How can I reduce my warnings for excesive links on our site?
-
Our campaign overview shows well over 100 warnings that could be hurting our google ranking based on excessive links on pages. Each page listed, however, is simply due to listing the brands we carry, and linking to the products.
Is there a way to do this without hurting our ranking? A better way than linking, perhaps?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks much, everyone. Relatively new to learning SEO, I saw the warnings that came up for it and immediately grew concerned. I believe that for now, I'm going to leave them as is, and worry about the stronger warnings and errors first, then perhaps visit this subject again with a web designer who might have some options on how to cut down the links but still make this a useful page.
Again, thanks!
-
I'd tend to agree with Troy (and I'm thumbing up his replies). This isn't your home-page or sitewide navigation - having too many links on just this one page probably isn't worth worrying about too much. You could nofollow the tag links - they are redundant. Realistically, though, since they link to the same URLs, Google probably already ignores those links (even though we count them twice).
You could argue that maybe the page isn't that helpful for users and prune it down somehow, but purely from an SEO standpoint, it's not a big deal. The main issue with too many links is one of dilution. I wrote about it more here:
-
As an alternative to Derek's suggestion.. Use the same link for the logo and the text. Currently you are wrapping the img tag in one anchor and then the brand name in another. Try putting them both inside the same anchor with the
in between them.This eliminates 1 of the links from each brand. Then perhaps remove that tag cloud as Troy suggested. Honestly I didn't even see the tag cloud there until Troy mentioned it in his answer.
-
Excessive links don't necessarily hurt your ranking if they are pointing to relevant, unique pages and enhance the user experience.
But if you want to cut down the number of links on the page, you can remove the anchor text link below each logo. Both the image link and text link are pointing to the same page. You will be able to slice the number of links on page in half.
-
My pleasure. To be honest, I'm still fairly new to it myself, so I'd be curious if anyone else had a different opinion. I just know that in the past, I've just ignored some pages that don't have anything on them that will necessarily bring home the bacon. Sometimes, a page that will be useful for a user will just look like a list of brands to a search engine, so...add it to the list of disallow'd pages in our robots.txt and let it go, imo.
-
Thanks,
That's very possible. Managing SEO like this is new to us, so I just figured I'd try and fix everything. If those particular warnings aren't too critical, then that's good to know, and we can move on.
Thanks again!
-
My initial thought is that having both the logos AND the tag cloud might be overkill and part of the problem. It's basically the same information twice.
The other thing is...maybe you don't worry about this page ranking? I mean...sure, you'll see warnings about this page, but maybe set this page to "no-index" and tune the rest of your site. This page isn't going to be the one to pull in organic search results, so I would think it can just be ignored. Focus on pages that will actually return results.
-
Yes, the page is this one: http://www.dvestore.com/brands/
We do have the brands somewhat broken out over the main site, but as most people do in our field, we have one page where you can look at all brands, each picture linking to the products we carry by them.
-
Do you mean that you have pages that list all the brands in one spot? Could you break those links into larger categories? That might help them to be more organized, more easily scanned and that would also be a better user experience, I imagine.
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
-
Redesign Just Starting - Should I Leave The Previous Incomplete Site or Setup A Temporary Holding Page and Redirect Previous URL'S?
Hi All I've picked up a new website project and wanted to ask about the best way to proceed with the current site during the development process. The current site is incomplete although it has been live for a while and has over 80 pages in the sitemap. Link to site https://tinyurl.com/ychwftup The business owner wants to take down the current site and simply add a landing page stating "new website coming soon". From an SEO perspective, am I better to keep the current site live until the new site is ready? Or would it not make any difference if I setup the landing page and add 301 redirects from each page in the sitemap to the landing page. Many Thanks In Advance For Any Assistance
Web Design | | ruislip180 -
Curious why site isn't ranking, rather seems like being penalized for duplicate content but no issues via Google Webmaster...
So we have a site ThePowerBoard.com and it has some pretty impressive links pointing back to it. It is obviously optimized for the keyword "Powerboard", but in no way is it even in the top 10 pages of Google ranking. If you site:thepowerboard.com the site, and/or Google just the URL thepowerboard.com you will see that it populates in the search results. However if you quote search just the title of the home page, you will see oddly that the domain doesn't show up rather at the bottom of the results you will see where Google places "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed". If you click on the link below that, then the site shows up toward the bottom of those results. Is this the case of duplicate content? Also from the developer that built the site said the following: "The domain name is www.thepowerboard.com and it is on a shared server in a folder named thehoverboard.com. This has caused issues trying to ssh into the server which forces us to ssh into it via it’s ip address rather than by domain name. So I think it may also be causing your search bot indexing problem. Again, I am only speculating at this point. The folder name difference is the only thing different between this site and any other site that we have set up." (Would this be the culprit? Looking for some expert advice as it makes no sense to us why this domain isn't ranking?
