Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
-
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page
As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link?
Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute?
I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this
thanks in advance!
-
Thanks Maximise and Sven, both very informative answers.
I have changed the question to a discussion as it seems there may be no definitive answer to the above, so look forward to hopefully seeing further input from the Moz community.
-
Hi Justin,
I think you raise a very good point. It is known that nofollow links 'leak' linkjuice, because the linkjuice is not passed through the link, but it isn't distributed to other links on the same page either. The juice that would have been passed through a follow link simply vanishes when you add a nofollow tag.
As you said it is also suggested that Google does not count multiple instances of one link on one page. So the question that remains is: Are the second, third etc. instances of links treated as nofollow links (leaking linkjuice), or are they simply ignored (not leaking linkjuice)?
If they are treated as nofollow links and leak linkjuice anyway, you might as well add a nofollow-tag and make sure you don't get penalized for them either. On the other hand, if they are normally simply ignored by Google, but start leaking linkjuice with a nofollow tag, you might be doing some serious damage to your site.
Quite frankly, I don't know which is the case. However, my gut feeling says that the pagerank sculpting days are over so the above reasoning might not be the way to think about this.
I would simply try not to 'overdo' anything to much. Don't have pages with 200+ links all linking to perfectly optimised pages with perfectly optimised anchors. I suspect that internal linking is not the driving factor behind Penguin penalties anyway, but backlinks are.
Looking forward to see what other people think!
Greets,
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online -
I think they only pay attention to the anchor text of the first link, this would stop people from stuffing multiple links to the same page each targeting a different term. So if you have a few text links to the same page make sure the first one contains your primary key phrase.
Nofollowing the rest of the links wouldn't have any positive effect. The total link juice a page can pass on is divided by the total number of links on the page (regardless of follow or nofollow). In fact it can have a slightly negative effect as the juice from the nofollow links essentially evaporates instead of being passed to other pages on your site. Here is an article on how this works.
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
-
"Avoid Too Many Internal Links" when you have a mega menu
Using the on-page grader and whilst further investigating internal linking, I'm concerned that as the ecommerce website has a very link heavy mega menu the rule of 100 may be impeding on the contextual links we're creating. Clearly we don't want to no-follow our entire menu. Should we consider no-indexing the third-level- for example short sleeve shirts here... Clothing > Shirts > Short Sleeve Shirts What about other pages we're don't care to index anyway such as the 'login page' the 'cart' the search button? Any thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ant-Scarborough0 -
Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain?
Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain? For context, whilst doing link gap analysis I've found our competitors are listed on local government directories such as getsurrey.co.uk and miltonkeynes.co.uk. Whilst these aren't seen as spam directories, it's still highly unlikely we'll receive much traffic through them. The links they provide to our domain have the nofollow tag. So I wonder whether there's any other benefit to investing the time in creating these listings? Would be interested to hear your thoughts Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Opera-Care1 -
Duplicate content in Shopify - subsequent pages in collections
Hello everyone! I hope an expert in this community can help me verify the canonical codes I'll add to our store is correct. Currently, in our Shopify store, the subsequent pages in the collections are not indexed by Google, however the canonical URL on these pages aren't pointing to the main collection page (page 1), e.g. The canonical URL of page 2, page 3 etc are used as canonical URLs instead of the first page of the collections. I have the canonical codes attached below, it would be much appreciated if an expert can urgently verify these codes are good to use and will solve the above issues? Thanks so much for your kind help in advance!! -----------------CODES BELOW--------------- <title><br /> {{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ycnetpro101
{% if page_description %} {% endif %} {% if current_page != 1 %} {% else %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %}
{% if current_page == 1 %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'product' %}{% if product %} {% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection %} {% endif %}0 -
Pages with excessive number of links
Hi all, I work for a retailer and I've crawled our website with RankTracker for optimization suggestions. The main suggestion is "Pages with excessive number of links: 4178" The page with the largest amount of links has 634 links (627 internal, 7 external), the lowest 382 links (375 internal, 7 external). However, when I view the source on any one of the example pages, it becomes obvious that the site's main navigation header contains 358 links, so every new page starts with 358 links before any content. Our rivals and much larger sites like argos.co.uk appear to have just as many links in their main navigation menu. So my questions are: 1. Will these excessive links really be causing us a problem or is it just 'good practice' to have fewer links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
2. Can I use 'no follow' to stop Google etc from counting the 358 main navigation links
3. Is have 4000+ pages of your website all dumbly pointing to other pages a help or hindrance?
4. Can we 'minify' this code so it's cached on first load and therefore loads faster? Thank you.0 -
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Should I nofollow the main navigation on certain pages?
We have several large Ecommerce sites with hundreds of links on each page. I have been trying to think of ways to focus our internal linking to increase certain pages relevancy. My thought was to put nofollow in the main navigation (since there are hundreds of links there controlled by dropdowns) and only follow the links on each page for the products we are selling and promoting (15-20 links). I would still be using a sitemap that includes the links. Is this a terrible idea? if a link is nofollowed in the main navigation does that still count as the one mention for google if it points to the same page that a normal link points too that is in the content of the page? since all of the main navigation is the same on every page of the website would it be good to only put nofollow on the subpages/subsections and leave the home page navigation alone (that would allow the spiders to crawl all of those links on the home page but not crawl those same links on the subsections where I could then focus the linking).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigtimeseo0