Internal links to low value pages
-
Hi,
We're doing a big content update on our product pages and I'm looking for some advice about our internal linking.
In a nutshell, the current design we're using links out from every product page (i.e. plants) to a set of accessory pages (i.e. things to help you plant the plants). The screenshot shows how this works.
The accessories we sell are a very small part of our business and don't attract significant or valuable search traffic. It's the plant pages that pull in the visits and make the money.
The reason for all these links to accessory pages is for usabilty & to reduce the volume of support calls about accessories (we get a lot of those).So my concern is that by linking out to these relatively low value accessory pages from all of our plant product pages, we will be spilling link juice from all our important pages to a small set of unimportant ones.
Should I be concerned about this and if so, what should I do differently?
I have considered:
- Making an intermediary page, listing the relevant accessories, so that each product page links to one intermediary page, which then links to all the accessories.
- Using nofollow on the accessory page links - there is so much info out there about this, much of it conflicting, that I just don't know if that's a good or bad idea.
- Using some kind of java-based pop-up box to list the accessory links that will hide the links from spiders.
- Linking back from the accessory pages to the relevant product sub-category pages to loop the flow of link juice.
All ideas welcome
-
Thanks Josh,
In the main we rank very well for medium length & long tail searches about our plants, which made me confident about doing all this internal linking in the first place. It wasn't until the die was cast that I lost my nerve.
It's so hard to track rankings across so many products & keyphrase variations, especially when we add in the variables of ongoing link building & the fresh chunks of content that we added to almost all of the updated product pages when we put in these new internal links. We're tracking samples of the most valuable ones in SEOmoz campaigns and nothing dramatic has changed.
We have no accurate means of measuring whether or not these links have affected support calls & email traffic, which isn't much help! We knew this beforehand, but our reasoning was basically "how could it hurt?".
I suppose what I'm really asking for is an example of another site that has dealt with this particular issue, i.e. found a way to use (almost) site-wide links to necessary but commercially unimportant pages without draining the link juice of its important pages.
-
Hey edeb,
This is one of those cases where you really have to evaluate what is going to work best for your bottom line. Remember that SEO is a means to achieve a goal.
I would start by finding out where you are. Do the plant pages rank well enough? If so, maybe you don't need to do anything, and your site can handle the minor leaks in juice (but hey, keep building links). If not, then yeah I would start looking at solutions to this.
You mention that you placed those products on the main pages to reduce call volume. I know how costly that is so I feel you there. But has it actually helped? And if so, how much? Is it worth the loss in rankings for those main pages?
If you aren't saving the cost you thought you would, or it's not enough to risk the rankings for those pages then I would get em off there (and look for more solutions to reducing that call volume. Man, that's so expensive).
If your major pages are ranking nicely, and the reduction in call volume has been a major relief, son't do anything. Well, call you competitors and brag, but nothing else on this front.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to set up internal linking with subcategories?
I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind. When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter? I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page. Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?
Technical SEO | | wplodge0 -
How should we handle re-directory links? Should we remove these links?
We are currently cleaning up bad links that were purchased by a previous SEO agency. We have found links on anonym.to pages that redirect traffic to our site automatically. How should this be handled? Should we remove these links?
Technical SEO | | Lorne_Marr0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Internal Wordpress blog ranked and not the main page
hello www.mysite.com/blog is ranked higher than www,mysite.com. i am trying to find the reason for the blog to rank higher which is not my goal. the blog reached the second page and the main domain is no where to be found. is there anything on Wordpress setup that may cause this? thanks
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Too many internal links on one page
Hello All, I have just started using SEO moz. I had one quick question i would like answered. Currently SEOmoz is telling me that there are too many internal links. The recommendation is 100 links per page but the majority of my pages have 125+ links Will this effect the page when its crawled? Look forward to your comments. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TWPLC_seo0 -
Link to overall brand pages
On our website we have two ways to get in a brand environment. We have general brand pages and brand pages divided by category. At this moment the category brand pages get the most SEO value, because we have a link on our homepage to these pages (via the mega dropdown). The problem is that we would like to assign the SEO value to the general brand pages (with all the articles) instead of the category brand pages (with only articles within a category). We prefer to optimize the general brand page without a link to this page on the homepage for now. for example; Those two pages have the most SEO value
Technical SEO | | eCommerceSEO
www.debijenkorf.nl/herenmode/diesel
www.debijenkorf.nl/damesmode/diesel but we would like to assign value to;
www.debijenkorf.nl/diesel Do you have a solution for this problem? Thank you in advance! Kind regards,0 -
Internal linking to subdomains
Hi *, I have a main site called example.org, and a lot of user generated pages to foo.example.org / bar.example.org and so on. Most of those pages link back to example.org. In example.org I have a page that links to all subdomains. How can I optimize the pagerank of the list page? Should I add nofollow to subdomain sites to avoid passing link juice to those sites and keep normal linking from subdomain sites?
Technical SEO | | ngw0 -
Can I use canonical tags to merge property map pages and availability pages to their counterpart overview pages?
I have a property website, for each property are 4-5 tabs each with their own URL, these pages include the overview page which is content rich, and auxilliary pages such as maps, availability, can I use a canonical tag to merge the tabs with very little content to their corresponding overview page which is content rich? I.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview This page has tabs for map, town info, availability which all have their own url i.e. www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/map
Technical SEO | | assertive-media
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/availability
www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/towninfo Because these auxilary pages do not contain much content can I place a canonical tag in them pointing back to the content rich overview page at www.mywebsite.co.uk/property-1/overview?0