Editor's Note: While we at SEOmoz feel this is an excellent subject for discussion and has already brought out some fantastic examples of what to do and what not to do (see the comments), we don't explicitly endorse all of the tactics described herein; please be cautious when using nofollow for link accumulation and changing anchor text of internal links in navigation and footers (see this post on internal links and this one on PageRank Scultping for more). And finally, a big thanks to Charlotte SEO for the contribution.
Placing the NoFollow link attribute on your website is a very important SEO factor for on-page optimization. Getting backlink juice to websites isn't that easy for everyone, so we need to make sure the juice flow is flowing properly.
I read a blog post last month demonstrating that a website is a balloon filled with water. Every link that does not contain NoFollow is basically someone sticking a needle into the balloon, which creates a leak. Imagine having 10 links on your page.....that's 10 leaks you need to stop! Your homepage pointing to your blog is not a leak. You WANT the juice to flow towards your blog. The leaks happen when you don't know about juice escaping to pages that should not be receiving juice. Not only are these leaks giving away juice, they are also being labeled with an anchor text.
Here are some examples of link juice leakage:
- Login/SignIn/Signup Links - Do you have a nofollow on this? Why not? There is no vital information on these pages. It's just a user function.
- Register - Same as above
- Logo/Header Picture - Unless you get customers by images (tangible products), what would be the point of not putting a nofollow?
- RSS feeds - Can create duplicate content. You want the search engines to index your blog posts, not your feeds.
- Tags, Archives, Category pages - They all contain your blog post. That's at least 3 extra pages with duplicate content, AND your juice leaks.
- Contact Us - Does this contain vital info that needs to be indexed? Normally, it's a form that needs to be filled out.
- Copyright/TOS/Privacy/Feedback - These pages do not contain relevant information to your website, and should not be indexed.
- Comment - Juice should stay in your blog post, and not going to comment pages.
Now here are some examples of leaks that contain the WRONG ANCHOR TEXT
Read More/Learn More/Read Full Entry/Permalink - Let's suppose I want label a page with 'Auto Finance' and the link to that page is example.com/auto-finance. It makes sense to put the anchor text as Auto Finance, but it doesn't make sense to use Read More as the anchor text. If you are using these anchor texts, you're leaking juice AND using the wrong anchor text.
Here's an example of what it looks like. I bolded the parts that would be links.
- title link: Auto Finance
- blog post: Auto financing has gone down due to the economic depression....
- Permalink/Read More/Learn More/Read Full Entry
Most websites will have at least 3: the title link, permalink, and Read More link. That's 3 links going to the same place, and 2 with the wrong anchor text. The name of the page is Auto Finance, not permalink or read more. If you have 5 blog posts on the homepage, that will be 10 extra links!
There are a lot more places where you need to put nofollow, but I saved the best for last.
Your 'Home Button' (if you have one)
The Home button is also an anchor text that leads to the homepage. Unless you're selling a 'home', you need to put a nofollow on this. By using the anchor text 'home', you're telling the robots that your homepage's title is Home....when it should probably be a keyword.
The home button was created for the 'users' so they can find the homepage. It is a user function (created for users, not robots).
There are 2 ways of dealing with this:- Changing the Home text to a keyword. If you do auto finance, then you will take out the word Home and put in Auto Finance.
- Placing a nofollow link attribute. Most people ask, "How are the robots going to find the homepage?" Easy. Place a link with a nice keyword on your footer. Just like the home button, the footer appears on every single page of your website. :)
Look at your website and determine if the pages/links are for the robots, users, or both.
I think some of the advice or recommendations in this post might be dangerous (and wouldn't be ones I'd always give).
On nofollowing stuff internally - my feeling is that yes, it can provide value, but you really, really need to know what you're doing, or you can actually kill traffic and rankings. It has a small upside in general, but a huge potential downside, so only use when you need lots of pages indexed and have a tree structure that's not doing that efficiently (or could use some extra assistance).
On changing the home link anchor text - bad idea! This is really dangerous territory. We've now observed multiple examples where this was quite clearly getting flagged as manipulative by the engines, and removing it actually helped the page/site rank better (some sort of penalty was in place for this).
Good points for discussion here, but it pays to take a critical eye to any piece of advice, especially those around internal linking (recently).
im not sure I understand
everything done in SEO is to 'manipulate' the search engines
It would be weird for the search engine to penalize someone for changing the anchor text to a keyword. This technique wouldnt even be greyhat or blackhat
I think removing the actual 'home' link altogether is a lot more dangerous, and was wondering if you can replace this with the header image? (didn't see home link on SEOmoz)
No no! No manipulation! SEO is about making conditions favorable for SEs to understand your structure and purpose.
It's a state of mind which makes it white hat. With nofollows you ask the SE to go along this path and not the other to efficiently index the site. That's showing the way, not manipulating.
Please read the comments of mvandemar. They saved me a few customers and gained me a few more.
Indeed nofollowing is really tricky. With the purpose in mind to show a quick way through your entire site you'll be ok in most cases.
Do you know the pagerank calculator? It's a bit outdated, but I think it's a great tool to see the impact of removing (nofollowing) or installing a link.
I have to disagree as well. SEO is not and should never be about "manipulation" it should be about two things:
#1 - Technology & technical fixes to help optimize the accessibility and targeting of web pages and web-based content for search engines (whose abilities are limited in comparison to human users)
#2 - Marketing & promotion of material that provides value to searchers and to those who are likely to help that content spread.
