Nofollow in site archutecture. Good or bad in 2013?

[mark_baird]

We have been using nofollow links to create a silo architecture. is this a good idea or should we stay away from using this on our site. Its an eCommerce site with about 3000+ pages so not sure of the best architecture.

ideas and suggestions on best practice welcome!

[SEOAndy]

it depends what you are putting as a no follow, do you mean for just external links?

not passing link juice as a silo can cause issues as search engines tend to favour all round "good egg" websites who are part of their community ... aka both receive and give links

[mark_baird]

no its not for external links its for the menu system and for internal link flow. just not sure if its a good idea. my site is www.centralsaddlery.co.uk if you want to see what I'm doing

[SEOAndy]

I'd probably look at sculpting using the sitemap - internally restricting flow can been seen as a little odd unless its for say documents, checkout or a login area type thing. what isn't clear is what it your objective in performing this task. Because even if you nofollow to that page others externally could and the equation alters a little - if you don't want a page found maybe look at robots.txt too

[mark_baird]

it was for content siloing for keywords but I'm starting to question the advice i was given on the subject.

[Everett]

I wouldn't use nofollow links for this purpose. The links are still going to dilute the pagerank you'd be sending on to other URLs being linked to elsewhere on the page, and if Google sees one link "nofollow" on a page they are thought to ignore subsequent, followable links to the same URL elsewhere on the page. A nofollow tag on a link isn't going to keep the page from being indexed in other ways either.

If you don't want the pages indexed there are other, better ways to achieve that, including robots meta tags and robots.txt disallows.

If you just want to optimize how pagerank flows throughout the site it would be better to focus on how and where you link to. For instance, do you really need all 100 footer links to every category from every category, or can you just link to other pages within that parent category? I would build a silo by removing links rather than nofollowing them.

Regarding the amount of pages and best architecture, it depends on the quality of those pages and whether you want them indexed. Example: If they are all unique pages with exclusive content that you want to rank Vs. a problem with duplicate content, thin content, indexable search pages, etc...

[mark_baird]

It was all about link juice flow.

We were also trying to optimize for the user navigation but this created lots of links in the nav. I can't work out how to help user nav without creating loads of links on page.

we have unique but thin content on the site as we are eCommerce. We are working on this but it is taking a lot of time and effort to fill up the site with good quality content.

could the use of nofollow be hurting our rankings?

[Jeepster]

Bad, bad, bad. Not me, that Matt Cutts guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

[mark_baird]

I think that's answered my question with a resounding no!

Thanks.

[Everett]

That does answer your question, but you still have the issue of so many links on every page. In my experience you don't need to stick to the "guideline" of 100 links per page, especially on an eCommerce site with multiple sub-categories all linked to from the navigation.

However, there are many ways around this. For example, you can link to main category pages and sub-category pages from the top nav, and only show the further tertiary categories and drilldown / faceted links in the sidebar for that category if you are on of the pages within that category. Make sense? This puts some of your product pages one click further away from the home page, but that is fine. I tend to cringe when I see totally FLAT architecture on an eCommerce site that big anyway.

Use of breadcrumbs, related product links, footer links, sitemaps and good top-level and sidebar navigation will ensure your entire site gets crawled easily and pagerank distributed properly without having thousands of links in the header navigation.

Good luck!