In most of my web site I have a lot of external links to my other sites and other external sites.
I need to know when is better to use rel="nofollow" or rel="external" in a website?
You may use external for every link to a different website, no matter if it’s yours or not, if it’s on the same host or not.
You may use nofollow for every link that you don’t endorse (for example: search engines shouldn’t assume that it’s a relevant link and should not give any ranking credit to this link).
You may use both values for the same link:
Foobar
Note that external doesn’t convey that the link should be opened in a new window.
Note that search engine bots (that support nofollow) might still follow a nofollow link (it doesn’t forbid to follow it). FWIW, there is also the nofollow value for the meta-robots keyword (which may mean the same … or not, depending on which definition you follow).
nofollow links attributes do not allow search engine bots to follow link.
If you have rel="nofollow" then the juice stops.
rel="external" dosent act like nofollow. its DoFollow link.
For rel="external" it means the file is on a different site to the current one.
rel="external" is the XHTML valid version that informs search engine spiders that the link is external.
However, using this does not open the link in a new window. target="_blank" and target="_new" does this, but is not XHTML valid. I hope that helps.
I advise you to use Nofollow Links for the following content:
Links in Comments or on Forums - Anything that has user-generated content is likely to be a source of spam. Even if you carefully moderate, things will slip through
Advertisements & Sponsored Links - Any links that are meant to be advertisements or are part of a sponsorship arrangement must be nofollowed.
Paid Links - If you charge in any way for a link (directory submission, quality assessment, reviews, etc.), nofollow the outbound links
**
If you have an external link to your own site then use
Your Link
If you have external link to someone else's site you don't trust then you can combine both and use
Other Domain Link
If you have an external link to someone else's site and you consider it's trustworthy then use
External Useful Link
It depends what you mean by "better". Those are two comopletely different attribute.
rel = nofollow tells the Search engine crawlers not to look at this link (probably you don't want this to happen for your other websites, but you will use it for other's web sites). Documentation: rel=nofollow - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
rel = external tells that the link is not part of the web site and open the link in a new window (it's not working for older IE). It is used as a valid XHTML attribute instead of target="_blank". Here you can learn how to use it: http://www.copterlabs.com/blog/easily-create-external-links-without-the-target-attribute/
Related
I am making a social network application where user will come and share the posts like facebook. But now I have some doubts like lets say a user is just shared a content by coping it from another site and same with the case of images. So does google crawler consider it as a duplicate content or not?
If yes then how I can tell to the google crawler that "don't consider it as a spam, its a social networking site and the content is shared by the user not by the me". Is there any way or any kind of technique that help me.
Google might consider it to be duplicate content, in which case the search algorithm will choose 1 version, which it believes to be the original or more important one and drop the other.
This isn't a bad thing per se - unless you see that most of your site's content is becoming duplicated.
You can use canonical URL declarations to do what you are saying, but i wouldn't advise it.
If your website belongs to one of these types - forum or e-commerce, it will not be punished for duplicate content issue. I think "social platform" is one type of forum.
If your pages are too similar, the result is that the two or more similar pages will scatter the click rate, flow etc, so the rank in SERPs may not look well.
I suggest do not use "canonical" because this instruction tell the crawlers do not crawl/count this page. If you use it, in the webmaster tool, you will see the indexed pages decrease a lot.
Do not too worry about the duplicate content issue. You can see this article: Google’s Matt Cutts: Duplicate Content Won’t Hurt You, Unless It Is Spammy
Suppose I have my live site at www.mywebsite.com, tracked and managed via Google Webmaster Tools. Then I want to add to the project list a subdomain like test.mywebsite.com which I use for testing purposes. Of course that subdomain shouldn't be tracked or indexed by Google, but I would like to use "fetch as Google" feature on it to see how the crawler manages the pages. Can I set up such a test environment without being indexed by Google?
Not had chance to test this, but I think if you add noindex tags to your site then it should still allow your site to be registered with webmaster tools, as it can still see the site's content in order to detect ownership.
I believe "fetch as google" then returns live results rather than what is already indexed (it wouldn't be very useful if it didn't allow you to check new pages or re-check updated pages), and so temporarily removing the noindex tag when you run it should allow this feature to be used (it may also return some useful information without removing it).
The fact "fetch as" has a separate "submit" button suggests to me that it will not automatically index pages found via this method, so that should not be a concern.
Adding canonical tags pointing to your main content would provide an additional security measure to stop it accidentally listing.
Google can't provide any information about your website if it's not indexed.
In other words, you can use Google Webmaster Tools without your website being indexed, but it will be pretty much useless, since will not provide any data.
