Internal no follow links

[Libra_Photographic]

I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog.

Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow.

What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Based on my experience that is an Issues ....why?

Generally, with internal links, we want to link one page to another to help Google discover the content, while also creating a hierarchy to reflect which pages are more important than others. Internal linking fulfills different tasks.

• It ensures the accessibility of all documents.
• It prioritizes content and distributes link juice.
• It helps to cluster content and creates a context to explain what a page is supposed to rank for.

Basically, Google evaluates the priority of a page according to the quality and number of incoming links. Depending on your website, as well as say products or contents that you have on your domain, you need to understand what is most important from a business perspective.

If you have an online shop, you obviously will have lots of categories that usually target very generic, high volume keywords. Then you also have your product pages. These product pages usually target more specific, long tail keywords; therefore the search volume per URL and that of the keywords is usually lower. From a hierarchy perspective, you should ensure that the most important categories are very closely linked from the homepage.

Another important is the link juice. The main idea is that link juice is a kind of definer of all the positive and negative characteristics that can be passed by an internal or external link from one URL to another.

**IN SUMMARY **

• _Internal-links is one the best way to build a site structure _
• _Internal-links is also important to pass link juice from page to another _
• _with no follow tag on all the above explanation is almost useless _

**_"The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow." **seriouslyI don't understand what is he talking about _

Hope this info will help you
Regards and good luck

[Libra_Photographic]

Thanks, Roman,

You are echoing my sentiments. I'm glad I wasn't having a meltdown.

[effectdigital]

Yeah that's pretty much overkill. "No-follow" isn't actually named very well as it doesn't prevent users or search engines from 'following' a hyperlink. I know, it was named really badly! In fact many people feel it's not even a directive to stop links from being 'followed' (or visited)

What the no-follow tag is commonly used for these days is to denote the difference between editorial and advertorial hyperlinks. It's only really an issue with external links, rather than internal ones. If you have placed content on another site (and you paid for it, like a sponsored post) with a link pointing back to your own site (to try and get referral traffic), the 'no-follow' tag lets Google know that the link is advertorial in nature and thus should not pass PageRank to the receiving domain / web-page

Because of this a lot of people believe that if you no-follow a link, it doesn't vent or lose any PageRank. This is false. If a link is default ('followed'), then an amount of PageRank will be lost from the linking page and donated to the receiving page. If a link is 'no-followed', the PageRank will still be lost by the linking page but the receiving page just won't get anything (so it gets vented into cyberspace). This is to stop "PageRank sculpting" using no-follow links from being a viable SEO manipulation tactic

As such, all no-following your duplicate internal links will do is vent tiny chunks of SEO authority without them then being appended to other pages on your site (so little bits of authority just get lost from your website's ecosystem)

It's not a huge problem that you should freak out about, in-fact the noticeable difference in performance via either implementation (I would guess) would be negligible to totally unnoticeable

But still - why chip away at yourself right? That's what your competitors are there for