redirected to a dynamic URL and presents the results.
On-Page Optimization | | TSDigital0 -
Too many links on page -- how to fix
We are getting reports that there are too many links on most of the pages in one of the sites we manage. Not just a few too many... 275 (versus <100 that is the target). The entire site is built with a very heavy global navigation, which contains a lot of links -- so while the users don't see all of that, Google does. Short of re-architecting the site, can you suggest ways to provide site navigation that don't violate this rule?
On-Page Optimization | | novellseo2 -
More than 100 internal links from a page
Hi, we have been developing our new site and improving the internal linking for 2 reasons, 1 to improve spidering and 2 to up sell more to customers. The error reports from SEOMoz are showing our biggest problem is too many internal links from 2000+ pages. How much of an impact does it have by having say 180 internal links compared to say 99 on a page? Our website has been moving up the SERPs so should i worry about it or should I ignore the warnings and continue with the menu system and internal linking we have in place already? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PottyScotty0