: Will adding nofollow to alternate language links prevent Googlebot from crawling so many of them? I have a site with many pages (30MM+ indexed) and have been getting a extremely high number

@BetL925

Adding nofollow generally does not prevent Googlebot from discovering content. See: Does a "nofollow" attribute on a link prevent URL discovery by search engines?

If the nofollow link is the only link to that page, then Google won't index it. In your case, I highly doubt that your alternate language links are the only links into your other sites. Once Google finds a dofollow link to any page on the alternate language subdomain, they would be able to discover the rest with dofollow links there.

The "extremely high number of URLs on your site" warning from webmaster tools is nothing to worry about if your site is supposed to have that many pages. Google is more worried about cases such as:


A site with session ids in the URL that make the site appear to have a different URL every time Google crawls it
Sites that can auto-generate a page for any URL


Every site with millions of pages gets this message in Webmaster Tools. There is no problem with a site having that many pages if it has the content to back it up. I've worked with several such sites myself. None of them have had trouble with rankings because of it.

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