Is "no follow"ing a folder influences also its subfolders?

[mgreco]

I work with an affiliate site which has quite messy link structure.
The issue is that their affiliate links are www.example.com/product, which are redirected to the affiliates landing page and which are internally "no followed"

The review pages are www.example.com/product/review

The site is one of authority sites in their market; still, there is ranking issues with review pages, even sometimes with crawling.

I have been very bothered by this and my new theory is that it is because this folder /product is nofollowed, it also affects /product/review

Changing it would be insane amount of work and I would have to be sure that it is really the cause of issues, so I would really appreciate your thoughts/experience on this issue.
Thanks!

[Keszi]

Hi Martins,

In my belief, if the page product/review is not linked from any indexed page with a follow link it makes it kind of hard for search engines to reach and index the page.

This is my opinion, but I will document a little bit and come back to you later on.

Istvan

[loopyal]

Hello Martins.

nofollowing a highlevel folder doesn't necessarily stop robots reaching the lower levels.

You may have links that point to the lower levels or there may be external links pointing to those lower levels.

Unless you test it and prove something, I wouldn't believe that nofollowing an upper page will prevent crawlers from accessing, indexing and following lower pages.

The nofollow only tells the crawler to not follow any links it finds on that page.

If you had the same links on another page that did allow following, the crawler can follow them

[Keszi]

Alan, I agree with you on this one.

But if there is no followed link to the pages then it kind of stops the search engines to reach these pages.

But we'll see as soon as we have any testing done on this issue.

[mgreco]

The thing is that the /product/review have links, actually lot of internal links and also external ones as well, so they are normally crawled, except sometimes there are some issues with them, besides often other article pages are outranking the recensione pages.
There is some issue when it comes to /review pages particularly and really this "no follow" of that folder would suit as an explanation at the moment.

[mediabase]

Hi Martin,

Rel="nofollow" can be used with the following syntax:

[Lousy Punks!](http://www.seomoz.org)

Links can have lots of attributes applied to them, but the engines ignore nearly all of these, with the important exception of the rel="nofollow" tag. In the example above, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link tag, we've told the search engines that we, the site owners, do not want this link to be interpreted as the normal, "editorial vote." Nofollow came about as a method to help stop automated blog comment, guestbook, and link injection spam, but has morphed over time into a way of telling the engines to discount any link value that would ordinarily be passed. Links tagged with nofollow are interpreted slightly differently by each of the engines.

Note that the sub-folders will not be crawled too.

I hope that you will found the solution.

[StevenHowe]

I have come to understand  (perhaps incorrectly) that the "nofollow" attribute doesn't actually prevent a crawler from following the link, but merely that it disregards any relationship between the content on the source page and the destination. On this basis, using the "nofollow" attribute wouldn't affect your site on a per-folder basis, only that your internal linking will be affected from a SEO point of view.

To prevent a crawler from indexing a folder or sub-folder requires modifying your robots.txt file (Harald kindly linked to a good article on this) and using "disallow" on a parent folder does affect sub-folders using this method.

[mgreco]

The pre-last sentence is probably the answer I was looking for - that "nofollow" attribute may influence sub-folders.
Still, would appreciate if perhaps somebody would have hands-on experience with this?

[Keszi]

Martin,

I have two questions:

1. Why is there a nofollow?

2. Are all of the review pages gaining links from somewhere else (indexable pages, with follow link)?

Gr.,

Istvan

[mgreco]

1."nofollow" is there as those pages are redirecting to affiliate landing pages. As I understand it is a fairly common tactic used for affiliate links.

2. Yes, they do. Still, they have issue outranking the articles mentioning product for the keyword of product.

[Keszi]

Martins,

Could you provide a link maybe? Or send it over a PM. Just getting out of office, I will check it in the weekend.

Gr.,

Istvan

[loopyal]

Martins - what Steve says is true.

the nofollow tag doesn't stop even googlebot following down the tree.

• I checked my logs.

The nofollow probably tells their system that no pagerank is passed through that link. - and any links on that page do not receive any pagerank.  I say "probably" because we don't know for sure.

[Dr-Pete]

I'd agree with the general consensus that, while a nofollow on the links could cut the crawl path, it's no guarantee that deeper pages won't be followed or indexed. Any stray internal links, inbound links, etc. could trigger a crawl, or Google could just go exploring and then not be certain about your indexation signals on the deeper pages.

Nofollow'ing the "/product" level could definitely disrupt link-juice flow to the "/product/review" level and may impact rankings. I'm having a hard time envisioning how you're set up, but I suspect there's a way to block the affiliate links without blocking the entire "/product" level. My gut reaction is that this isn't set up quite right.

[CleverPhD]

Are you also blocking the sub-folders with robots.txt?   I think of nofollow as being used on a page by page basis vs a folder basis and only with the robots.txt you can block a folder.

As these pages are already in the index and you want them out, you really need to add a noindex meta tag on the offending pages.  I would not use the robots.txt approach as you want Google to be able to spider the page then read the noindex meta tag to remove the page.

Cheers.

[Dr-Pete]

Keep in mind that, even if the nofollow does block that path (and I agree with others that that's dubious - I've seen Google take a lot of liberties), there are still potentially other paths to those deeper pages, including old, inbound links. Even if there are no paths at all, but Google previously indexed this pages, they may keep indexing them. Ultimately, you'll probably a need some stronger medicine here.