Pyramid link structure - how to noindex, nofollow

[SilverStar1]

I'm talking about this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1

Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).

SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.

Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.

Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)

Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?

[_nitman]

Hi,

Could you please help me understand your concern here? What do you mean by "noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs"?

May be you need to elaborate your concern or share some screenshots to help me understand it.

P.S noindexing a subset of pages is not harmful for sure.

[Ria_]

I'm confused. Why would you want to noindex all of those pages? If you don't want those pages to be indexed by Google, tagging them noindex is not harmful at all. But why would you want to noindex the front page, category, subcategory and product page?

[SilverStar1]

Oh, sorry, I mean product page have lot of links from top, left menu, from "recommended" products. My offer is left only 1 "way out" - to parent category (in this case it Plain shirts).

But if I will noindex "recommended" products, are they will disappear from G. search?..

[SilverStar1]

I just want to follow "pyramid" scheme (see pic in article). If not use noindex, how to do this pyramide?

[Ria_]

If you noindex a page, you are telling Google that you don't want the page to be indexed and it will disappear from Google Search. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? Maybe you are thinking of index, nofollow on Recommended Products instead to reduce the number of links that Google will follow?

[_nitman]

Hi,

Well, following "pyramid" scheme and noindexing pages are two different things altogether. Let's not mix them, its creating confusion actually. So, tell me why do you want to noindex your pages?

Using pyramid scheme and optimizing your site's architecture the best possible way can be done independently.

[_nitman]

Are you trying to say that you're planning to have multiple URLs for a single product page here? For instance, if you have a product which can be reached from multiple navigation paths, so you want to have those multiple URLs for it?

Like if a product is tagged in category "x" and "x" is a sub-category of category "y", then the number of possible URLs for product page "p" would be

• www.example.com/y/p
• www.example.com/y/x/p

So, here these 2 URLs are candidates of duplicate content penalty and hence, you want to noindex them? Is this what you're trying to explain?

[SilverStar1]

Alright, I got it, lets forget about noindex, left nofollow only.

Now to have pyramid scheme my plan should look like this, right?

Product page: nofollow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts).

SubCategory page (plain shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory.

Category page (shirts): nofollow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories.

Front page: nofollow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.)

[_nitman]

No! Don't "nofollow" them. Why do you want to nofollow them now?

You're not spamming here, inter-linking from flyout-navigation/header/footer/on-page-navigation/breadcrumbs are the natural ways people use for internal-linking, that won't hurt you for sure.

[SilverStar1]

No, I just want get rid of million useless links from both menus and make clean pyramid structure with plain link flow:
(product have only 1 link to subcategory, subcategory have 1 link to category and few links to products and so on).

[_nitman]

Well, these aren't "useless" links. After all, they're linking your categories/sub-categories etc. and should be followed by bots even if a HTML snapshot of any page captures 2-3 follow links (from flyout/menu navigation, breadcrumbs etc.) of another page.

Hope this helps!

[Ria_]

I agree with Nitin here.

I think the confusion is perhaps that you're taking the pyramid structure in that Moz article too literally? There is nothing wrong with linking between different pages as Nitin said. In fact, by linking to related/relevant content on your website, you are enforcing the context and the meaning of the pages' content. The diagram in the Moz article is just showing how you should have the minimum number of links possible between the homepage and any given "deep" page on the website. So, using Moz's diagram as an example, from that website's homepage, you can get to their deepest page in only three clicks. The more clicks (or links) the harder the page is to find, and therefore less likely to be found and crawled by Google. Remember that Google has a crawl budget.

So long as you don't have hundreds of links on any one page you are trying to rank and it doesn't take too many links to get to any one page, I wouldn't worry too much it. The nofollow attribute is only to be used when you don't want Google to follow that link and pass link juice between the pages.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi there,

I see what you're trying to do, and I think I understand it. You're attempting to conserve your link equity and flow it only to the most important pages, or what we use to call "pagerank sculpting."

The good news is you don't really need to worry about it. These days, adding nofollow to your links doesn't really increase the equity flowing through the followed links. And in fact, you could be shooting yourself in the proverbial foot by denying equity passing links to your lower product pages.

Best time to use nofollow for internal pages is typically to increase crawling efficiency, or to prevent bots from visiting pages you don't want indexed anyway. Attempting to scuplt link equity in this way could cause lots of unintended negative consequences and my advice would be in most cases to let your link equity flow freely throughout your site in a way that was natural to both humans and bots alike.

Best of luck!