• BBgmoro

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Get found
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
          Moz API

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Should I add no-follow tags to my widget links?

        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 add no-follow tags to my widget links?

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        3
        3
        1448
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • Maximuxxx
          Maximuxxx Subscriber last edited by

          Matt Cutts recommended in a video in 2013 to add rel="nofollow" on widget links that link back to your website.

          Some background of my company: We're a software company for website chat. There's a 'powered by' link in our widgets that links back from our users' websites to our website. Currently these are all follow links.

          I checked out the links of our competitors, and it seems none of them have no follow on their widget backlinks. This, together with the fact that the video is quite old and information on this issue rather scarce, makes me doubt whether we should change our widget backlinks to no follow.

          Does anyone have thoughts on this?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Everett
            Everett last edited by

            Hello Pascal,

            Like Hillary Clinton, I have a public opinion and a private opinion when it comes to stuff like this. The public opinion is also Google's, and that is to use a rel="nofollow" attribute on widget links. They are considered links that webmasters use to manipulate the search engine rankings. Yes, that video is old, but the rule still stands as far as Google is concerned.

            My private opinion is that widgets are a form of branding, and it is not a webmaster's responsibility to do anything other than get their brand discovered far and wide. You created a widget that, if people are using it, probably provides some value to them. Why should you get any less credit for this than you would get from someone linking to the widget on your site?

            If you are going to keep the links followable, my advice is to keep the anchor text branded and the href pointing to your home page. This is the least likely to seem like link-graph manipulation. Avoid deep-links, unless they go to the widget download page, and avoid optimized anchor text. Use "YourDomain.com" or "Your Brand" instead.

            I'll leave the question open for more input since this isn't a question that necessarily has a single "right" or "wrong" answer.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • TimHolmes
              TimHolmes last edited by

              Hmmmm, Google will likely deem your widget as an advertising tool and in their world this is potentially deemed negative, as such you have to make the call, do you want to stay on Google side and follow what they say or continue and then fall foul to some kind of penalty.

              I personally would add rel="nofollow" to be on the safe side. Hopefully this won't dramatically affect your rankings.

              Could you potentially trial the nofollow on a segment of the plugins to see how it impacts your rankings. Scary I know, but possibly the only way you can see how it could affect you.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • blankslatedumbo

                Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**

                I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/ Can anyone weigh in on this?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blankslatedumbo
                0
              • Angelos_Savvaidis

                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_Savvaidis
                0
              • monali123

                How to detect a bad link and remove ?

                As per google penguin, all the low quality back links are going to affect the website SERPS hugely. So, we need to find all the bad back links and then remove them one by one. What I would like to know is, what tool do you use to find all the bad back links ? And how do we know which is a bad back link or bad website, where our link should not be there ? Then what service what do you suggest for back links removal. I contacted LinkDelete.com and they quoted me 97$ for a month to remove all links in less than 3 weeks. 
                Let me know, what you suggest.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monali123
                0
              • vmotuz

                Follow or nofollow to subdomain

                Hi, I run a hotel booking site and the booking engine is setup on a subdomain.
                 The subdomain is disabled from being indexed in robots.txt Should the links from the main domain have a nofollow to the subdomain? What are you thoughts? Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmotuz
                0
              • witmartmarketing

                Links from new sites with no link juice

                Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site?  I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site.  I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion  this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase,  then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing
                0
              • cprodigy29

                Where to link to HTML Sitemap?

                After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy29
                0
              • SamBuck

                Noindex,follow is a waste of link juice?

                On my wordpress shopping cart plugin, I have three pages /account, /checkout and /terms on which I have added “noindex,follow” attribute.   But I think I may be wasting link juice on these pages as they are not to be indexed anyway, so is there any point giving them any link juice? I can add “noindex,nofollow” on to the page itself. However, the actual text/anchor link to these pages on the site header will remain “follow” as I have no means of amending that right now. So this presents the following two scenarios –   No juice flows from homepage to these 3 pages (GOOD) – This would be perfect then, as the pages themselves have nofollow attribute.   Juice flows from homepage to these pages (BAD) - This may mean that the juice flows from homepage anchor text links to these 3 pages BUT then STOPS there as they have “nofollow” attribute on that page. This will be a bigger problem and if this is the case and I cant stop the juice from flowing in, then ill rather let it flow out to other pages.   Hope you understand my question, any input is very much appreciated. Thanks

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck
                1
              • jorgediaz

                Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links

                Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.