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.
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
-
Hello,
I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+).
if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/
Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do?
Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that.
Any suggestions are very welcome.
Thank you in advance!
-
And what about "external"?
-
Thank you guys! I really appreciated your help! This clarified a lot for me.
All the best to all of you!
-
I can't see any reason why you would want to nofollow links to your own social networking pages. They are very much related to your site so why not pass pagerank to them. As Takeshi rightly points out, if you nofollow them then any pagerank they might have got from your home page just evaporates.
-
Do not nofollow your social media profiles.
Adding nofollows to links does not increase your PR, it just eliminates the link juice that would have gone to those pages. Do not nofollow your own links or links to properties you manage. Only nofollow links if they are low quality sites, you have a commercial relationships with them, or they are competitors.
Linking to your social media profiles will also get them ranking higher in the search results for your brandname, which is a good thing if you maintain good social media profiles.
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
-
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 -
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john_marketade0 -
Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page
Scenario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links. Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
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