Should I use the nofollow attribute on internal links?
July 11th, 2010
Regarding “nofollow” on internal links: Does it hurt? Does it help? I read different comments from Matt on this matter over time. What’s the latest? Roland, Bangkok
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Categories: SEO
Come on, youtube is a part of the big money machine google and they use nofollow on internal links. So did the guys from youtube not know how google works or did they know it better then all other webmasters?
i liked it! thanx for clearing that up
i personally think nofollow should be used on any links and Google should be able to find out what links to follow and credit and which one not to.
@sceleski Someone is using javascript injection to show alert window.
When I load this page I get alert “YOUR COMPUTER IS FUCKER THANK EBAUMSWORLD FOR THIS CATASTROPHE”.
WTF?!?!
good
And what about external links to Affiliate Programs? I am using nofollow for this.
@drwxrxrx LOL xD
@Alexeixx3
Still no. The reason is that whether or not you have nofollow on external links you can’t get more pagerank to flow through your site. It will “disappear” or “evaporate” if you have nofollow links ; it won’t go to other links. (I was just about to write an article about this).
You should probably add “nofollow” to your contact page, because there are people who search for these pages and spam you with promotional offers.
What about nofollow for external links??
@darkyndy Having a link multiple times it fine and doesn’t affect page rank at all. I just leave them alone.
Thanks for the clear answer. Now I am waiting for a video about nofollow links, but not on internal links. Some information on that subject would be nice.
Even if you wanted to avoid having your login page indexed, wouldn’t using nofollow be the wrong approach? Even if you manage to nofollow every link to that page, you might not be the only place in the world that links to it, and Google might still crawl it anyway as nofollow just avoids flowing pagerank.
It seems to me that any time you might want to nofollow an internal link, a noindex meta tag would be more appropriate.
If you have one menu at the top of the page and another one at the bottom of the page containing the same links, is it ok to add nofollow on the links from the bottom of the page? (basically they have follow on the top of the page).
Generalizing a little, if you have on a page a link multiple times, it is ok to to say on the 2nd, 3rd… link nofollow?
Matt, I gotta say . . . nofollow is evil, period.
I’ve written about this several times at Answer Guy Central blog, most comprehensively on January 6, 2010:
Seriously; I just think that tag is a bad idea. Always. I understand why you guys created it, but it’s only REALLY useful when applied BY you; anyone else using it is doing evil (hmmm . . .) And as I recall, and old Google axiom was “Don’t Be”.
I want to redub Matt’s videos based solely on his hand gestures. Try it out for yourself: put the video on mute and let your imagination go wild! I think this one is about waterwheels in a Rube Goldberg machine.
cool backgrounds – and your hair is back! Woof.
awesome video. thanks again, Matt!
Good answer Matt!
oh. it’s SEO business…