There are subtle things, basic things, obvious things and advanced things in SEO, but I believe all of them fall under these buckets, and are not manipulation :-)
Also - on the "home" front - sorry - didn't mean to suggest it had to be called "home" - I just mean that if you change your top homepage link to say "SEO - Search Engine Optimization Company," there are certainly algos and detection system that might not look kindly on that.
Thank's Rand for clearing up this home page nofollow issue.
Hi Rand,
I also think that it would be little bit spammy having links to homepage with anchor texts in footers.
Here is my solution:
* Nofollowing HOME links
* Making site logo clickable and writing targeted keywords in logo's alt tag.
I wonder if alt tags have not same effect with links anchor texts, because, in SEOmoz's Ranking Factors v2, some SEOs gave it not much points as link's anchor text.
What do you think Rand about this issue?
Rand,
I agree on the Home navigation and nofollowing stuff internally, but what do you think of the broader suggestion by Charlotte to plug every "leak" on every page to the point where you have no outbound ("do-follow") links?
To me, it seems like abusing the no-follow tag to this extent would be seen as spammy by the search engines...Even if Google isn't looking for currently now, I think its very likely Google will eventually adjust their algorithm to penalize abusers of the nofollow tag (because that is what this post is basically advocating), as thats how all SEO "manipulations" play out - someone has a really good (but dishonest) way of getting better rankings, it gets overdone, and Google adjusts accordingly and lays the smack down on the serial abusers.
I also find it troubling that the SEO community would recommend to clients that they shouldn't ever link out on a page (unless nofollowed) while simultaneously stressing the importance of inbound (do-followed) links to a page.
nnnick - actually, we don't recommend that. We, at SEOmoz, in fact, strongly recommend linking out to good places - https://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-reasons-you-should-link-out-to-others-from-your-website
Thanks Rand. I just re-read Charlotte's post and I think she is actually mostly referring to internal links, and not all links in general, which does make more sense. There are definitely some leaks worth plugging - the extent of plugging to do I guess is what's up for debate.
Thanks SEOMoz & Charlotte - very interesting read.
he.. lol
and i believe all of my post was about internal linking
(maybe i have reread it to make sure i was clear)
Leaking out for external links is another story.
Rand's comment/link shows that need to.
I think especially when it's a new site, and you want Google to be able to know what kind of you have by linking to external relevant sources.
Thanks Charlotte! I think I read it too quickly and extrapolated that you meant all links, not just internal ones. It is interesting to see in this very blog the links that are followed vs no-followed.
I have to admit I read it a few times, and couldn't find anywhere it stated you were talking about internal klinks, as opposed to all links, I'm glad to hear that that's what you meant.
this whole things about manipulating the Home link anchor text has me a bit dazzled. i have read stuff from lots of good and well known SEOs out there (eg: T. Malicoat) that recommends changing the anchor text for the home link, instead of using Home. At the same time, it kinda feels it is a bit spammy to fill this in with keywords... i think it is just a question of tryin and see what works for each site, as it doesnt seem like there is a SE algorithm that looks at this and directly applies a penalty or turns a blind eye in equal terms for all sites...
Thanks for the post. But, well, I am baffled.
According to this contribution (read the comments and follow the links) when the first link is nofollowed, the second link with the nice anchortext to the same page doesn't count as I found out.After removing the nofollow the results of all my clients quickly recovered. Phew. So I think twice before I nofollow a link to the homepage or a page into the heart of my navigation structure.
Also there are some messages that say, that anchortext to home isn't as important as for other pages. Which would make sense in 2 ways.Using"home" is consistent with Google's user experience policy.Second:most people use home. Googlebot "knows" that. It could be a reason to devaluate the anchortext to home, which makes sense.This also is consistent with my observations.
I am all for using nofollows to control the juiceflow but it should be used with great care.
interesting points but I added the nofollow one by one, and saw a difference in my own rankings by identifying my home page as 'seo blog' than using it as 'home'
as the article Rand writes
"(and yes, you can use nofollow on the first link if you want the second link's anchor text to count..."
Hi Charlotte, Great post...
Sometimes I think having optimised anchor text in the footer can appear a little spammy especially if it is the last link on the page (e.g. "Copyright 2009 anchor text" ) as that is where so much link spam happens.
Have you had any positive results with just linking the logo with anchor text?
i only recommend having a few links on the footer (4-5)
if it works then the juice will be divided by 5...not by 10 (if you have 10 links)
I'm not sure if i understand the question for the logo.
To me the logo is an image so I'm not sure how someone would put an anchor text. Maybe an alt tag or title tag?
If you dont plan on using the image for commercial purposes then i dont see why you would NOT put a nofollow on the link. If you sell products that have images then it would be a good thing to leave the dofollow, and put the alt tag so you can appear in the Google Universal Search.
hope that makes sense
Just FYI - I think some others looked into the testing of the "nofollow the first link to get the 2nd to pass anchor text" and it was inconsistent at best. Thus, my recommendation would be not to rely on that as a way to get the "home" link to pass anchor text (though, as I've written in my more thorough comment below, that can be a potential spam signal, too).
Muffin, if you have 3 links to the homepage like for example in:
1. Logo
2. Main navigation
3. Breadcrumb
At the moment I only added the "nofollow" attribute in the linked logo, as I feel unsure if it would be wise to also nofollow the Home main navigation and breadcrumb links as they are core navigational elements.
How would you deal with that? Any thoughts?
I did a test a few months back where I changed the link text of a site-wide footer link to the home page. Previously it had the name of the site .com and I changed it to my main keyword. Viola! An instant addition of tens of thousands of keyword laden links pointing to my home page!
