To Follow or not to Follow?

Marketing
1

Hello!

I’m putting a bunch of “no follows” on my site to parts of the site that will dilute my content. For one aspect of the site, however, I’m not sure whether to hide it or not. My site consists of 20 pages of good mathematical content related to particular mathematical topics. For each page, I have approximately 5 dynamic links that lead to 5 other pages, each with a single “review type” question (I organized it this way for aesthetics). The problem though is that each of the question pages just has 1 question, and that’s it. If I were a robot, I’d think that these pages were a bit sketchy.

So, would it be better to do a no-follow, and just let the robots see the “main” content? Or, does it not hurt to have them follow the other pages as well even if they have minimal content?

Thanks so much,

Eric

2

I’m sure you will find exact answer to your question from Matt Cutts
Should internal links use rel=“nofollow”? - YouTube

:slight_smile:

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3

Don’t make all the links no follow. when we make link nofollow in that case search engines ignores it and also ignores anchor text so in this condition you can’t get benefit of building link using anchor text. Only make those link nofollow which are for visitor information only including pages like “contact us”, “terms and conditions” etc.

4

making do follow always help while no follow dont give you any seo benefits.

5

Thanks for all of your responses!

6

And why is that?
I really would like to hear your explanation why not.

You see, we have all these pages: contact, ToS, privacy etc. ranked at least PR 3…
Are you saying that we’re doing something wrong?

:confused:

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Why is it important for Google to list your terms of service and privacy pages? Those are pretty irrelevant to almost all surfers, and even the tiny few who do care about them are almost always going to want to look around your site first, rather than go straight to the TOS from Google.

The more pages on your site that Google is indexing that you don’t want to be returned at the top of the search results, the bigger the risk that one of those pages might somehow end up ranking above the actual content pages for certain queries. If you “nofollow” all links to those pages of legalese that no-one ever looks at, you negate that risk. It may not be a big risk, it’s up to you whether it is worth worrying about.

Off Topic:

Most people couldn’t give a tos about your terms of service :rofl:

8

Irrelevant, eh?
And yet PR 3 says that there are people who are linking to these pages.

Now, only morons would pay fees for services without knowing who the are paying to, what should they expect if services are not up to their expectation and what will happened to information they have had submitted because they don’t care to read Privacy Policy.

Are you talking about that sort of “surfers”?

Ah, but I want them in SERPs regardless of where they are appearing.
Who cares how “surfers” will get to my site as long they will come. I’m sure they will find their way around and eventually get to pages I really want them to see and I more than willing to take that risk

Then most of them are idiots and they deserved to be punished by scammers because of their stupidity.

:slight_smile:

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I don’t think that is a fair statement to make. Why would I want to take a look at someones privacy policy when I’ve not taken a look through what they had to offer? All Stevie is saying here is, there is no need for Google to rank your TOS and such because 99% of surfers don’t really care about that till they’ve had time to look you over and are actually interested in your service or product.

10

Because the objective is to bring visitors to your site by ALL and ANY means.
After they’ll get to that site, nicely organized sitemap will take them to places they want to see but if “support pages” aren’t sit high enough in SERP, then you can forget about visitors and what you have to offer.

How do you know that? Where from you got this 99% number?

SEO is NOT about having nicely optimized your index page alone but to have every page of your site no matter how insignificant and obscure they might be, and make them come up in SERP high enough so they’ll bring another (never enough) Joe Public to your site so you can make another sale.

:slight_smile:

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SEO is about much more than just pushing your site up the rankings by brute force.

Unless the sole point of your site is to generate revenue through impression-based advertising (in which case you are a leech on the interweb and Google will treat you as you deserve to be treated), SEO should focus on getting the right pages to the top of the search results for relevant queries.

If someone is looking for a product or service that your site offers, but the first page on your site they come across is the terms and conditions, just how likely do you think they are to persevere through your site to the actual meat of the content? Not likely at all. A very high proportion of surfers have no attention span, no resilience and no initiative. They’ll click on the first three results in Google and then give up. If you’ve wasted your SEO efforts by (accidentally or deliberately) prioritising a page that doesn’t work as a landing page, or doesn’t answer their question, you aren’t going to get any worthwhile traffic.

12

I’m sure you’re not talking about AMRAY Web Directory or Hosting. Are you?
We DO NOT use any of Adwords nor Adsense on principal and care less about any side revenues and the only revenues we care about are the one that we earn by servicing our users.

And who is in there to say which one is wrong or right to push to the top. You?
I never heart anything from G. that says contact, tos, privacy pages are of no use
rubbish which should be avoided by any cost in SEO quest for high SERP.
If I missed that announcement, feel free to point me to where it says so.

And why not? If they can to navigate to page they want in one click, then
what difference does it’s make how they got to initial page in a first place?

You’re partially right about the first three results (I give them 3 pages) but you are wrong
about “wasted efforts” if what you have done has had placed your site in these first 3 places.

Here is an example of why I say that.
If you Google for: free listing you will find AMRAY directory in #1 position but it won’t take you
to index page but to submission page and if you visit that page, you’ll find why I say that every page
you place on top in SERP is count.

:slight_smile:

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This SEO newbie is feeling more and more confused. :confused:

Now I’m not sure WHAT the best approach is…

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I was not talking about any sites in particular (♪ you’re so vain, you probably think this post is about you ♫) but directories in general.

And who is in there to say which one is wrong or right to push to the top. You?
I never heart anything from G. that says contact, tos, privacy pages are of no use
rubbish which should be avoided by any cost in SEO quest for high SERP.
If I missed that announcement, feel free to point me to where it says so.

It’s up to you which pages you want to push to the top. If you think the most important one is your privacy policy then that’s your choice. I’m suggesting that for most sites, that would probably not be the best choice, but who knows, maybe on your site the privacy policy is the most important thing for people to see when they land on the site. For my site, it isn’t.

And why not? If they can to navigate to page they want in one click, then what difference does it’s make how they got to initial page in a first place?

Because a high proportion of surfers are fundamentally lazy. I know from looking at my site logs that many people do successfully use the site navigation, which I’ve made as simple and straight-forward and obvious as I can. But a significant minority, even when landing on a page that gives them a good information scent for their search query, don’t bother following a single link. They’ve landed on a page that doesn’t have the information they want but has a blindingly obvious link to that information, and they leave without clicking through.

I don’t pretend to understand it, it isn’t the way I work, I persevere and follow the information scent and try to use site navigation and restricted searches on Google to track down the answer when I find a site that looks like it might have what I want … but then I also read books, try to cast an informed vote and believe that allowing language to revert back to a series of grunts and shrugs is a bad thing … which puts me out of step with a large chunk of the population…

Here is an example of why I say that.
If you Google for: free listing you will find AMRAY directory in #1 position but it won’t take you to index page but to submission page and if you visit that page, you’ll find why I say that every page you place on top in SERP is count.

That’s fine, and an excellent example of why it isn’t always the home page that you should prioritise for all search terms. Sometimes an inner page is better, because it answers typical questions or gives a suitable call to action for targeted traffic (ie, traffic arriving from particular keyword searches). A submission page, for a site like that, is a great one to have as the first result … because it allows and encourages people to jump straight in and engage with the site. Do you really think that your terms of service would have the same effect?

15

Thats not the objective of SEO. After all, who have said so? or did you make it yourself?

A single relevant visitor on your website is more useful than 1000’s of irrelevant website visitors. Irrelevant visitors would spread negative words about your website (as they won’t get, what they were looking for in your website).

On the other hand, relevant visitors will always spread good word about your website. <snip/>

16

First and last warning: be respectful of fellow posters or be infracted.