Are There Any Positive Use Cases for No-Following Internal Links?

[Nonbeardedman]

I've learned quite a lot about SEO, and I know quite a lot about SEO, more specfically on-page SEO. I've been following the crash course and was using the Content Planning day as a guide for mapping out silos for my site and creating a broad strategy for improving the overall topical relevancy of my site - and it's been challenging some of my previously-held beliefs about SEO and how to plan for cotent.

Within that day of the crash course, this link to Bruce Clay's Siloing guide was provided. I've been following it and have mapped out a bunch of silos for my site based on its sub-themes and have associated my big list of keywords with the silo - essentially mapping out which silo is going to encompass which set of keywords and how all of it is going to play out i.e. navigating the customer journey and amassing topical coverage.

I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in that guide and it's been pretty spot on, however this stood out:

Linking from support page to support page in different silos dilutes the themes of both silos. By linking to the top of the jelly silo, you not only keep the integrity of the two silos, but also you help to establish the jelly landing page as the main page for that silo. If you absolutely had to link the creamy peanut butter page to the flavored jelly page, you would want to do it with a rel=”nofollow” link attribute. The rel=”nofollow” link attribute is a signal to the search engine not to pass PageRank, the indicator of link value or relevance.

[...]

Rel=”NoFollow”

When you link between different silos within the site, you may always link normally to a landing page. When linking between silos and the target page is not a landing page we want to have ranked, in that case we would use a nofollow link attribute. Add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to eliminate passing PR when linking two subjects outside of silos. This will allow unrelated pages to link to each other without confusing the subject relevance. A rel=”nofollow” removes the PR relationship between two or more pages.

I've never no-followed an internal link to my site. Also when they talk about cross-linking from one silo to the other - I can imagine many scenarios with my site where that would be happening - so I don't think I can just go with the thinking that I just won't link to them becasue they're not part of the same silo.

For example, Let's say I have a site in the Football (Soccer) niche. My main theme would be Football, sub-themes could include Football Teams, Football Rules, Football Tutorials, and Football News. Further sub-themes might be mapped out like this:

• Football
  • Football Teams
    • Premier League
    • La liga
  • Football Rules
    • Common terminology
    • Offside
  • Football tutorials
    • Beginner
    • Intermediates
  • Football News

Now, I can imagine that if a person on my site is looking for beginner tutorials, exploring my Football Tutorials silo, they won't know much about Football and thus the rules of Football (part of the Football Rules silo). So they might be looking at an article called: "How to Recieve a Long Ball" and within that article I might mention something like this:

"When the ball is in the air, coming towards you, try to block the defender with your back faced to them. As soon as the ball gets closer to your head, shimmy past the defender's side by turning away from them and sprinting towards the ball. Make sure to time this right, if you're late to react and don't turn quickly enough you might risk being offside."

Now, referring to the Bruce Clay guide, the above is a support page of the Football Tutorials Silo and is linking to the Offside page of the sub-theme: Football Rules - according to Bruce, that'll dillute the theme of both silos. So, should I rel="nofollow" the offside link that's pointing to the Football Rules silo from the Football Tutorials silo?

I'm currently also in the middle of a site audit (I'm dividing my time to focus on both the planning for future content and direction as well as improving what I already have) and I've been reoptimizing my posts by including keywords I'm partially ranking for with the help of GSC and have been adding internal links to relevant posts. So, knowing when and how to rel="nofollow" internal links can be a great help before I start making macro-level changes to the site's internal linking structure and group my current posts in their relevant silos.

 

[wikibum]

I personally don't do silo's which is why all my internal links are do-follow. But I have built silo's in the past and they do work pushing all the juice to specific pages.

In my humble opinion, I would leave the link as do-follow. The amount of juice being sent to that page would probably dilute your existing silo but not enough to hurt your silo. However, it would also push juice to the offside page helping it to rank higher. If you don't want to dilute the silo - my suggestion would be not to link to the offside page in the first place - instead of no-following it.

 

[Nonbeardedman]

my suggestion would be not to link to the offside page in the first place

But wouldn't that contribute to a negative user experience? Like the beginner may not know what offside is. So, if I have a page explaining the offside rule wouldn't it be better to keep them on my site to get an understanding of that rule rather than having them guess what it is or going to some other site to find out?