3 days later...I dropped of the map. I didn't just drop a page or two. I was NOWHERE in the results. (I forgot to mention that before the change I had been ranking between 5-12 for that keyword.) OK, it might have been a fluke. So I left it for a day then panicked and changed it back. A few days later and POW! Back on page 1 for the keyword.
Well..as any curious (and somewhat clueless) SEO-addict would do, I changed it back. And like clockwork, 3 days later..gone! Changed it back, and I am back. This is seemingly repeatable, and the most directly google manipulation that I've ever experienced, albeit in the wrong direction! But I've been reluctant to try it again. I'm happily gaining a few spots by the tried and true method of link building. Whooda thunk?
So just be careful out there people! What seems like a small change can have a big impact. My case might be unique due to my link profile and a million other factors. But I saws what I saws! And it skeered me good!
3days is not a long enough period
I changed the title tags after getting to page 3 of SEO
I dropped to page 4
Waited about 2weeks, and went back to page 3...and higher than I was before.
Folks my recommendation is this, and I'm sure everyone can agree on it.
Always have beta sites that you work on CONSTANTLY. Never try 'new stuff' on your money making sites or client sites.
Try to do this stuff on 'new sites' otherwise you may never figure out why your rank higher/lower since the site would've been established already. New sites will help you to see if title tags, description, nofollow links, etc. work.
Every SEO guy should have a few beta sites that they work on.
My seo blog is one of my beta sites. I didn't get it to page 3 for 'seo' in 49 days because I used the 'machine gun' effect. I used a lot of stuff that I had already learned with other beta sites...
There aren't any 'quick fixes' in SEO. That's why you have to make sure that even though your rankings drop...it's going to be the best thing for your site in the LONG RUN
Thanks for sharing jspash. Your experience and further testing is a good warning to others who might consider manipulating the achnor text to the home page.
I'm surprised anyone would regard what he wrote when he says he only waited 3 days.
If you do beta testing then you would need to wait longer.
Just like title tags...when you change them do you see the effect within 3 days or does it take longer?
I agree that 3 days isn't usually long enough to come to any conclusions, but combined with Rand's observation that changing homepage anchor text was getting flagged by the engines, it seems like jspash's experience was valid.
I believe it. Common sense tells me that changing the anchor text of the link to your homepage is a clearly manipulative practice that the engines can easily identify.
I'll play it safe and just not do it, as Rand and jspash have both observed negative effects on this one.I'm sure the long term benefits, if any, are minimal. It's not worth the risk in my opinion.
There are still some great take-aways from your post though, and I will be implementing some of your suggestions. I'll just avoid that one particular tactic of homepage anchor text manipulation.
There are accepted and argued theories around nofollow. Some say it works others feel that its just a signal to google regarding onsite SEO manipulation if done too heavily. I normally implement nofollows slowly over a spread period of time to avoid flagging anything up.
On total I think you have covered nofollow practice well enough - however many of the pages / links you have identified should in addition be blocked of by robots txt as well so that there is no chance of them entering the index.
I especially like the fact that you made a point of social media buttons - they do indeed need to be nofollowed and as you point out, for wordpress atleast, Joosts Sociable plugin is an excellent solution.
I agree that they should not be indexed.
I was hoping to save that in another post about robots txt :)
Looking forward to the robots txt post of yours soon :)
No follow is different to noindex and especially for wordpress where there is an issue with on site duplicate content(tags,pages categories archives) there should be another strategy with it...
What do you suggest?
I have a blog where I do not use the "nofollow" attribute at all. I prefer using the "noindex" robots.txt directive or the noindex meta tag for the pages I do not want to be indexed. Many of those pages have backlinks. BUT NO WORRIES! Those pages have outbound links to other pages I want to have indexed and ranking, and they get that incoming PR Juice. Notice that the "noindex" robots.txt directive is only supported by google. Have a look how I do that: https://www.seowatchblog.com/robots.txt
Right on Rishi, and very nice post Charlotte. Well done on your recent promotion!
You (all) might want to consider checking out your code order in your site's HTML page source. if you're using CSS positioning and you have more than one link to a page - nofollow the least optimimal anchor text if it's positioned higher up than the optimal anchor text.
Did that make sense?
PS - See you at SMX london if not sooner big guy!
thank you!
Your post does make sense since i dont believe the bots crawl from bottom up... The bots may just crawl the first part of the page only so it's good to make sure everything is optimized from the top bottom
i'm not sure if i'll be in london (I'm in charlotte, nc) :)
Lol richard - way to include a convo in a post :P Not sure will hit SMX but meeting definately necessary.
Seein g some on page anchor text value tests people have done, I must agree - sometimes its worth nofollowing links that have the same anchor text.
Many believe Google doesn't see NOFOLLOW it as natural, as Rishi explained. Rand's explanation below addresses the concerns as well.
I misused the NOFOLLOW tag and saw a decrease in rankings. <hindsight> I'm taking a different approach now.
Having just attended IM Spring Break Conference, a great deal of discussion was held about this issue. One speaker noted:
A good internal link strategy can move a page 4-5 SERP spots. If you don't want a page to rank, use NOINDEX.
NOFOLLOW was not intended for link juice sculpting.
Everybody, including Google, knows that 'home' means the home page and not that I'm 'selling a home.' Before I read some of the comments specifically explaining why the advice given in this post was not a good idea I would have not changed my 'home' link anyway.
