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.
Links to Social Media accounts, rel=nofollow/follow and rel=me
-
Hi guys,
I just saw this rel="me" attribute and I can't find any reputable recent (within last year) information. I never heard of this and wonder if it's any beneficial in any way.
At the same time, should I use nofollow or follow on links from website to social accounts? I've heard different opinions but, again, no recent relevant and trustworthy information.
Please, kick me into right direction. However, when kicking, please give me some proof, rather than thoughts
Thanks!
-
I'd recommend linking to all your own properties using rel="me". You can see the tag in common usage on Twitter and Instagram profiles, where the user's website link is tagged using rel="me". You can basically connect up all your online properties as belonging to the same person/brand/entity - and who wouldn't want that. You're indicating to Google that all those webpages are related to you. By linking to your social profiles from your website using rel="me", you're confirming that those profiles are officially yours.
-
Now, what's about rel="me"?
Anybody has any insight?
-
Good article, but as you said, statements sometimes conflicting and self-contradicting. I guess the best way is to test and see what works and what doesn't.
-
Thanks! I'll look into it tomorrow.
-
You might be interested by this article from Marie Haynes on footer links (follow or not follow) which gives a recap of the (sometimes conflicting) statements from Google regarding footer links- and some advice on how to deal with it.
It's a pretty long article - but worthwhile reading; Marie is also member of Moz & specialised in link penalties & unnatural links.Dirk
-
Thanks.
What about too many follow links from the same website?
Example: as a webdesign company we have a backlink from every client's footer. So, we used to have them all follow, therefore from large ecommerce websites we were getting 10k+ follow links. We decided to try to do all those links nofollow. Pretty much next week we saw significant enough jump in rankings.
There are lots of articles/discussions about topical relevance of follow interlinked websites as well.
What's your take on this?
-
Basically nofollow links should be used for
- links to site with untrusted content
- paid links
You could use nofollow as well for crawl prioritisation (not leading Google bot to pages on your site that can't or shouldn't be indexed like loginpages) -although this is not the recommended usage (according to Google: "a solid information architecture is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links".
Source: Google
For links to Facebook you have the choice - a big chunk is not being indexed by Google (source: https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt?_rdr=p) - so you could put the links nofollow (but you could leave them follow as well). For the other ones - it could be interesting to have links to your Instagram / Twitter account to push these as well.
I would just keep all these links follow. It will certainly not hurt you.Dirk
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
-
On a website, is the most effective user experience for the social media icons to open new tabs?
There is debate around what is most effective for user experience. When a user clicks on the social media icons on our site, should a new tab be opened for the social media page or should the website redirect to the social media page?
Social Media | | Sable_Group0 -
How do I merge a google+ and a youtube account?
Before Google merged Google+ and Youtube, we had opened a Google+ account for our business from one email account and a separate account on youtube from a separate account. Now that Google merged the two channels, it created a new G+ page for our youtube account. but I want to merge the youtube account with our formal Google+ page. How do I go about doing that Thank you Joni
Social Media | | JonsonSwartz1 -
Hootsuite Vs Sprout Social for social media management
Can you please tell me if hoot suite or sprout social is a better option when it comes ot managing social media? Corn
Social Media | | netlover0 -
Does social bookmarking still work? If so can anyone recommend a tool
Hello everything, I'm trying to find a tool I can use for my domain : www.van-plus.com to get it socially bookmarked? Can anyone recommend anything? Thanks in advance!
Social Media | | vanplus0 -
Deleting Poor Performing Social Media Accounts for Businesses?
I'm the Internet Marketing Manager for an ad agency and in charge of not only our social media and SEO but advising and hooking up clients with successful campaigns. I've taken the liberty of signing us up for almost every major social media account. Some are very successful (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Vimeo is ok (we use it over YouTube), Vine is picking up) and others are very not doing well (Flickr, Foursquare, YouTube really is low, Google+ is very mediocre). I’ve been wondering if it would be more beneficial to just delete certain accounts. I think I need to keep Google+ (Google values it and we are not doing terribly on it) but all the others listed in the bad column I think are really cancerous to our SEO (and make us look bad b/c we are doing poorly on them) but I really don’t know. I used them kind of to see if they would work for us and to demonstrate that we knew what we were doing in these social networks, but I think they may be doing us more harm than good both from a PR standpoint and SEO. Doesn't it hurt your website for Google to see poor performing social media accounts, just as the opposite would be true (good sm accounts and mention/activity would give you klout & SEO...)? What do you think? I'm no novice but no master either. Love this forum. Thanks in advance.
Social Media | | JCunningham0 -
Does buying thousands of Facebook Fans/Likes affect SEO?
To begin with, please pardon me if this question is ignorant. I'm completely new to this whole social media thing, and somewhat feel it is overhyped. I find it really difficult to believe that social media will actually help the majority of small business owners out there like me, and that most of them are probably being misled about the powers of social media to increase sales. Because it's mentioned so frequently, I've decided to delve into it a bit more to see how this could possibly help me business. Over the past few weeks, I've become familiar with a company that sells Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, as well as YouTube and SoundCloud plays. Since my official Twitter and FaceBook accounts really didn't have that many followers, I decided to buy a few thousand followers for each account. Initially, I bought them because I wondered what would happen if a customer that visited my online store happened to go to those Twitter and Facebook pages. If I personally see a Facebook page with few followers, I probably wouldn't give them my business. I would want to go with a company that seems to generate a bunch of traffic to their pages. Originally, I only had about 200 Facebook followers (now called Likes, it seems) and maybe 25 Twitter followers. I now have over 12,000 Twitter followers and 2,000 Facebook Likes. I may end up buying more since the service was pretty quick and affordable. I'd like to know if Google factors Likes and followers into it's formula for creating SERPS. Will my website rank higher if I have 10,000 likes, rather than only 200? If so, would it be a notable increase? FWIW, I found that more people organically started following my Facebook and Twitter accounts once I had more followers. I didn't change anything about how I maintained the page; I just had more people following them. One other thing of note: these companies are almost certainly using fake/hacked accounts to like various pages around Facebook/Twitter. You can tell because my Facebook page says some city in Croatia has the most amount of 'likes' of my page. Do you think this might come into play at all? Thanks for any and all help!
Social Media | | CHEATERS0 -
Youtube SEO: Does your channel name / user name matter?
My predecessor left me a gift of what is arguably the worst kind of Youtube channel name: Our company's name condensed to an acronym with some additional gibberish that may or may not have meant something to her. In short: Our channel name will never be searched for, will never provide any ranking boost. Now our Youtube success has been very marginal so far: 31 subscribers, 7,300 video views. Given that situation, should I seriously consider scrapping my channel and starting something new with a keyword targeted channel name? Or does channel name matter so little that I should hold on to my 7300 video views?
Social Media | | AdoptionHelp0 -
Best social bookmarking sites
What are the best 5 ( or 10 ) social bookmarking sites to promote a new site ? If we were to launch a new site, what bookmarking sites would be beneficial to spread the word about it. Thanks
Social Media | | seoug_20050