Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Hey there Mozzers,

I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow?

If possible tell me why also.

Thanks in advance

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Angelos. Dofollowing internal links, is fine, especially in the context of relevant articles as those links are tying together information both in relation to search and for users that want to quickly dig deeper while reading your work.

[DirkC]

The main reason to use internal "nofollow" links on your site if the links would go to technical pages like login pages, or links to pages that you don't want to have indexed. As Ryan says - if you link to other relevant articles there is no reason to use nofollow.

Dirk

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Awesome and fast! Thanks Ryan.

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Thanks Dirk! Awesome info

[PaddyDisplays]

I would disagree Dirk, You should never use Nofollow on internal links as its throwing link juice out the window.  It better to noindex pages you don't want indexed. nofollow should only be used on external link you don't vouch for  or for paid for links

[DirkC]

At least we agree that we disagree

I always take the "efficiency" approach - a technical page like a login page makes no sense as a landing page, and I don't want to have it in the search results. So I put the page on "noindex" and all the links that point to it as "nofollow". Given the fact that Googlebot is not crawling all the pages every visit, I don't want to waste its time on crawling links to pages that don't need to be indexed anyway.

Even if you look at it from a "link juice" perspective, you want the juice to go where your interesting content is, not to pages that don't need to be indexed anyway.

[PaddyDisplays]

Yes but when you "no follow" link juice that would have been passed to that page is loss (and not diverted to other pages), in turn that means that any pages that is linked to from the login page does not get any juice passed to it.  And when you think something like a login page is linked from every page that's a lot of link juice to throw away (collectively).

I understand your point about the crawling, but unless you have lots of new content (or updating content)  I would take the boost from the maximising link flow though the site.

I have removed "no follow" from internal link (like login) before and have seen general boost in rankings site wide before ( not scientific proof granted)