10,000+ links from one site per URL--is this hurting us?
-
We manage content for a partner site, and since much of their content is similar to ours, we canonicalized their content to ours.
As a result, some URLs have anything from 1,000,000 inbound links / URL to 10,000+ links / URL --all from the same domain.
We've noticed a 10% decline in traffic since this showed up in our webmasters account & were wondering if we should nofollow these links?
-
Unfortunately, it is very situational and tough to tell without seeing the sites. I tend to agree with Marcus that it generally makes me a little nervous, but Zachary is right - sitewide links aren't necessarily bad. They just tend to be associated with quality issues, especially on large scale. Still, one site is one site. Worst case, those links are probably just being devalued (in other words, Google is turning down the volume on them).
If you're sharing content across the two sites, you might want to try a cross-domain canonical tag instead. It really depends on the degree of the duplication. Still, a link bank from each piece of content to the original content is generally a good idea.
Any sitewide links, like footer links, on top of that, are probably very low value. Whether I'd remove, nofollow, or leave them alone, though, really depends a lot on the quality and the relationship between the two sites.
-
Is it a link or is it a canonical? If it is a link to the canonical then I would not imagine it is going to help anyway but personally, I would try to have high quality links and not these mass link bombs, it's just asking for trouble and you won't get 100,000 links worth of benefit anyway.
As ever, hard to be precise without seeing the site in question but... I would edge towards no follow here.
-
Hi Marcus,
Yes, so, basically, it is 1 million links to one URL, and other URLs have 10,000+ links. This happened because they use our content, and we canonicalized all of their content to us.
In most cases, the anchor text is the same throughout.
It is a reputable domain that is linking to us.
Should we no-follow these links? It would be quite difficult to remove them all-together.
-
You're essentially asking if sitewide links are OK. Yes, they are.
Marcus makes a good point: if any of the pages are poor in quality, you'll notice a decline in value. Your priority should be ensuring all of the pages are high in quality, or at the least noindexed. The problem with WPMU was that they can't control the quality, so they just took the links out. Sounds like you are in a position to keep the links, but do a bit of cleanup.
-
Hey Michelle
Just to clarify, are you saying that you have some sites with like a million pages and that these sites have a footer or template link to another site?
If so, this might be an interesting read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
I am not 100% clear here so as ever, examples would be useful but I really can't see that one domain putting a 1,000,000 inbound links to a single page on another domain as being anything but a bad, bad thing. Combine that with some dodgy anchor text and you are on the road to ruin.
It's a shot in the dark without an example but I would suggest an nofollow given what we know.
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 deal with parameter URLs as primary internal links and not canonicals? Weird situation inside...
So I have a weird situation, and I was hoping someone could help. This is for an ecommerce site. 1. Parameters are used to tie Product Detail Pages (PDP) to individual categories. This is represented in the breadcrumbs for the page and the use of a categoryid. One product can thus be included in multiple categories. 2. All of these PDPs have a canonical that does not include the parameter / categoryid. 3. With very few exceptions, the canonical URL for the PDPs are not linked to. Instead, the parameter URL is to tie it to a specific category. This is done primarily for the sake of breadcrumbs it seems. One of the big issues we've been having is the canonical URLs not being indexed for a lot of the products. In some instances, the canonicals _are _indexed alongside parameters, or just parameter URLs are indexed. It's all very...mixed up, I suppose. My theory is that the majority of canonical URLs not being linked to anywhere on the site is forcing Google to put preference on the internal link instead. My problem? **I have no idea what to recommend to the client (who will not change the parameter setup). ** One of our Technical SEOs recommended we "Use cookies instead of parameters to assign breadcrumbs based on how the PDP is accessed." I have no experience this. So....yeah. Any thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
One Site vs. Many
This is a question that I am not sure has a "right" answer. I am just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on this. I can see benefit of both sides of the coin. In your opinion, is it better to have one large e-commerce site with all of your content on the same domain or is it better to have multiple more targeted domains with your content broken up into smaller chunks? The reason I ask is, I feel like while multiple more targeted sites certainly have the benefit of focus, aren't you taking all your traffic and content, splitting it up and leaving you with several sites that most likely are getting less traffic than one large site would. All opinions welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey0 -