Web Design | | izepper0 -
Recovering organic traffic and Google rankings post-site-crash
Hi everyone, we had a client's Wordpress website go down about 2 weeks ago and since then organic traffic has basically plummeted. We haven't identified exactly what caused the crash, but it happened twice in one week. We spent a lot of time optimizing the site for organic SEO, improving load times, improving user experience, improving the website content, improving CTR, etc. Then one morning we get a notification from our uptime monitoring service that the site was down, and upon further inspection we believe it may have been compromised. The child theme that the website was using, all of the files were deleted and/or blank. We reverted the website to a previous backup, which fixed the problem. Then, a few days later, the same exact thing happened, only this time the child theme files were missing after the backup was restored. We've since re-installed and reconfigured the child theme, changed all passwords (Wordpress, FTP, hosting, etc.), and we're looking into changing hosting providers in the very near future. The site uses the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which has recently been reported as having some security flaws. Maybe that was the cause of the problem. Regardless, the primary focus right now is to recover the organic traffic and Google rankings that we've worked so hard to improve over the past few months up until this disaster occurred. The client is in a very competitive niche and market, so I'm pretty frustrated that this has happened after we were making such great progress, Since the website went down, organic search traffic has decreased by 50%. The site and all internal pages are loading properly again (and have been since the second time the website went down), but Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting a number of pages as "not found" witht he crawl dates as early as this past weekend. We've marked all errors as "fixed", and also re-submitted the Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools. The website passes the "mobile-friendly" tests, received A and B grades in GTMMetrix (for whatever that's worth), and still has the same original Google Maps rankings as before. The organic traffic, however, and organic rankings on Google have seen a pretty dramatic decrease. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to recovering a website's authority and organic traffic after it's experienced some downtime?
Web Design | | georgetsn0 -
Two Different IP Addresses For Different Parts Of One Site Okay?
I have a client who has a site in Drupal and, for reasons too complicated to go iinto, wants to host part of the site in Wordpress from a different server. So it would be like oldsiteexample.com being in Drupal and the new oldsiteexample.com/marketing and everything below /marketing being in wordpress on a different server, obviously with a different IP address. Are there SEO considerations in this? The existing oldsiteexample.com has a lot of authority/rank/traffic and don't want to inadvertently risk that. Thanks... Darcy
Web Design | | 945010 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
Site redesign and links?
I have a real estate website. On my sidebar I have about 16 links to pages on various neighborhoods. I templated my site using dream weaver so the same sidebar and links are on every page. I'm thinking of redesigning the sidebar and having one link that will take visitors to a page where all the neighborhood links will be and then from there visitors can choose whichever link to go to a specific neighborhood info page. I am doing this to clear space on my side bar for other content and links. What impact would this have on my home page? The website is bronxpad.com if anyone wants to check it out and provide feedback.
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Finally have a budget for a great seo ecommerce site but need help choosing wordpress, joomla, modx, magneto or? Thank you in advance for your generosity of time
We finally have a budget and want to dump our intuit/homestead site www.originalartbroker.com Our budget is 5k-10k but could do more if needed. I am slowly catching my competition with this homestead site that I built. But I do realize it is time to step back, figure out what is best, and hire a pro to get the job done. I am green in the seo and web development arena so please go easy on me and please help to point me in the right direction. Just went out on a limb a couple years ago playing with homestead.com site software and built what we have today. Didn't know anything about website development...it sort of just happened. I feel and know that homestead.com solution is hindering what we could be doing due to the bloated nature of the site and inability to perform such task as 301 redirects etc.... I have been able to slowly attain first page seo rankings on keywords based of the artists we carry using this po-dunk homestead platform to build my site after a ton of work education thanks to seomoz and a lot of you. But, have never asked for help and could really use some generosity of time in explaining a solution that would work best for our business. Do we just go with a wordpress site that is similar to our current setup and use their plugins? Do we use a cms software solution like magneto or joomla? We will only have 200-300 pieces at any given time. We are constantly selling and buying new pieces providing us content. We are need of a site that can perform well in terms of seo. I have heard of a lot of people talking about joomla, wordpress, and magneto. Would like to be able to have a product catalogue that ultimately sends whatever inventory we are uploading to our social sites and blogs so I don’t have to pump the product out to all of these sites. We offer free custom framing with our pieces and it would be nice to have a program that could wrap the photos of the pieces with the different frames for our customers. When I add a new piece I would like this software to have a predesigned product page that it plugs the information into. I would like it to create the url extension based of the artists name, medium used, and piece name to create unique and individual urls. I would like it to also create its own H tags throughout that product page according to the artist name description, and medium used. I would like to be able to sink this up to google merchant and other sites to carry our product. Bottom line is we sell art. We sell pieces by specific artists. We are constantly buying and selling. I need something powerful that keeps up with our content
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments1 -
Is it more beneficial to have internal links without the full file path?
When linking internally in my site is it more beneficial to have links written like, Fast Blenders OR Fast Blenders
Web Design | | tickettoss0