Follow or no follow?
-
Should I add NOFOLLOW to the links in the footer of my site like "about us", "Contact us" etc because they are in the footer they are on every page so would this harm SEO in any way?
-
No need to add nofollow to the footer links. Keep it natural.
-
Oh and one final thing, I have a menu system that uses ajax, Google reports too many links on the page because it has the main link eg ceiling-lighting.html but then you can choose things like colour so it would change it to ceiling-lighting.html?colour=brass+supplier=another etc is this damaging to the site?
-
Thanks for the replies, I will leave them as they are, one other thing with regards to nofollow, does having more than one link to a page cause problems? for example on my product page the product title leads to the product so does clicking on the image and there is also a "more info" link that has the same url
-
Is page sculpting basicaly trying to manipulate crawlers into roaming your site more to specific pages to boost their rankings?
-
The only pages you should be using nofollow on would be any pages you don't want to be found in Google. PageRank sculpting is long dead (or so Google says) so you won't be able to horde your page strength.
Matt Cutts does use nofollow on his website, but only on his RSS feed. I go a step further and also nofollow any cart pages for ecommerce stores and any login/auth pages. Just anything that shouldn't be in search results.
I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I don’t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results. Even that’s not strictly necessary, because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages.
--Matt Cutts
-
Pages such as the about us page can have real value to your readers so definitely leave these as followed links. Likewise, if your contact page has important information such as telephone numbers or physical address, you want these pages indexed.
Rand wrote a post on NoFollow sculpting which dates back to 2008 but is still pretty relevant.
-
I don't see why you would want to do that; I would assume you would want the link juice on your site to spread freely through all the links so that each page is benefiting. If you nofollow the links then any links you follow will still be devalued by the nofollow links and the nofollow links themselves will not provide any juice to the rest of your site.
I would say that nofollowing your navigation links is therefore a bad idea
-
I would leave these as normal links.
No-follow is designed for links that you don't want to pass value. This could include advertisements (Google wants paid advertisements to be no-follow) and comments on your blog.
There was a previous theory that no-following internal links would result in the other links on the page passing more value (page sculpting) but this was debunked by Google. An internal link with a no-follow would not pass link value and the link value would be lost (not funneled to the do-follow links).
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
-
my site has 17.5m Total links according to Moz (16.6m internal follow & 840k no follow) i think i have a problem...
We are hosted by visual soft and it is a proprietory platform so we dont have full control of our site.
On-Page Optimization | | Russell-Gorilla
in comparison, 3 of our main competitors, two of which are way way bigger than us have 1.4m & 4.7m - another one still probably double or perhaps triple our size is @ 2.5m Should i worry?
Should i post my website url on here?
I would like to start working on canonical links on my site but not sure where to start, does moz pro have some sort of check or rating, i have no idea if even the basics mentioned in the tutorials have been done....
Russell0 -
When using external links for onsite optimization, should they be follow or nofollow links?
I'm trying to optimize my home page and need to add external links. I'm planning to link to other authoritative sites. Should they be follow or no follow links?
On-Page Optimization | | ntaparia171 -
Do Search Engines Try To Follow Phone Number Links
Any SEO thoughts on using rel="nofollow" when inserting a link to a phone number? To make a phone number click to call we use (555) 555-1234 Wondering if search engines are trying to follow that link or if this is standard and not to worry. Any thoughts on if I should add rel="nofollow" to these or does it not matter? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Lions-Pro0 -
NOINDEX, FOLLOW on product page - how about images indexing?
Hi, Since we have a lot of similar products with duplicate descriptions, I decided to NOINDEX, FOLLOW most of these different variants which have duplicate content. However, I guess it would be useful in marketing terms if Google image search still listed the images of the products in image search. How does the image search of Google actually work - does it read the NOINDEX on the product page and therefore skip the image also or is the image search completely dependent on the ALT tag of any image found on our site? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | speedbird12290 -
Best Practice: Should We Always Make No-Follow for External Links from Blogs?
Hi Mozers, I have few questions: 1. If I am allowing advertising on my blog and people advertising by placing Ads, Contextual links in Posts, Should I make them No-Follow? If Yes, then I might lose a good amount of income coming from Advertising. What is the best practice without loosing Organic rankings. 2. If I make all the External Links No-Follow (simple wordpress plugin can do), then I may not have anyone to advertise on my blog. What is the advantage that I am going to get? 3. Keeping the Do-Follow on all external links, how it will effect my blog? when there is no spam and all quality content on the blog. Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | mutantspy0 -
Best Way To Pass Rank To Follow Up Article?
What is the best way to pass rank to a follow-up article? For example, we write an article "Product A Rumors" that ends up ranking #1. When Product A is released, we write an article called "Product A Review". What is the best way to pass rank from the first pre-release article to the second post-release article? We don't want to do a simple 301 redirect as we want readers to be able to go back to the first article to see the progression of the Product A life-cycle. Also, should we go back and edit the old article to add a link to the new? Should we add a link in the new article to the old? Thanks in advance 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
Follow or nofollow the social links?
I recently seen a site that has delibrately no followed the links to there social sites. The company's Google Plus, Facebook and twitter icons all no followed? I would have thought you would want google to know about these profiles? Whats everyone elses take on this?? shivun
On-Page Optimization | | seohive-2227200 -
No Follow Internal Links
Hi Mozzers, I know that this has been asked a few times and answered as well, I would just like to know some more on the internal link count on a page. I ran the SEOmoz report and many of the pages on the website have more than 150+ internal links. Now, should I use the rel=nofollow tag on some pages that I feel are not important? I have a list of pages which are not important from the SEO point of view, but from the usability factors they need to be there so I cannot remove the links to them. So, would be OK to place the rel=nofollow tag on them. My whole purpose is to reduce the count of internal links on the page as seen by SE's. Now, some say that the rel=nofollow tag does not lower the link count, but it can definitely (I believe) prevent the bots time in getting to those pages, which SEOmoz report also quotes. (__When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. ) So, probably I can save their time. Does anyone have any views on this, Cheers,
On-Page Optimization | | RanjeetP0