To many links hurting me even though they are helping users
-
I have a scrabble based site where I function as a anagram solver, scrabble dictionary look up and tons of different word lists. In each of these word lists I link every word to my scrabble dictionary. This has caused Google to index 10018 pages total for my site and over 300 of them have well over 100 links. Many of them contain over 1000 links. I know Google's and SEOMOZ stance that anything over 100 will hurt me. I have always seen the warnings in my dashboard warning me of this but I have simply ignored it.
I have posted on this Q and A that I have this issue, but IMO having these links benefit the users in the aspect that they don't have to worry about coping the text and putting it in the search box, they can simply click the link. Some have said if it helps the users then I am good, others have said opposite.
I am thinking about removing these links from all these word lists to reduce the links per page. My questions are these.
1. If I remove the links from my page could this possible help me? No harm in trying it out so this is an easy question
2. If I remove the links then I will have over 9000 pages that are indexed with Google that no longer have a link pointing to them, except for the aspect that they are indexed with Google still. Is it going to hurt me if I remove these links and Google no longer sees them linked from my site or anywhere else?
-
Hey Cesar
I have grabbed the URL from your profile and will give you some answers and suggestions as to ways to tackle this.
Firstly, can you just feed back on your goals here? What are you trying to achieve? Is it just to remove these errors in the SEOMoz tool? Or are you looking to improve the ranking of these category pages? I will assume it's a bit of both and give you some suggestions.
1. Removing the links is probably not the best approach as your are going to orphan all those children pages so they may fall out the index and like you say, it kind of works for users. That said, having so many links on the page is not great either. If this was me I would probably break things down a little further and stop having single pages doing so much work.
So, as an example:
http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/words-with-z/
Here we have several categories and a ton of links under each category so why not put each category on it's own page? So, a page for 6 letter words with z, 5 letter words with z, 4 letter words with z etc. You could still show a sample of the words for each category but you would take the number of links right down and also possibly create some more specific and targeted landing pages for search traffic.
You already have the links to each section but they use anchors on this page rather than separate pages so that is a simple way to keep it user friendly, bag some new landing pages and take the number of keywords per page down.
Things get a bit more unwieldy when we look at the words-with-a page as opposed to the words with z as there are just so many more words (links). So, the suggestion above is still valid, but I would likely introduce some pagination as well with all the standard SEO rules of pagination applied. You have two options here with as either rel=prev and rel=next to indicate they are part of a series or rel=canonical to the first page. You would have to give this some thought as I don't know how your users arrive but I would tend to swing towards rel=next & rel=prev in this instance to show this is a series and sometimes people may want to land at page 2, 3 etc if they are looking for a specific word.
It may even be that you have the main page as a view all page and then still have pagination but the specifics depend upon what is best for your users and search.
Some good reading:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
http://www.seomoz.org/q/pagination-ajax-rel-next-and-previous-rel-canonical-and-meta-noindex
2. Removing the links
Yeah, it will likely hurt as you are saying these pages are not important enough to have any links to them. I think the above pretty much answers this one but that is not a good idea. Just be smarter in how you link to these pages and you will be okay.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Cesar, reducing the number of links per page is probably best practice. Google may decide not to index or follow all the links, or if the anchor text is very keyword driven it may be considered spammy. Pages with 1,000 links are probably passing on very little page rank at any rate,
I do understand your point about improving the user experience, but unfortunately algorithms probably won't understand the reasons behind this.
Is there a way that you can refine/restructure the results pages so that users don't see a very long list of results/links? E.g. for a page that has 1,000 results, could you paginate according to letters of the alphabet?
1. It could possibly help you. There's no penalty for having too many links per page (unless they appear spammy), but some restructuring could ensure that internal links pass on more link juice.
2. If these pages are not linked to from elsewhere, they probably will see a drop in ranking/page authority.
Good luck!
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
-
Dynamic links & duplicate content
Hi there, I am putting a proposal together for a client whose website has been optimised to include many dynamic links and so there are many pages with duplicate content: only the page title, h1 and URL is different. My client thinks this isn't an issue. What is the current consensus on this? Many thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | lorraine.mcconechy0 -
Navigation Links Causing Too Many Links Help?
