Multiple Common Page Links

[APFM]

Hi everyone -

I've taken over SEO for a site recently. In many cases, the reasons why something was done were not well documented. One of these is that on some pages, there are lists of selections. Each selection takes the user to a particular page. On the list page, there is often a link from an image, a name, and a couple of others.  Each page often has 30 items with 4 links each.  For some reason, the 4th of these internal links were no-followed.

When I run this site through several different site evaluation tools, they are all troubled with the number of no-follow links on the site. (These instances from above add up to a 5 figure number).

From a user perspective, I totally get why there is a link where each of these links exist. If I wanted to click on the image or the name or some other attribute, that totally makes sense.  Its my understanding that Google / Bing are only going to consider the 1st instance.

If this creates excessive links, wouldn't you want 3 of the 4 links in each set no-followed? If its only excessive unique links that really matter, then why would any be nofollowed.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

As far as I know, internal nofollow links do not make any sense, unless you are trying to "direct" search bots to specific pages, but not others. In your case, as you say, there are many other links to the same page, so internal architecture here doesn't take place.

So, I say remove nofollows on internal links, try maybe reduce amount of links in general though. The problems you might encounter are related to so called crawl budget by search bots. They have limited amount of time and resources to be on your website, and, if you have many-many links to the same pages, bots might be running in circles, wasting their resources.

Hope this helps.

[Stephaneham]

As Dmitrii said, there's no reason for there to be nofollows on internal links. In fact, your best bet would probably be to reduce the amount of links per page. If each item has 4 links, that means you are getting 120 links per page only for your items. That's simply too much, and you aren't counting the rest of the links that are present in the page (Header, sidebar, footer etc).

[APFM]

I've set up a new redesign of our page to reduce the number of links per item from 4 to 1.  We are also going to reduce the number of items from 30. The challenge here is that in some cases, there really are more than 30 items that are relevant (e.g. not related, but actually part of the list as they should be).  We've got some thinking to do as to whether or not we do pagination or incremental load.