Internal links

Marketing
1

Hello,

This is my 3rd SEO question in about as many days and hopefully my last for a while! Basically, I’d like to know what the search engines do with interal page links. For example, if I put:

<a href="#tips">Visit the Useful Tips Section</a>

will Google try to find the “Tips Section” on the page?

Basically, my site has pages you can visit for free and those that you can’t without membership. All 100 pages of the site have links from the homepage. BUT, for the portion that can’t be visited without membership, a user gets a message after clicking on said link (using nyroModal), saying “Sorry! This is for members only”.

For example, a member’s only link would look like:

<a class="nyroModal" href="#members_only" >8.4 Numerical Ratios</a>

All in all, then I have 20 links going directly to free pages from the homepage (all content) and 80 pages that link to “#members_only”, giving the user the “Need membership” message. I like being able to show all of the possible pages AND I like being able to give the enticing message. But, I’m getting very nervous that search engines would see these “80 links to nowhere” and dock me — since they won’t understand that a paying user will have access to the links.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!

Thanks again for everyone’s help,

Eric

2

It should work!

  1. Noindex and nofollow all your member pages. So, search engines won’t index the page.
  2. Apply rel=“nofollow” to links which points to the member only pages.
3

If the links are to actual pages that are only available to logged in members then Googlebot will see an HTTP 401 error and realise that it should disregard that link. If the links are to non-existent references within the page, I don’t know how much attention Google pays to those.

The safest thing is to put rel="nofollow" on any links that are not publicly available, and then there’s no danger.

4

Thanks guys!

-Eric