Personally, how I'm looking at it is that, from an SEO point of view, it might not be a good strategy for the linked page (in this case the offside page) because the link juice gets cut off. But, from the reader's perspective I think it contributes positively - like I believe it positions my site as an authority since I have all the relevant info on football - it's like telling them "Hey! You don't need to go through the trouble of searching article after article to learn about Football, you can learn everything here! Convinently all in one place"

What I'm trying to confirm is, is it bad from an SEO point of view or good? Like, does it really help with maintaining topical relevancy and silo structures or is it just one of those hard-to-maintain, perfectionist-level things that won't make much of a difference - you know like having a Disavow list of millions of spammy links when Google itself manages to filter out most of them... I say this because I've always seen rel=no-following internal links as a bad practice for sites

Also since I've already created my site with a "post-name" permalink style, I don't want to mess with physical silos and changing my links to "category/post-name", so my best bet is creating these virtual silos through interlinking

 

[CCarter]

I've never no-followed an internal link to my site.

I would leave the link as do-follow.

I wouldn't recommend nofollowing ANY internal links on a site.

Let's say you nofollow the privacy policy or terms of service pages, than how does Google know you take privacy seriously for your users? Having a privacy policy is a "known" factor of trust. If Google can't visit the page cause of nofollow, how does it know what's going on within the page.

Aside from that, this nofollow from silo to silo makes your job that much more complicating. Google is a lot smarter than most SEOs give it credit for.

And don't get me wrong Bruce clay is a pioneer in SEO, but doesn't mean the experts are always right on every subject.

I think nofollow different silos just adds more confusion to Googlebot and can just cause them to say "screw this weird site", since you are creating a labyrinth maze for it.

 

[Nonbeardedman]

If Google can't visit the page cause of nofollow, how does it know what's going on within the page.

Wait. Google completely ignores a page if you no-follow it?

From what I know, Google can still see the page's contents (like for indexing purposes etc.) but doesn't pass any value to that page.

Like, when you go to a store to buy a suit and the salesperson tells you about the nice loafers they have as well in their "loafers" section. You'd go there and take sort of a look around and check out the shoes but you won't really consider buying it or getting more details about it as you only came here for the suit - so it doesn't really carry any significant value in comparison to the "suits" section for the person, but it's there for other people as it is a part of the store nonetheless.

So, I'm assuming Googlebot has the same thought process?

Anyways, that's my understanding from what I know. Does Google completely ignore a page and its contents when you rel="no-follow" it?

Aside from that, this nofollow from silo to silo makes your job that much more complicating. Google is a lot smarter than most SEOs give it credit for.

This is actually what I was afraid of. Google seems to be getting smarter day by day and the main purpose of me making this post was to clarify whether this whole rel="nofollow" thing between silos is necessary or just another layer of management I have to take care of - because being a perfectionist that's trying to beat that habit, I don't want to go into a relapse of "analysis-paralysis" unless it's really important

I think nofollow different silos just adds more confusion to Googlebot and can just cause them to say "screw this weird site", since you are creating a labyrinth maze for it.

Aren't I doing the opposite by nofollowing different silos? The reason I thought this (nofollowing silos) could give some benefit was because Google would know which group of articles are closely related together - which would mean they don't have to go through my site like a maze and figure out what it's about, rather they can just get an accurate idea from seeing what links to what and make the connection themselves easily.

 

[CCarter]

perfectionist

Perfectionist is code for procrastinationist. It sounds like you are doing something but in the end you are just wasting time.

Google would know which group of articles are closely related together

Google has been doing this since 1998. 25 years ago. They have made billions of dollars and poured a ton of it into hiring pHDs and top coders... for 25 years.

You don't think they know how to categorize categories by now? Seriously? This is what I mean by SEOs not giving enough credit to Google.

Does Google completely ignore a page and its contents when you rel="no-follow" it?

"In general, we don’t follow them." - Google​

What you are doing is a theory called "PageRank Sculpting". It's a technique from like 2007. 16 years ago.

Here is a blog post directed from Matt Cutts' blog talking about it and not recommending it from 2009, 14 years ago: PageRank Sculpting

What you are doing is basically wasting your time with extra work, on ancient techniques. Each article you'll have to categorize your links and monitor carefully in a spreadsheet some nonsense that is a bad practice.

Instead you could be using that time to market your website which has a better impact on your revenue and bottomline.

Like I said Perfectionist is a fear induced form of procrastination.

 

[Nonbeardedman]

Alrighty then, I have my answer. No internal link is to be rel="nofollowed"

I'm going to build out these silos without overthinking anything any further - plain ol' simple plan > write > promote > bank

Thanks for the clarification, I appreciate it

 

[thisishatred]

I think the biggest benefits of "silos" in general is just the crawlability aspect of making Googlebot more efficient on your site.