I think this is one of those instances where designing for regular usability by humans would lead you to the correct conclusion about modifying the text in your internal links.
I forgot to include the gravatar
Make sure to put a nofollow on the gravatar link!
Go to the gravatar link, and check out how many domains are pointing to them!
This is a great article. It is especially relevant for local/region based sites where there is less competition. For these sites, your internal linking structure matters a lot.
One thing we do is to have a header with links for the user. We nofollow some of those. For example, the Home link. Users are familiar with a Home link so we have it but nofollow it. At the footer, we have a home link but the anchor text will be something more relevant.
I found that on national sites, high traffic sites, it doesn't matter as much but we do it anyway.
All good points.
thank you!
i agree also that having links on the top of the page also helps
sometimes it's easier to put the nonessential links up on the top right of the template, and put the good stuff on the NavBar
my site is pretty small with about less than 25 pages so i had to make sure everything counted with any backlink juice i was receiving.
Receiving/directing are two important aspects of Juice flow
I took this same approach with my blog. I nofollowed the links in the top nav which had generic anchor text and then developed more keyword-specific anchor text for the footer links. Just a small part of my SEO strategy to take over the No. 1 spot for my own name in the SERPs. Two years ago, I was lucky to be on page three of the SERPS ... now, I've reclaimed the top spot from some other guy with the same name who plays the Native American Flute. And no, it wasn't about ego, it was just a small SEO experiment to see how long it would take.
Excellent YOUMoz post!
Interesting post, I use NoFollow on my links to TOS other pages that I feel are worthless. Word of warning if you’re using links in your footer that are over optimized, good will reduce their value. I believe Rand blogged about this within the last few months, I'll look for it later.
yep i recommend only have 1 link for a page in each page.
2 is pushing it.
that's why i would put the nofollow on the homebutton to avoid having 2 links to the same page
Good post, although I don't agree with everything.
Should I use the nofollow attribute on affilite links? I assume so but just want to make sure...
depends on the type of affiliate link
if it's your buddy's site or one of your site then you may want to
if it's an Advertisement then i would put a nofollow on it
"By using the anchor text 'home', you're telling the robots that your homepage's title is Home....when it should probably be a keyword."
I think it's dangerous the thing to assume Google is dumb. They have hundreds (thousands?) of very smart people working on algorithimically decipering site structure; I think its highly unlikely that Google doesn't know which your home page is, and is unlikely to be influenced one way or another by the anchor text you give it.
The general idea here is controlling link juice from flowing off a page. I'll agree that this is something we want to do, to some extent. Okay, let's work with that.
Using nofollow is the suggestion as a way to control this. Its one method. That said, others have brought up suspicion about whether relying too heavily on nofollow might send an overoptimization signal to the search engines. Fair enough.
So why not take the general idea and use another method?
The most simple would be to simply just not have unnecessary and redudant links to Page B from Page A. Do you need 3 links from Page A to Page B? Maybe. Maybe not. If not, remove the unnecessary ones.
Another idea would be how the links are implemented. You could use Flash to link to pages and that would not lose juice.
Lastly, look at your site-wide navigation and general navigation structure. If you have a 50 page site, do you need to link to all 50 pages from all 50 pages? Maybe not. So don't. Do that for the 20 pages you really are trying to rank, but take those 10 "company information" pages you are linking to from each page and instead of linking to all 10 just link to the 1 main one, which in turn will link to the other 9.
Come on people, focus on the meat... not just the details :)
So what about if you already have a blog with the anchor texts and URLs in the comments? Is there a way you can make them all nofollows? If you can do an automatic function to make them all nofollows, what if there are some that you DO want to keep?
most blogs already have it inserted for comments
All in one SEO
Robots Meta Tag
are good wordpress plugins for nofollow but to put the nofollow on tags or categories you will need to put in wp-category-template for wordpress.
Wordpress and Blogspot are good with NoFollowing. However, I'm pretty sure ExpressionEngine & Drupal don't do this automatically.
Drupal does not. For the tags there is the rel="tag" attribute set. Does anybody know if the SE's honor this in any way?
Nice post!
How about the search pages? Like yourdomain.com/?query=mykeyword
Does anybody knows how to put NOFOLLOW for the link on Google blogs which says "Comments" . Is it somewhere under settings. I can see all links within comments are NO FOLLOWED but actual link which takes visitors to COMMENTS page is not NOFOLLOWED
So why are a lot of people so afraid of using nofollows? And all for what seem emotional reasons?
Sure, as I said in this discussion several times, great care must be taken where and when to use them.But the Google's webmaster guidelines have been changed. Look here. They now (also) describe a nofollow as a means to show priority to crawlers.
So the original blog-link-spam purpose has been expanded by big G herself :)
So what am I missing?
Another good way to link to home is to link using the logo image and putting your anchor test in the Alt tag.
I'm not sure how using 'nofollow' can come off as spammy
If you look at this page and other pages you will see that SEOmoz has nofollowed a lot of links. How is that spammy?
here's a part of the G's guidelines
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
We don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
My post was not about pagerank, but about leaking link juice(internally) AND anchor text.
Home - is an anchor text. My purpose of placing a nofollow on the 'home' button would be not to transfer the anchor text.
Will your homepage be crawled and indexed? Of course! Read the 2nd part..... "However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap."
Again...this was only 1 part of my entire article.
The point was to help everyone to think more about using 'nofollow' in/on your website(s).
What you are missing about nofollow is that it ALSO acts as a signal to search engines. Over use it, and your site can / may be flagged up.
