Moving from no follow to follow links on our eCommerce site
-
Hi everyone,
I recently taken on an SEO eCommerce account and found that all the footer links have a no follow attribute.
I've requested that the no follow tags be removed as the pages are quite valuable (about us, finance, recycling, help centre etc). I've been asked what the risks are and all I can think of is a slightly increased number of pages for Google to Crawl. Are there any other risks you can think of?
Does anyone have experience around making this type of change?
For benefits, I believe that it will make our content look more trustworthy to Google and help with traffic through to those pages in the SERPs. Any other pros you can think of will be a great help.
-
Fab, thank you both for your thoughts. I was 99% sure I was going to do it, just needed someone else to agree with me
-
Are the pages linked elsewhere with follow links? And therefore, are those pages already indexed? (I would be surprised if they weren't, especially "About Us"). If so, changing the follow status won't have any impact on crawl budget but will demonstrate to Google that those pages are more important to you.
It seems to me that the pages you've listed would certainly be pages you would want to be indexed. And give the small number of pages you're talking about, it's not going to have any real impact on your crawl budget.
The fact that you're talking about less than 10 additional pages aside, if you're worried about crawl budget (as you might need to be if your e-commerce site is vast), then there is a good article here from Yoast: https://yoast.com/crawl-budget-optimization/
The pertinent section, and to work out if you really need to worry, is:- Determine how many pages you have on your site, the number of your URLs in your XML sitemaps might be a good start.
- Go into Google Search Console.
- Go to Crawl -> Crawl stats and take note of the average pages crawled per day.
- Divide the number of pages by the “Average crawled per day” number.
- If you end up with a number higher than ~10 (so you have 10x more pages than what Google crawls each day), you should optimize your crawl budget. If you end up with a number lower than 3, go read something else.
-
You can go for it.
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
-
Would merging a site with strong DA with one that has weak DA be a smart move?
I am working on a project for a client that has two ecommerce sites each with several thousands of products. Site A has a strong DA, is ranking well on Google for thousands of competitive keywords and generating high traffic and conversions. Site B has a poor DA, ranking poorly and much less traffic. We are considering the idea of merging the 5,000+ product pages from site B into site A. How can we evaluate whether this would be a wise move with the least risk to site A?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Sitemap links
Hi, I´m running a sitemap using pro-sitemaps and I find several pages that shouldn´t be listed. How do I find how are these pages being generated? Can´t find the links the robot is following to get to those pages..
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
Internal link structure, find out if there are any internal links to this page
When i use this url in open site explorer it says that there are no internal links:
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
http://goo.gl/d2s6tJ
Page Authority is also 1, it should be higher of there are any internal links to it right? But i am very sure there are links to this url on my website. For example on this URL:
http://goo.gl/ucixRH How certain can i be of this? Because if i can be very certain, than we have a internal linkstructure problem on our entire site i believe.0 -
Hot Linking
We recently noticed that our website www.efurniturehouse.com is being hot linked by axsoris.com a Dutch website with many malware issue. Any suggestions how to proceed? Thanks in advance Tony
Technical SEO | | OCFurniture1 -
Moving a site including meta data
If a website is moved to a new server, how can you ensure that all meta data moves with it?
Technical SEO | | jazavide0 -
Internal Linking
Hello there, I own a "how to" website with 1000+ articles, and the number of articles is growing every day. Often some articles are easier to understand if I link a certain step to an article that was written before, because that article explains the step in more detail. Should I use "read here/read more" or the "title of the article I'm referring to" as anchor text? When is internal linking too much? Should I use nofollow?
Technical SEO | | FisnikSylka0 -
How hard is it to rank above a site that has 300 back links from dex?
I am new to SEO and have started my keyword research. One keyword I would like to rank for has a competing site with over 400 back links, 300 of which are from dex. How hard would it be to outrank links coming from dex?
Technical SEO | | marker-3115280 -
Problem with my site
the site is casino.pt we created the site 7-8 month ago, we started to push it by good and natural links (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.casino.pt/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!page), links in sites with content rich and most of them related to gambling and sport topics. During the first 3-5 months, the rankings were better and better, after the 6 months, the site lose all its rankings. Aditional details http://www.casino.pt/robots.txt http://www.google.pt/#hl=pt-PT&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=805&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.casino.pt&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=2651649a33cd228 no critical errors in google webmaster tools any idea how can I fix it? thanks
Technical SEO | | Yaron530