I mean truth be told, most people just absolutely blow at internals (myself included) - and in a lot of cases their posts/pages don't have any internals at all. Internals are something I've harped on with my own site(s) and it has continued to pay off massively.

For some reason people are like super afraid to "cross" silos too but if internaling to a page makes sense from a user perspective (you know the people actually reading your content) then it probably makes sense to Google too.

I wrote on this topic to another user a few days back - you can read that here.

Even that small silo I wrote up:

/house-plants/pothos/
/house-plants/pothos/care/
/house-plants/pothos/care/sun/
/house-plants/pothos/care/watering/
/house-plants/pothos/care/pests/
/house-plants/pothos/propagation/

Those query paths are better answered when they have their own pages - if we're going to internal to something completely tangential like a new flower, why would I cut off pagerank if it can potentially help other silos on my site?

I don't know about everyone else but my intention with every page/post is to rank that page/post.

Say a particular "pest" affected "pothos."
(I don't know shit about plants but I know some pests/mites/etc. affect certain species.)

So I talk about it here:
/house-plants/pothos/care/pests/

I get a link to that page and say that same pest affects another species of plant and I link to the other silo:

/house-plants/sunflower/care/pests/

I can just as easily link back and forth?

It's kind of the same thing with the privacy policy or terms of service pages - you can just internal back to your homepage from those pages.

A privacy policy page and terms of service page are riddled with brand-based anchors that make those easy to do.

 

[Darth]

I would never nofollow any internal links on my site. Maybe this was a thing years ago, but today it's simply silly to do, and worse a big fat waste of time thinking about and actioning.

 

[JOoa0ky]

So... I have a question for ALL of you. @Nonbeardedman

Does giving a dofollow really dilute your page's pagerankjuice?

Here are two scenarios about an article for symptoms for testicular cancer.

Option #1
Cites 20 different research articles from NIH and google scholar with all dofollow external links.

Option #2
Cites 20 different research articles from NIH and google scholar but with all nofollow external links.

If we really believe in dofollow links diluting pagerankjuice then why is it common practice to go with option #1 and not option #2?

I believe we can all unanimously agree that option #1 is better than #2, right?

Or perhaps I'm wrong...?

 

[CCarter]

I believe we can all unanimously agree that option #1 is better than #2, right?

It's about trusting the source. IF you don't "vouch" for the external link then nofollow.

IF you "vouch" for the external like then keep it non-nofollow, or what you kids call dofollow.

It's like there are girls you DO NOT want to introduce to your parents, but you still bang them (link out to), but don't vouch for them (nofollow).

And then there are girls you WOULD introduce to your parents, you still bang them too (link out with a "dofollow" - hopefully SEONick does see this).

That should be simple enough analogy for you guys to understand.

 

[AhFreshMeat]

I would put the ‘offside’ internal link further down the page if its less relevant. Meaning place less relevant links further down the page and most important/relevant in the “main content” or earlier in the article.

Ask yourself, if you were google, what would you do? If I was google, I’d judge the first few links and deem them as the most important and relevant for that page.

But… As the author expands on the topic further down the page, so does the likeliness that you’ll mention something less relevant to the title of the current page.

As @CCarter mentioned, google has been doing this a long time. Sculpting in regards to OP beyond what I mentioned above is likely a waste of time, energy, and even thought.

 

[Nonbeardedman]

I've already decided on not no-following my internal links and have made a list of all the posts I'll be re-optimizing based on my "new-found" knowledge.

But I believe I need to give some further clarification for my thought process behind making this post and believing that no-follow links could be a potential benefit to the site - especially for maintaining topical relevancy.

Firstly, let me explain why I believed this would've benefitted my site while taking into account some of the other replies here:

I have multiple silos, let's say 10 for now, that are sub-themes of the main theme of the site. When I'm talking about a certain subject on the site, and the viewer is looking at that, they don't want to be redirected to a totally different topic.

The reason I think this works for topical relevancy is that when you no-follow links that are not of maxmium or optimal relevance in comparison to the topic at hand (the one the reader is currently reading) it would force Google to waste resources in trying to figure out the article I'm linking out to from my current article is relevant or not to the topic at hand.

Sure, Googlebot is smart and its evolved to be a lot more smart. But at the same time, it's a machine, a piece of code, albeit a pretty darn technical and advanced one, it's still an algorithim. It doesn't look at the content with the same interest of the actual reader and doesn't make a concious decision to read the "offside" page I'm linking to because it feels it should know the offside rule before learning how to recieve a long ball - because it would directly affect my results - that is unless I tell them it does.