Hello, I have read some SEOMOZ search results for this, but am still concerned that Google may see 4,500 Too Many Link warnings as a problem. This is caused primarily due to our header navigation, which is not intended to be keyword stuffing, but to provide all avenues for our breadth of content. site: crazymikesapps.com. Most answers seem to advise if there is no keyword stuffing at hand don't worry about it. Any help appreciated. thank you Mike
On-Page Optimization | | crazymikesapps0 -
Page Titles For Local - Help on URL Structure
Trying to figure out the best way to construct localized urls for the dental website. For example, If I have the URL:
On-Page Optimization | | Czubmeister
http://www.kooskidental.com/services/cosmetic-dentistry/
and If I want to make it local to the city I would use: http://www.kooskidental.com/services/richardson-tx-cosmetic-dentistry/ But what happens is that I have other options off the menu like: http://www.koooskidental.com/services/richardson-tx-cosmetic-dentistry/teeth-whitening/ But if I am trying to rank for richardson tx teeth whitening, I would have to do http://www.koooskidental.com/services/richardson-tx-cosmetic-dentistry/richardson-tx-teeth-whitening/ But that's pretty long and ugly and I don't think I need richardson-tx in their twice. If I am trying to rank for richardson tx cosmetic dentistry and richardson tx teeth whitening, what would be the best structure for the url's?0 -
How many times should a word appear in an article?
Hi My site is maily about growing fruit and vegetables and was badly hit after the September Panda update. Each page is about one type of fruit or vegetable and discusses how to grow that particular plant. Each page targets two keyword phrases, "growing abc" and "how to grow abc" so e.g. "Growing garlic: a guide on how to grow garlic" would be the page title and then the two phrases used a couple of times on each page. However the plant, in the above example "garlic" can appear upto 30 or 40 times per page, also the phrases "how to grow" and "growing" will appear on just about every page, would these facts be hurting my overall site rankings? Many Thanks Simon
On-Page Optimization | | spes1230 -
Do Blog Comments On Your Site Help SEO?
There is a lot of debate as whether or not having comments on your blog is helpful from an SEO perspective. Proponents believe that more comments (1) creates more content, which search engines love, (2) creates more relevant keywords that can be searched, and (3) helps with "freshness" of the site/content leading to greater site authority. Others like Joost de Valk believe that comments can actually hurt SEO because keyword density cannot be controlled. He argues that his top SEO content are pages not posts for this very reason. What is your opinion?
On-Page Optimization | | marcperry0 -
More than 100 internal links from a page
Hi, we have been developing our new site and improving the internal linking for 2 reasons, 1 to improve spidering and 2 to up sell more to customers. The error reports from SEOMoz are showing our biggest problem is too many internal links from 2000+ pages. How much of an impact does it have by having say 180 internal links compared to say 99 on a page? Our website has been moving up the SERPs so should i worry about it or should I ignore the warnings and continue with the menu system and internal linking we have in place already? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PottyScotty0 -
Optimizing Internal Links to Homepage
I've read that the Bots only count the first link on a page. My navigation has 2 links to my homepage - 1 from the logo keyword.png alt txt=keyword & 1 text link 'keyword.' Now in my content does it have any seo value to link relevant pieces of text back to the homepage? Thanks Jason Jackson
On-Page Optimization | | JasonJackson0 -
Many pages describing services or just a few?
Hello, I'm in a professional services industry. My services, and my competitors' services, can be broken down into about 20 categories or so. Most of my competitors have 50–100 pages describing their services, pages all cross-linked with appropriate anchor texts, but pages that have a lot of duplicate (though rewritten) content. That is, each individual page is pretty shallow, but they create the structural appearance of a lot of relevant content. Should I do the same, or should I just stick to the 20 categories with a handful of cross-links as necessary? This will allow me to get more relevant keywords on the page, and will likely be easier for the user, but might make Googlebot think the site isn't as deep, and it might affect my ability to do as many internal anchor text links.
On-Page Optimization | | maxkennerly0