Google webmaster tools won't let you do that but you can test a website for seo checkup or other errors like search description missing,image alt missing etc with bing webmaster tools
I have a wiki website. Many spammers using it for seo. They are adding spam-posts with a link to an external website. Is there way to make sure they won't get benefit of it? My thought is adding a text file like robots.txt to inform the search engine "don't consider external website links for search results". I don't want to prevent spammers from creating posts for the sake of advertisements :)
Add rel="nofollow" to the links when you output them on your site.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
They will still spam your site with links, so you'll need to monitor as well.
Should one apply rel="nofollow" attribute to site links that are bound for secure/login required pages?
We have a URI date based link structure where the previous year's news content is free, while the current year, and any year prior to the last, are paid, login required content.
The net effect is that when doing a search for our company name in google, what comes up first is Contact, About, Login, etc., standard non-login required content. That's fine, but ideally we have our free content, the pages we want to promote, shown first in the search engine results.
Toward this end, the link structure now generates rel="follow" for the free content we want to promote, and rel="nofollow" for all paid content and Contact, About, Login, etc. screens that we want at the bottom of the SEO search result ladder.
I have yet to deploy the new linking scheme for fear of, you know, blowing up the site SEO-wise ;-) It's not in great shape to begin with, despite our decent ranking, but I don't want us to disappear either.
Anyway, words of wisdom appreciated.
Thanks
nofollow
I think Emil Vikström is wrong about nofollow. You can use the rel value nofollow for internal links. The microformats spec and the HTML5 spec don't say the opposite.
Google even gives such an example:
Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.
This does apply to your use case. So you could nofollow the links to your login page. Note however, if you also meta-noindex them, people that search for "YourSiteName login" probably won't get the desired page in their search results, then.
follow
There is no rel value "follow". It's not defined in the HTML5 spec nor in the HTML5 Link Type extensions. It isn't even mentioned in http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values at all. A link without the rel value nofollow is automatically a "follow link".
You can't overwrite a meta-nofollow for certain links (the two nofollow values even have a different semantic).
Your case
I'd use nofollow for all links to restricted/paid content. I wouldn't nofollow the links to the informational pages about the site (About, Contact, Login), because they are useful, people might search especially for them, and they give information about your site, while all the content pages give information about the various topics.
Nofollow is only for external links, it does not apply to links within your own domain. Search engines will try to give the most relevant content for the query asked, and they generally actively avoid taking the website owners wishes into account. Thus, nofollow will not help you here.
What you really want to do is make the news content the best choice for a search on your company name. A user searching for your company name may do this for two reasons: They want your homepage (the first page) or they more specifically want to know more about your company. This means that your homepage as well as "About", "Contact", etc, are generally actually what the user is looking for and the search engines will show them at the top of their results pages.
If you don't want this you must make those pages useless for one wanting to know more about your company. This may sound really silly. To make your "About" and "Contact" pages useless to one searching for your company you should remove your company name from those pages, as well as any information about what your company does. Put that info on the news pages instead and the search engines may start to rank the news higher.
Another option is to not let the search engine index those other pages at all by adding them to a robots.txt file.
Suppose I have a link in the page My Messages, which on click will display an alert message "You must login to access my messages".
May be it's better to just not display this link when user is not logged in, but I want "My Messages" to be visible even if user is not logged in.
I think this link is user-friendly, but for search engines they will get redirected to login page, which I think is.. bad for SEO? or is it fine?
I thought of keeping My Messages displayed as normal text (not as a link), then wrap it with a link tag by using javascript/jquery, is this solution good or bad? other ideas please? Thank you.
Try to create a robots.txt file and write:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mymessages
This will keep SEO bots out of that folder
Use a robots.txt file to tell search engines which pages they should not index.
Using nofollow to block access to a page is erroneous - this is not what nofollow is for. This attribute was designed to allow to you place a link in page without conferring any weight or endorsement of the link. In other words, it's not a link that search engines should regard as significant for page-ranking algorithms. It does not mean "do not index this page" - just "don't follow this particular link to that page"
Here's what Google have to say about nofollow
...However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other
sites link to them without using nofollow or if the URLs are submitted
to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search
engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
One way of keeping the URL from affecting your rank is setting the rel attribute of your link:
My Messages
Another option is robots.txt, that way you can disallow the bots from the URL entirely.
You might want to use robots.txt to exclude /mymessages. This will also prevent engines which have already visited /mymessages from visiting it again.
Alternatively, add the following to the top of the /mymessages script:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
If you want to tell search engines, not to follow a particular link , then use rel="nofollow".
It is a way to tell search engines and bots that don't follow this link.
Now,google will not crawl that link and does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across this link.