If we really believe in dofollow links diluting pagerankjuice then why is it common practice to go with option #1 and not option #2?

Keeping links on dofollow won't dilute page rank of that page, and I didn't say that, I said it would dillute the theme of the silo, which was also what Bruce Clay mentioned (referring to the quote I mentioned in my OP). I'm not concerned about losing page rank, I'm concerned with Google mixing the categorization of my site's main themes and sub-themes by misrepresenting my site's structure and "thinking" that a certain topic's theme is closely related to another topic when it may not be.

The reason why we all agree that option #1 is better than option #2 is because that refers to external links, which could be treated differently. Over here, you're linking out to expert studies, this would defintitely pass pagerank to them sure, but it'll directly benefit your site as well, because Google would think "oh okay this guy isn't just going off about symptoms of testicular cancer that he once heard from his Uncle or something, he actually took the time to study research journals and reports and even cited these sources so that they could back up their claim."

It would just be greedy and not very smart to keep the pagerank all to yourself by not linking to the external sites. If you want to be considered an expert on a topic you ought to cite the experts who've done the research rather than say "these are the symptoms of testicular cancer and you better believe me because I have a Ph.D in this stuff."

I would put the ‘offside’ internal link further down the page if its less relevant. Meaning place less relevant links further down the page and most important/relevant in the “main content” or earlier in the article.

This could make sense from Google's eyes because I remeber (not that well though) that they mentioned they treat links at the bottom of pages as "supplementary content" that aren't very related to the page. But, if you put yourselves in the shoes of the visitor would you read the whole article on receiving a long ball and guessing what offside means until you reach the end and then actually get ot know what offside is?

Personally, if I ever come across an article that uses industry jargon I don't know of, I either just assume its meaning (which the article might clarify as I read further based on understanding the context) or I'll open a new tab in chrome write "define (industry term)" check it out and go back to reading the article.

I think it would be smarter to direct them to your page on the topic which would not only tell them what it means but also give examples with images to understand it better and even address common confusions that may occur when they first pick up on the term - which could also help to align me as an authority/go-to source for every football-related thing they need to know.

Ask yourself, if you were google, what would you do? If I was google, I’d judge the first few links and deem them as the most important and relevant for that page.

If I was Google and I were to look at the article with a do-follow link this is what I'd think:

1. Look at the site's main theme, okay so the site is about Football (not the rugby one the soccer one) which I'll figure out by looking at the very clear wording that's been used across the site
2. I'll go to the article titled: "How to Recieve a Long Ball" and see how it aligns with the main theme Football. Okay, so this long ball is probably a technique or something related to Football and since the site's theme focuses on Soccer, this can't be about receving a long ball in Rugby which is another word for football
3. After reading and analyzing the first few paragraphs I start to understand the main theme of the article, the main points being discussed, what the author's tone is, who this article is meant for, etc.
4. I come across the first link which has the anchor text of "offside" and links to a page titled: "What is Offside: Everything You Need to Know" okay this seems to be related to the site's overall theme which is Football but how does it relate to recieving a long ball?
5. I might be able to fill in that knowledge gap but then the Offside page would link to a page talking about how F.C. Barcelona losed the Copa del Rey Final because of having one of their goals disallowed due to offside which would link to La Liga, which is a part of the Football Teams.
6. Now, what does a Football Team, more specifically a football team from the Spanish league, has to do with the offside rule which has something to do with recieving a long-ball?

Boy, these examples are getting long, I might as well start a Football site.

Anyways,

Here's the issue I could think of when retracing my steps. I'll assume, based on my understanding (the pages I crawled) that the typical user flow is like this:

Receiving a long-ball > Getting Offside > F.C. Barcelona loses Copa del Rey Final

Now, all of this ties well with the main theme which is Football (Soccer), but there's no sub-theme. I'm making these mini-connections between articles where they may or may not make sense. This could primarily cause problems in smoothly navigating the customer journey which I'd be doing using the AIDA technique. With the Aida technique I can hyper-target a customer and guide them totally through one customer journey - and Google will also know that this flow of articles, linking from one to the other, are a part of the whole singular customer journey, created specifically for a specific customer segment.