Its a similar signal to one where all of a sudden you get hundreds of backlinks. Its an indication of unusual activity.
Its spammy in the sense you are "artificially" boosting the value of certain pages. Its not wrong in my eyes, but we know that G doesnt like TOO much manipulation :)
Matt Cutts originally said that:
There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.
However, there are plenty of conversations and theories worth considering.
Can't agree.
The Google webmaster guidelines state, that nofollow can be used as crawl prioritization. (What a word to type).
And we all know how reliable google Webmaster guidelines are 100% of the time right? :P
Um, well, I don't. So almost all I guess :)
So please explain. Might be off-topic though.
I'd say that quite a few webmasters utilize nofollow specifically for manipulative purposes. This, to me, is spammy.
When used correctly - in moderation, and with discretion - I think nofollow makes total sense. However, I agree with rishil nofollow is spammy if and when it is used to "artifically" boost the value of your pages.
Interesting ideas.
Would no-following to your contact page risk having the link no longer appear as one of those extra links that appear under a search result (not an indent but those extra links that show up when you are the first result - what are those called?)
In general I agree but you should be careful with sudden sitewide changes in the way you link (whether the links are nofollowed, their anchor textes etc.) because Google might find it manipulative.
Sorry if I steer away from the topic - but we were just having a discussion about "sudden sitewide changes" and how these may impact a website's ranking in Google. Some say that any sudden, "bulk" change - for example, getting an influx of high PR links in a very short period of time - may raise a red flag to Google. I am on the fence as to whether or not I believe this assertion to be true, but I see the validity and would like to investigate further.
As a rule, I believe that nofollow should be used moderately. I also follow the SEOmoz thinking that it is beneficial to link to authority sites - as in, an outbound "dofollow" link. Having worked on two sites - one that nofollows outbound links to authority sites, one that has some nofollow links and some dofollow links to authority sites - I have to report that I've not seen negative impact from "dofollowing" some of said links.
Nofollowing a contact page doesn't make sense to me at all. I wouldn't do it...Gunneweg and others are right; for certain SEO purposes, and with local search in mind, why WOULD you nofollow your contact page?!
sorry been sick all day
contact page should not be indexed
think about it
If you searched a keyword, and the landing page was the contact page would you go around the website looking for your info or would you bounce?
If placing an address due to targeting a region is important to you then you need to put that information on the footer or on the homepage not the contact page which google might not even crawl.....
If you place it on the footer then it will appear on every page of your site.
I agree that the contact page shouldn't be your first point of contact via a search engine.
However, if your contact page is the best optimized page on your website and people find you there before they find your homepage; you need to reconsider your optimization strategies.
I would love to see anyone here who has their contact page ranking on Google for a competitive term.
Don't get me wrong....About us and Contact page are different.
That's not the point; "If you searched a keyword, and the landing page was the contact page would you go around the website looking for your info or would you bounce?"
If I search a keyword and the first page to show for my website is my contact page; I've failed.
I also would like to see competitive contact page rankings:)
Regarding the larger/well known companies out there, often times users will want to get straight to their contact/directions pages and a number of them will search in Google for 'KPMG contact'. You risk having those pages not rank #1 or not even rank by nofollowing those links.
I nofollowed all links to the contact page on one of my sites and when you search for mysite.com contact, that page is no where to be found.
I would be careful about nofollowing pages that users use to communicate/find you.
Local businesses should consider the value of their contact page. It's like an electronic business card and should be optimized as such to rank in the SERPs. I would not recommend NOFOLLOW of this page for all sites.
If someone wants to optimize for a location, putting the address at the bottom of the home page, where footer content is devalued, will not be the best optimization practice. The contact page is the ideal place to target local optimization.
The hcard format is designed for this and is best practice for a well-optimized contact page. It helps optimize for the owner's name, information and obviously location, including latitude and longitude.
A good contact page should convert into a phone call and/or completion of a contact form.
If I search for "Contact xyz company" I expect their contact us page to come up in the search results.
Great article! I posted it on my FaceBook fan page! https://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/pages/Web-Success-Team/5726817919
Great post and great discussion. I'm starting to heavily no follow my clients links to privacy etc.
Has to be done these days.
Matt Cutts has NoFollow on his Home button
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog
it may look like either he put it...or it comes standard with the Thesis theme.
and yet this very page doesn't have "nofollow" on contact page :) :D
Not sure if its been mentioned above already (lot of comments!) but worth mentioning the idea of pagerank sculpting hasn't been around long and too my knowledge (might be wrong) still hasn't really been proven to help rankings. The theory makes sense, but it is probably only theory at this stage.
Websites which were ranking well before nofollow still rank now even if they haven't used a single nofollow tag.
Its got merit but lets not forget its experimental
everything in SEO is experimental and ALL SEO information are theories.
Unless we're privy to the exact information on the search engine's algo then we're all speculating.
There are many factors when it comes to ranking, and applying ALL of them helps.
There are a lot of websites that have nofollow, and other websites that have hardly any content on the site. They may rank well but if they applied all then they will rank better.
We know that backlinks help but does that mean we should only get backlinks, and not use other factors of SEO? That is the case with many 'old websites'. We know they're not using a lot of factors but they have other seo factors that over compensate where other factors are missing.
hope that makes sense, and thank you for your post!
thanks robert. i'd agree to some extent but I think there's levels of 'experimentalness'!
For example we know optimising a page title works because testing has proved this. My point was really that to my knowledge although a lot of people (myself included) are playing with pagerank sculpting, it hasn't been proven to work yet.
