Should i remove the nofollow from mediawiki?

[Host1]

We have a website which uses mediawiki for public documentation. The moz crawler keeps nagging us that 50% of our sites have the nofollow-metatag. (And noindex for that matter). This is information pages and such in mediawiki.

From a SEO perspective: Should we remove these tags? I assume they probably do not hurt?

If we shouldn't remove the tags: Is there any way to get moz to ignore these pages so we can get rid of this "noise" in the moz-panel?

[adamxj2]

Are you saying that your sites are noindex/nofollow or are the links within the site nofollow?

[Host1]

The links within the site (within mediawiki to be specific) is noindex + nofollow. This due to it being information-sites and such in mediawiki.

Not sure what to do with them, but it's fairly annoying that moz lists it as a problem with "1000 internal links having nofollow" if it's not really a problem at all.

[adamxj2]

I'm still not entirely sure about how your site is structured but I'll give it a shot…

Firstly, the noindex tag is only for pages. It tells the crawl to not index an entire page and stops it from ranking. That tag is meant for the section of the page. Nofollow tags are found within the link and are meant to stop the transfer of page authority…so you are essentially telling the crawler bots that the links are external and/or not totally relevant/trustworthy. Nofollow shouldn't be used really on internal links within your site pages because you want to spread the page rank and authority and receive the SEO benefits of that.

It's probably telling you there is a problem because you are essentially stopping the flow of link juice within your site and from sharing page rank and authority with other trustworthy/relevant sites.

So why have you made them nofollow in the first place? Maybe you can assess why and where to use the nofollow so that it is beneficial. I guess it's not necessarily a "problem" …but you are not receiving any possible benefits from limiting your nofollow links.

Hope that helps!

[Host1]

Hi Adam.

Thank you for the good replies.

The url to the wiki: http://docs.host1.no/wiki

Url to main page: https://host1.no

"Complaints" from the moz.com-engine:

#1: (mediawiki-problem)

Crawl Issue Found: Use of 'nofollow' Tag

49% of site pages are tagged with the nofollow META attribute#2: (mediawiki-problem)

Crawl Issue Found: 404 Errors

8% of site pages served 404 errors during the last crawlExample of sites Moz.com complains about noindex/nofollow on:http://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=infohttp://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=historyhttp://docs.host1.no/w/index.php?title=Cloud1&action=editAnd so on.I assume google won't mind this as it's pages that really don't need to be indexed. But it would be nice to get moz' crawler to ignore these errors as they might mask other actual problems by the amount of errors i get. When i get 1000+ errors from this it's hard to find the real problems.

[adamxj2]

Ahh ok I see now.

Even though you have a nofollow on your link in the navigation from your url to your wiki, the pages will still be indexed! Even if the links are not being followed by search engines they are still being indexed by them-just want to make that clear. Also, it's important to note that even if Google reads a nofollow tag they still have an option to follow it anyway. Because of the open source platform you are using, I'm not sure if there's a way to stop the crawl from indexing the link between your url and your wiki. That might take some fancy foot work. That would be the only way to get the nofollow percentage removed…but you really don't want your wiki pages to not be indexed anyway.

Moz is reflecting what the crawl bots see…such as Google. You can't tell it to not show you certain things unless you alter your code, .htaccss, or robots files to change the way the site is being crawled.

As I stated earlier…having a lot of nofollows doesn't necessarily hurt your SEO, but it will not bring you the benefits of followed links that pass link juice and page rank.

I understand it's hard to see the real issues to address when you are flooded with this other stuff, but I'm not sure you have many other options unless you want to remove the nofollows.

Just curious…why do you use so many nofollows anyway? Or is it automatically generated by wiki?

[Host1]

The nofollows are automatically created by mediawiki.

I'll try to find a solution for removing them i guess. Thank you for your input.