Here's how that could play out with a proper categorization of sub-themes (the ">" are do-follow internal links to that page):

Football Tutorials [category page (or silo)] > For beginners [sub-category (or sub-theme)] > Passing techniques for beginners (Pillar page) > Beginner Long-passing Techniques (Supporting page #1) > Receiving a long-ball (Supporting Page #2) > Landing page for email newsletter that informs readers about the latest and greatest passing techniques to up their game > Buying training cones to aid them in practicing long-ball passing technqiues which I would recommend them from the newsletter

And here's how that would look within the AIDA framework:

Color Key: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action

Football Tutorials [category page (or silo)] > For beginners [sub-category (or sub-theme)] > Passing techniques for beginners (Pillar page) > Beginner Long-passing Techniques (Supporting page #1) > Receiving a long-ball (Supporting Page #2) > Landing page for email newsletter that informs readers about the latest and greatest passing techniques to up their game > Buying training cones to aid them in practicing long-ball passing technqiues which I would recommend them from the newsletter

Now, these articles would also have a ton of internal links to other silos. For example the "Passing Techniques for Beginners" piller page might also link to the intermediate passing techniques page. But they'll be no-followed so Google will ignore them when specifically thinking about the readers on that piller page.

---


Okay so even after ALL of that, why did I go with not no-following internal links?

Well, @CCarter 's comment got me thinking, "huh, maybe I don't know much about internal links as I thought", and also because it was the first time I've heard of something called "Page Rank Sculpting" So that blog post from Matt Cutts led me to research a bit further (I didn't research too much just enough to make a decision).

This is already getting pretty long, so I'll just let Matt himself explain my reasoning:

I just came to the conclusion that the trade off between the time to manage all that no-follow internal linking mumbo jumbo and just letting Google figure it out itself (even if it messes up some of the categorization) is not worth it.

My time is much better utilized writing the newer content, optimizing it for search, and then creating custom media to traffic leak socials

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk

 

[AhFreshMeat]

I would only think to do that if I had to put the link in the first half of the article or the "main content". But I feel like thats not necessary, there's more relevant links to push in those areas for me. links further down the page google already knows what to do with those as thats seen as supplementary content. Again, during the time it took to research and do all that, you could had built 2 links, that alone would had been more powerful – but for sake of seo argument I'm sure thats a decent practice.

But then again, if google sees sites no following their own links, isn't that unnatural? (maybe, maybe not at all)... and how many top pages do the page raters rank that have that? maybe none? And doesn't google heavily rank pages based on that? Theres a ton of ways to play devils advocate here – all in all, I've learned to go with the flow and check off major boxes and grab the 80/20 and move forward. Going deep on details and learning deeper and deeper is great, especially with SEO, but at some point it could hurt you.

I like the area of thought, but I personally wouldn't no-follow the "offside" link, unless it was SUPER off topic. I don't think your example requires no follow or gains a large benefit from doing so unless it was the first link on the page or is placed in the intro.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wouldn't recommend nofollowing ANY internal links on a site.

I agree, entirely. The reason you see people doing it is because they think that if there are 3 outbound links on a page, and they understand that each gets 33.3% of the juice, that if they no-follow one of them then they 2 remaining ones get 50% of the juice. This is incorrect. The remaining two get 33.3% of the juice and the last one WASTES the other 33.3% of the juice. It's wasted, gone, poofed into the aether. It exits your page and never makes it to the destination page.

Another reason to never no-follow, even if you're linking to pages you don't want indexed, is that if those pages are set to noindex, Google needs to follow the links to crawl the page to find that noindex tag. If you nofollow all the links to a noindex page, Google will index the page. They just won't have any information about the page. And this will drag down your Panda quality score. Trust me on this, I've done it by accident and costed myself 10's of thousands of dollars over time until I discovered the issue.

Does giving a dofollow really dilute your page's pagerankjuice?

No. When pages send out page rank juice, they don't lose the amount they have. There's no subtraction process. Pages accumulate page rank through inbound links but don't lose it through outbound links. The outbound links simply share the amount available to be sent out.

This is why Page Rank is a normalized and logarithmic score. The logarithmic part takes care of the fact that 99% of pages will have very little page rank while the 1% will have astronomical amounts. It allows that 1% to be mathematically handled as if there's an even spread between 0 to 10, with 10 even steps. The reason it's only ever 10 steps is because it's normalized.

Normalization means that if the best page on the net has 982,837,415 points, you'll divide that page and every other page on the net by 982,837,415 and multiply by 10 (in this case). So the best page ever will be Page Rank 10 and never higher. The scale is always compressing or expanding to accommodate all pages like this, based on the score of the highest scoring page.