Google’s Martin Splitt answered a query about whether or not inner nofollow hyperlinks and noindex meta robots directives ship the fallacious sign to Google that the web site is low high quality.
Nofollow Hyperlink Attribute
The nofollow hyperlink attribute happened as an ordinary created by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft that publishers can use to sign {that a} hyperlink can’t be trusted (similar to hyperlinks in consumer generated content material) or for paid hyperlinks. The concept is that the hyperlinks can’t be trusted or used for rating functions or for no matter motive.
SEOs found that PageRank didn’t stream by way of hyperlinks that had the nofollow attribute so naturally the self-identified “white hat” SEOs tried gaming Google by including nofollow hyperlinks to their privateness and about us pages with the intention to funnel the utmost quantity of PageRank to the pages that mattered. This follow was referred to as PageRank Sculpting and it exhibits that including nofollows to inner hyperlinks is longtime follow and that it’s by no means been an issue earlier than.
For the report, PageRank sculpting doesn’t work as a result of, in a extremely simplified rationalization, Google basically counts the quantity of hyperlinks on a web page, together with hyperlinks with nofollows and divides the quantity of PageRank that flows as if all of the hyperlinks counted. That’s the way it was defined a few years in the past and which will have modified over time, we don’t actually know.
Noindex Robots Meta tag
The noindex robots meta tag is a directive that crawlers like Googlebot are required to obey. It permits a writer a strategy to block crawling on the web page degree.
There’s nothing concerning the noindex worth of the meta ingredient that signifies whether or not the web page is untrustworthy or something like that. It’s only a strategy to management crawlers.
Google’s Martin Splitt narrated the query:
“Can numerous inner hyperlinks with nofollow tags or many pages with noindex tags sign to Google that the positioning has many low-quality pages?”
Martin answered:
“No, it doesn’t sign low-quality content material to us, simply that you’ve got hyperlinks you’re not prepared to be related to. That may have many causes – you’re unsure the place the hyperlink goes, as a result of it’s user-generated content material (during which case think about using rel=ugc as a substitute of rel=nofollow) otherwise you don’t know what the positioning you’re linking to goes to do in a few years or so, so that you mark them as rel=nofollow.”
Nofollow Is Not A High quality Sign
Martin confirmed that there is no such thing as a sign indicating a worth judgement about “high quality” that’s related to using a nofollow hyperlink attribute or the noindex robots meta tag. Utilizing them on inner hyperlinks or for stopping crawling is ok and haven’t any impact on Google web site high quality judgements.
Take heed to the podcast query and reply on the 1:17 minute mark:
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