Google WMT Turning 1 Link into 4,000+ Links
We operate 2 ecommerce sites. The About Us page of our main site links to the homepage of our second site. It's been this way since the second site launched about 5 years ago. The sites sell completely different products and aren't related besides both being owned by us. In Webmaster Tools for site 2, it's picking up ~4,100 links coming to the home page from site 1. But we only link to the home page 1 time in the entire site and that's from the About Us page. I've used Screaming Frog, IT has looked at source, JavaScript, etc., and we're stumped. It doesn't look like WMT has a function to show you on what pages of a domain it finds the links and we're not seeing anything by checking the site itself. Does anyone have experience with a situation like this? Anyone know an easy way to find exactly where Google sees these links coming from?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
SEO for 1,000,000 page site
Dear All, I hope you can help me with another question about doing SEO for a large site: 1 - My domain is 11 year old, all time was a parking domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
2 - We have 10,000 articles - unique content (500-1500 words)
3 - the remaining are automated content, however, they are also unique with data (numbers, figure) We are going to launch it in 2 weeks, and intend to do the following things: Stage 1: first 2 months - only post 10,000 articles with unique content, NO using automated ones.
Link building: get 5-10 authority links pointing to it, either article writings or link pages (authority links Yahoo directory/Dmoz) Stage 2: month 3 to 6: gradually put the automated content online while still posting unique and well written articles.
Link building: Start building links with PR websites, article submission. Do you think there are any problems with this plan? and if 5-10 links can improve our site ranking, given it has a lot of unique content? Thank you very much. BR/Tran1 -
Disavowing Links for Subcategory of Site
Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site? We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site. Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Changing Site URLs
I am working on a new client that hasn't implemented any SEO previously. The site has terrible url nomenclature and I am wondering if it is worth it to try and change it. Will I lose rankings? What is the best url naming structure? Here's the website http://www.formica.com/en/home/TradeLanding.aspx. (I am only working on the North America site.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Two Brands One Site (Duplicate Content Issues)
Say your client has a national product, that's known by different brand names in different parts of the country. Unilever owns a mayonnaise sold East of the Rockies as "Hellmanns" and West of the Rockies as "Best Foods". It's marketed the same way, same slogan, graphics, etc... only the logo/brand is different. The websites are near identical with different logos, especially the interior pages. The Hellmanns version of the site has earned slightly more domain authority. Here is an example recipe page for some "WALDORF SALAD WRAPS by Bobby Flay Recipe" http://www.bestfoods.com/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 http://www.hellmanns.us/recipe_detail.aspx?RecipeID=12497&version=1 Both recipie pages are identical except for one logo. Neither pages ranks very well, neither has earned any backlinks, etc... Oddly the bestfood version does rank better (even though everything is the same, same backlinks, and hellmanns.us having more authority). If you were advising the client, what would you do. You would ideally like the Hellmann version to rank well for East Coast searches, and the Best Foods version for West Coast searches. So do you: Keep both versions with duplicate content, and focus on earning location relevant links. I.E. Earn Yelp reviews from east coast users for Hellmanns and West Coast users for Best foods? Cross Domain Canonical to give more of the link juice to only one brand so that only one of the pages ranks well for non-branded keywords? (but both sites would still rank for their branded keyworkds). No Index one of the brands so that only one version gets in the index and ranks at all. The other brand wouldn't even rank for it's branded keywords. Assume it's not practical to create unique content for each brand (the obvious answer). Note: I don't work for Unilver, but I have a client in a similar position. I lean towards #2, but the social media firm on the account wants to do #1. (obviously some functionally based bias in both our opinions, but we both just want to do what will work best for client). Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crvw0