Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links

[robertrRSwalters]

Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text.

We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for.

I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links.

Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization.

Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.

[Alex-Harford]

I'd say it's not worth it these days; if you add nofollow to a link, the link juice disappears completely, e.g. if you have 10 followed links on a page (and 10 links in total), they'll each get 10% of the link juice. If you make 1 of those 10 links nofollow, the other 9 links will still only get the same amount of link juice - 10% will be lost completely to the nofollow. It used to be the case where the link juice was shared between the number of followed links, but not any more.

Edit - check out this from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

[robertrRSwalters]

Hey Alex,

So you would go for more of a 'link amputation' approach ?

[Alex-Harford]

Not necessarily - the 100 links is just a warning - not an error. I can't speak for SEOmoz but I think that number comes from the days when search engine crawlers weren't so sophisticated; the likes of Google have no problem crawling a lot of on page links now. If it would make it a better user experience to remove some links, then go ahead.

This is an old post - be aware that in most situations it's probably only the anchor text of the first repeated link that counts - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts - so that's a possibility for improving your link optimisation. Another way to optimise your site using links is to be aware that links in body text have a higher value than those in sidebars and footers - it's a good way to link to other internal content.

[robertrRSwalters]

From our home page we have all image links to our core pages, maybe I should add some exact match anchor text links to our core pages from there you mean?

It's an old CMS we are on but I still think I can squeeze some extra performance out of it.

[Alex-Harford]

Again, if you think it will benefit the human user. I'm hesitant to give more specific advice when I haven't seen the site in question. You can always take advantage of image alt attributes if you're not already.

EDIT - if you're talking about The Furniture Market, the navigation links on the left and top would definitely be better as text.

[robertrRSwalters]

I agree Alex the problem comes with link cannibalization. As the site works from templates there is a lot of variation with how the text renders across browsers so from a user point of view and with all the issues with w3c validation images were the best way to go.

Its a toss up between the links looking ugly and link juice.

[Alex-Harford]

Do you mean keyword cannibalisation - where different pages are targeting the same keyword? You have numerous pages where the main key phrase in the title tag and elsewhere on-page includes "oak furniture" for example.

I don't have much experience with CMS's so apologies if my question sounds a bit dumb, is it not as simple as selecting a default size and font like Arial or Helvetica?

[robertrRSwalters]

Hey Alex,

Hit the "oak furniture" analogy on the head there. I could go through our core pages disabling the canalizing link. So the Oak furniture didn't work on the oak page because the user is already there.

The CMS is reliable and a little FUGLY I can't get a nice font to work and align how I want so resorted to images.

How much of an edge do you think we are missing because of this issue? can you quantify it?Essentially this is not going to boost usability massively, just sculpt link juice hopefully.