Although I don't agree with all your points, any blog post which gets over 100 comments is doing something right so well done!
I would like to go ahead and say that I have enjoyed the back and forth and discussion on the topic. I also need to add my 2 cents so that i can keep up with a fellow Charlotte SEO's link profile.
I think that, while I don't 100% endorse the exact method of Robert's post, it is a good reminder of the use of no-follow.
It is also important to point out that it is not about agreeing 100% with what one person says for the following reasons.
1. This is not group think
2. SEO is just as much an art as it is a science.
3. Any scientific "proof" you use today can/will be negated by an algorithm change.
4. A successful SEO has their own "special sauce" that they use to get good rankings, and their sauce may not go with your chicken dish.
5. I like Scotch, it doesn't mean I have to drink the whole bottle, even if I think it will make me invisible.
My only disagreement, and this can be applied for many SEO theories or strategies, are that anything that can be percieved as an un-natural pattern will be eventually identified and neutralized and/or penalized by the big G.
However, I still see those damn, reciprocal link junkies ranking for stuff, so that sauce works for them.
Scott
As Rand did, I would disagree with your recommendation to rename or nofollow the Logo/Home link, unless you have an alternative Home-Link on every site, e.g. via Breadcrump. There are also still some Hijacking- und Duplicate Content examples around, that make it even more useful to use the Home-link (absulute formatted) for prevention.
And I must also disagree with your car finance example. If there are more than one link to the same page, online the first linktext counts, so I do not care about nofollowing the other links.
I am not sure about if additional links pass linkjuice and even if, I would not care as well, because I want my blogposts/articles to be pushed.
IMO the only really good use of nofollow is preventing Duplicate Content - all that sculpting matters can make you more harm than will help you to achieve rankings.
To make that clear: You cannot leak Linkjuice with outgoing links - you can only pass it to related sites (internal or external). And beacause high quality outgoing links will help your own ranking, the only need for nofollow would be to mask low-quality links. Why do you use them in the first way?
Also, not sure how using 'nofollow' will come off spammy.
Using keywords over and over again is spammy.
Think of it this way
You have 10 pages on your site
6pages of content, privacy page, terms of use page, registration page, and a login page.
Do you think placing a nofollow on the Privacy, TOS, registration page, and login page is spammy?
Has nothing to do with spam. You don't want the bots crawling these pages and/or even indexing them.
Also, if you think that this is 'artificially' helping you to rank then I can show you a competitive website(s) that rank very well, and better after i made the changes.
Don't take my word for it. If my seo blog was artificially ranked then it wouldn't have stayed on page 3 for 'seo'.
As I wrote in a earlier post....have your beta sites, and try it for yourself.
I stand by everything I wrote not because I just thought it to be a good idea or 'emotional' (lol), but implemented on sites I already work on.
If you dont believe me then believe the rankings. :)
If using nofollow for page sculpting was spammy then google wouldn't go to the extremes that they do with channelling juice in youtube.
I'm not sure I would nofollow category pages. One of my blog's category pages ranks well for a number of competitive keywords. Aren't category pages a great way to rank for more broad level keywords?
It seems that planning out your blog structure by figuring out what categories to organize your content in and then keeping each post within that category highly relevant should help with duplicate content. Those individual posts help reinforce each category.
Stephan Spencer is pretty big on blog optimization as well as implenting nofollow in the right places but even he doesn't nofollow category links on his blog https://www.stephanspencer.com
I do agree with the nofollowing of archive links.
This is a great post...it's generated quite a bit of discussion amongst the moz members.
thank you omar
i'm glad that everyone is taking some stuff to consideration
there are many things in SEO that is nothing new but they are overlooked.
all my articles on seomoz will be about
simple things that will have everyone say..."why didn't i think of that?"
Good article.
However, I'm not so sure about the nofollow for the contact page either. If you gain business locally and want your website to display with a multi link page list underneath I recommend you keep following that link.
Link bleed is one thing, nofollow website cannibalism is another.
Viva la PAGERANK!
Thanks for your post! It's very interesting how page juice is distributed.I thought that no-follow links was used only to external links on our website. Now I will use the nofollow links more effectively and make some tests on my website #2. Thanks !
Hey,
A great post !
I have a question: Does using social media widgets like "ShareThis" lead to link juice leak?
If yes, How can we rectify it.
Gaurav
I'm not sure about 'share this' but 99% of the social share widgets do not contain 'nofollow'
Here's what you can do
1. Email or contact the developer to implement the nofollow on future plugins
2. You can edit the php files (if you know how)
3. You can get other plugins that will put nofollow on all external links
I like the homepage tip :)
It is suggested that some no follow tags actually pass juice. I always no follow terms, contacts etc etc but i always keep in mind that the internet is intended to flow juice around so try not to 'pool' it too much but merely use no follow to 'guide' the juice around.
Thanks again.
I would always get backlinks from all types of sources
When I realized that I never gained in the SERPs, I went back to checkout the links
They all had the same thing in common... they were nofollow.
I spent more time obtaining two types of links
1. Dofollow
2. Links that got indexed
If the website/links didn't get indexed than I wouldn't waste much time going back there again. (most are directories)
There are a lot of ppl who rank for the keyword SEO on page 3 that have THOUSANDS of links. A lot have over 10,000
I have less than 1,000, and I'm on page 3.
Quality is better than 10,000 nofollow links
These are nice tips to use. Wondering if everyone will use nofollow what will happen to Google's page rank algorithm. Newer sites will never be able to reach a higher spot.
