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.
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).
-
I dont see any reason to put or not the follow links in your navigation, unless you want to focus on a certain page for more relevancy, or focusing a certain page for ranking.
If you want to remove your follow links on your navigation be sure you specified your inner pages in your Sitemap.xml, so Google bots can still track your pages.
-
Referred to the "long dropdown menú", I suggest to copy a practice I see more and more: to use the mega dropdown just in the home page and disable in the internal pages (maybe creating a sub navigational category menu in the categories' hubs).
I am sorry I have not here with me the link, but that is also suggested by Google in one of their webmaster help answers.
-
I am not a big fan of internal link nofollows and find the whole thing more or less pointles and it's better to let Google crawl through your site freely. Site architecture /structure is crucial. One thing we did recently was remove links which lead to same pages and trimmed our link count down by 30%. Another feature we've introduced was a featured box which contained products which we knew needed some internal link love. Typically ecommerce sites have popular products by no way to specify which product pages to feature manually (or at least in a controlled way).
Are you using faceted navigation at all?
-
First off, I'd just say that internal navigation controls tend to have only a small impact. That's not to say it's not worth doing, just that you shouldn't expect a massive ROI unless your nav structure is truly horrible

That said, nofollow might not be the best choice - here's why: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow. You might also want to read - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-illustrated-guide-to-matt-cutts-comments-on-crawling-indexation
There are some potential other ways to do this, though:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation
Basically, my suggestion would be to think about how you could implement some form of consolidation or possibly use less navigation by default (maybe only enable the long drop downs if a user is logged in, or only show them on the specific category pages).
Let me know if you've got follow-ups after checking these out. I'm happy to help further.
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
-
Massive Amount of Pages Deindexed
On or about 12/1/17 a massive amount of my site's pages were deindexed. I have done the following: Ensured all pages are "index,follow" Ensured there are no manual penalites Ensured the sitemap correlates to all the pages Resubmitted to Google ALL pages are gone from Bing as well In the new SC interface, there are 661 pages that are Excluded with 252 being "Crawled - currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." What in the world does this mean and how the heck do I fix this. This is CRITICAL. Please help! The url is https://www.hkqpc.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | D.J.Hanchett0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
How to check if the page is indexable for SEs?
Hi, I'm building the extension for Chrome, which should show me the status of the indexability of the page I'm on. So, I need to know all the methods to check if the page has the potential to be crawled and indexed by a Search Engines. I've come up with a few methods: Check the URL in robots.txt file (if it's not disallowed) Check page metas (if there are not noindex meta) Check if page is the same for unregistered users (for those pages only available for registered users of the site) Are there any more methods to check if a particular page is indexable (or not closed for indexation) by Search Engines? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boostaman0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
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!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0