That's kind of what I'm arguing about.
Newer site won't be able to increase their link juice, and established will lose theirs too if people who are linking to them starts to nofollow them...
This is a great post. Should probably go into "Headsmacking Tips". I was just able to find quite a few links on our site that should be nofollowed. Thanks!
funny thing is that there's a lot of SEO tips that look like 'common sense'
putting 2 and 2 together is HUGE in SEO
just like the nasty gravatar link......they got thousands of blogs pointing a link to them from every blog post!!!
p.s. if this article helps you out plz make sure to give it a thumbs up!
Good post CharlotteSEO. I have been incorporating most of the items in here, but managed to learn a few more. I really appreciate you taking the time to follow up with most of your commenter’s as I feel that too many Moz posters to just Post and Run and the community does not get a little deeper insight. I think I might give additional thumbs up to Authors that follow the discussion and provide us with feedback on our feedback. If it is valuable feedback.
lol I love chatting about SEO, and want to make sure everyone gets help or ideas.
All articles should have interaction from the author. The article is the author's product. If he/she isn't around to explain the product, then nobody is going to 'buy it'. Even if it's the best article out there...
A few months ago I discovered a huge source of link bleed: social bookmarking icons or bookmarklets. Typically people (meaning myself) just cut and paste the bookmarklet code into a page or as part of a blog template. Also typically, this code does not contain nofollows. I couldn't believe I had been operating that way for months and this had gotten by me. Duh! We had a couple dozen on each page...yikes!
i use sociable by Joost
it comes with nofollow
If you look at https://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20 you'll see a PageRank of the page is 10. Hey, PR 10. The reason is very simple, tons of sites are linking to the page without nofollowing it, even our big and famous SEOmoz.
no wonder i see addthis popping up on page 1 for the keyword SEO
some of the stuff i wrote about deals with SEOmoz, but we both know that SEOmoz is making sure it doesnt have to their clients sites....rather their own.
I have seen a lot of web developers or SEOs deliver top notch results to their clients, but their websites look like a 2yr old made it.
One thing I learned is try not to put all your secrets on your own personal site. Your competitors know your site better than your clients so they'll be watching every move you make.
That's true.
The cobbler always wears the worst shoes - In period 1997-2004 I was designing and developing (SEO too) websites for a clients, those were very good looking sites (technically and aesthetic), but my own was one page site with logo, contact form and list of references.
On the other hand - nofollowing addthis.com code is not something which could be a top secret tactic, IMO.
i agree that it's not a top secret tactic...
what i dont understand is why isn't 99% of the websites not using it ?
Thanks for letting me know. That little devil will be nofollowed next time we deploy a site update :-)
In general I agree but you should be careful with sudden sitewide changes in the way you link (whether the links are nofollowed, their anchor textes etc.) because Google might find it manipulative.
The best you can do is to implement a good link structure from the very beginning, but of course it will not always be possible.
not sure about that
once i did the updates...and of course got backlinks
my seo blog went from 25, to 10, to 8, to 5....to 3
i got on page 3 for the keyword SEO in 49 days
i dont think i got there just with the backlinks.....
everything counts!
Of course. But there are examples of sites being hurt by sudden sitewide changes. And in addition I can refer to https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3756885.htm.
do you think that implementing "nofollow" on a sitewide basis will hurt a website?
edit - ahh you're talking about the footer links.
i have added these on a lot of websites that have about 40-50 pages, and seen increase in serps for the subpages
i dont recommend putting more than 5 links....and it should be important links
Hey Charlotte SEO, congratulations for the promotion! I think I should get a 20% commission (3 thumbs up) for being the first to recommend the bump ;)
Seriously though, I've learned a lot from the post and all the comments. I just wish I could print them all out to keep for reference.
Nice work Charlotte - thanks for sharing and congrats on getting bumped up.
I particularly liked the points about home button and the header images. Hadn't considered those before. Always something new to learn around here fantastic.
Great read. Happy I read through all the comments before making a decision :)
I perfectly understand the value and use of the nofollow when it comes to sculpting your site, however I'm not totally keen with it's excess usage.
Firstly, we all know that backlinks are more important than on-page optimization, thus better time invested.
Second, if everybody starts to nofollow everybody, there just won't be any link juice left to brag that sculpting your site helps in the SERPs, and no need for the backlinks either with 0 link juice.
Internet, and more specifically the blogging community is based on the sharing of information not nofollowing everybody!
Ok, I'm now waiting for your tumbs down!
Nicolas,
I am with you. No thumbs down here. I keep thinking that there are certain aspects of nofollow, PageRank sculpting and changing "Home" links that are not quite natural on the web.
At some point the use, or over use, of some of these blur the lines between "Technical SEO" to "SEO Manipulation". At some point the engines are going to start guaging sites as much based on natural site structure as they currently do for quality & spammy type of links.
My main point is that websites are always looking for a competative edge. So why trust their "natural" structure and view it any other way then shades and levels of potential manipulation?
Thank you for making the first reply not a thumb down! :)
I feel like in the real world economy, everything needs to flow.
In order to get more money (or link juice on the web) you can:
_ Either save money (or link juice through nofollow)
_ Either earn more money (done with more backlinks on the web)
Using both appropriately will yield the best results. That is conscious saving, and increased earning.
But removing yourself totally from the consommation chain (nofollow everyone) will lead to certain death. The same goes to giving everything out to everybody.
I personally only recommend moderate usage of such tactics.
Despite the criticism I may get, it's important to me to remain true to my principles.
If the link to the homepage with the anchor text "Home" is nofollow. How abt having my links in image with text as Home and using keyword in the Alt Text. Do you call it Blackhat/Spam/?
No, but you should use it with moderation.
Excess usage of keywords in image description is frowned upon. The description is expected to describe the image itself, especially for the text only browsers.
What do you guys/girls think about nofollow on forums? I run a forum and my users are posting links all the time. Does it make sense to have all these links automatically nofollowed?
Yes, that's exactly what nofollow was intended for.
Absolutely. I do think links within forum comments should automatically be nofollowed.
Reminds me of comment spam - so many people leave comments and link their name to their website and if a site does not automatically nofollow links in comments, these links will cache - I see comment spam links in Yahoo! Site Explorer all of the time. Drives me nuts!
Tag pages can be a hugely valuable source of traffic. There are ways to optimize your tags / search results pages to not create duplicate content which can then lead to heavily optimized pages on your site (so even though you don't write an article entitled "Search Engine Optimization", you do have a page on your site that is optimized for it.)
I feel that changing the Home link needs to be discussed and tested more deeply. I do aggre that changing the anchor text to, say "World's best SEO" will surely get you in trouble but what about using your brand name, say "SEOmoz" ? Why should this be a problem for SEs? And with the Vince update (corrct me if I am wrong)it makes even more sence to do this.
And nofollowing logos... Won't a nice alt tag fix the problem?
Nofollow the logos is the purpose of having the logo 'not crawled'
I had multiple pictures & swf files showing up when i did
site:domain.com
I didn't see a purpose of these files being in the index
What I'm wondering is why SEOmoz doesn't have a Home button or a link that goes to the homepage.
They only have the logo that goes to the homepage....
Just wondering what SEOMoz might know that we don't.
My 2¢ on the home page link. I'm from the old school that thinks there should be header and footer links on most pages that include a "home" link. In addition to the logo liking to home as well.
It's my personal opinion that from a usability perspective it's "expected"
helps the visitors engage with the website especially if you have a long post, and they have to scroll all the way back up to get to your navbar
a floating navbar will help also.
Grin.
Seomoz uses image replacement in the logo.
So it's a text link. It doesn't say "home", it says "Seomoz.org".
looks like java...and I thought that Google doesnt crawl java yet
No, plain css with display set to none.
There is some discussion about the logo somewhere.
cool...please post when you find it.
i didnt know you can do that
Just do a search on image replacement. You'll stumble over it.Thing is: this is on topic. An anchor text which makes sense. If it helps? Dunno.
thank you everyone who participated in this article!
it's always good to hear from everyone on a subject
Proverbs - "...and in multitude of counsellors there is safety"
Hi,
I think I would like to let search engines follow my links to the RSS feeds. For starters, I certainly want them indexed, as the search engines can hear of my new posts more easily if they read my feed than just by crawling for new links in an otherwise quite static environment. Feeds are definitley the most updated pages of a site apart from the homepage, so together it means the spider have at least two pages it crawls quite often from which it can learn of my new article.
But to have my feed crawled frequently I should let it gather some rank.
Duplicate content is an issue though, but that's just what rel/canonical can be used if needed. But that's not sure: the feed contains much text in one page that otherwise appear on numerous, separate pages - which pages have at least as much text along the article that does't appear in that feed, like comments, menu, footer, etc.
So I'm not that much against letting at least the articles and category feeds rank some.
having the nofollow on your RSS page link will not stop the crawlers from searching in another manner
For example,
You can submit your rss feed to multiple directories and/or ping the feeds at autopinger or pingomatic. Wordpress already has the rpc.pingomatic so it pings the crawlers directly to the feed.
If you put a nofollow on the robots txt then this will stop the crawlers period.
RSS feeds shouldn't be indexed as it will be duplicate content
If you're looking for a single page to get indexed faster (and stay in the top rankings), then I recommend building INDIVIDUAL links to that page.
Category/tag/archives all serve a purpose...but they are to the readers not to the robots.
Robots should only crawl your post, and your post should not leak juice to tag pages, category, or archive pages. If you put a nofollow on these types of links, then your Post will have a lot more authority because it's not giving out so much juice
Hey Charlotte SEO:
Great post and great follow up comments. I'm surprised I'm the first to say that this post deserves to get kicked upstairs by Rebecca.
thank you!
it's not my b-day today is it?
Yes, it's your SEOmoz b-day today!
Congrats Charlotte!
Good post CharlotteSEO. Sculpting juice flow with nofollow tags is an often overlooked aspect of SEO, and you have explained the problem and the solution well.
I was just wondering about nofollowing the contact page. I don't know if that's a good idea. You DO want that page indexed so that the engines can identify your location for local SEO purposes. Notice that SeoMoz does follow the footer link to the Contact page.
Best practice would probably be to have your address, phone, and email information in the footer of every page of your site, and THEN nofollow the contact link as it won't be providing any additional information. This way you still have the local SEO optimization, and you plug that leak. If your site doesn't have the contact information anywhere else, then I wouldn't nofollow the contact link though.
I agree, and it will depend on the website.
Some websites do not target a region or may not even put an address
IF the person is targeting a region then I think that having this code on the 'footer' will be good.
<address>
123 tbd st, city, state, zip code
</address>
My reason for having a nofollow link on the contact page is that most websites just have a contact form w/out including any info on it.
Contact pages contain no content that is beneficial to having them spidered except if you're planning to target a region with your website.