Site Wide Link Situation
-
Hi-
We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!
-
Hi! Thanks! I completely understand. We would never want to prevent URLs on the client's domain from being crawled. That could clearly put our client's online presence at risk. However, we're more concerned with Google noticing the shopping cart's domain is pointing to every page of the client's website which could appear unnatural & potentially, put the client's site at risk. What we're hoping to achieve is preventing from Google crawling the third party URL on every page to avoid any penalization.
-
Rez you gotta consider a few things.
When looked at the site structure and AI of your site you have to think about the Juice flow as a funnel. More Juice to the top distributed less juice to the bottom. So for shopping cart pages or product pages ( depending on how deep they are ), i usually incorporate Long tail , targeted keywords ( ie: Mimi Juie baby sippy cups ) where the volume is not much but its targeted enough that even with a limited juice flow you can rank.
My initial suggestion to you was to contact the person or company that built the shopping cart in order to remove the link. ( THAT IS MY FIRST OPTION ). I would not do a no follow to the product page. ( dont do anything crazy like that ) Specially if you have Share bar options for your products and reviews etc. ( you will lose all that ) .
LAST OPTION for you should be to do a robot.txt to ONLY that link, NOT the page.
Again please understand you should not DEVALUE your page like that .
Hope this helps.
Let me know how it turns out
Hampig M
BizDetox
-
Hi-
Thanks for the feedback! So the robots.txt is the best way?
The shopping cart's URL does not have much authority so it's not important for us to get the link juice from the separate domain which is why we're debating how to implement a no follow. Do you see any harm in doing so?
Thanks,
Rez
-
Rez.
You should be able to remove that sitewide link from your shopping cart. I had a similar situation with a joomla site i did that had a sitewide link situation on the product page of JoomShopping and you can purchase to remove it. Unfortunately thats the way it is. Take a look at the help files or forums of the shopping cart site. What shopping cart is it?
If you cannot remove it, then robots.txt is the best way i would NOT do a no follow to that page. Unless you dont care about the data or care about getting ranked for those pages. But you are saying its site wide.
So i am a little confused on that.
Hope it helps.
Best Wishes,
Hampig M
BizDetox
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
-
Contextual links (is this screen shot considered contextual /editorial links ?)
Hello, Is the screen shot below considered contextual ?https://imgur.com/a/mrbQq and does it have any value or no value What is the value on a scale from 0 to 10 (if you know) of a contextual link versus non contextual links. Thank you, mrbQq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
If linking to contextual sites is beneficial for SE rankings, what impact does the re=“nofollow” attribute have when applied to these outbound contextual links?
Communities, opinion-formers, even Google representatives, seem to offer a consensus that linking to quality, relevant sites is good practice and therefore beneficial for SEO. Does this still apply when the outbound links are "nofollow"? Is there any good research on this out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielpressley0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Should We Link To Our News?
We just started an "In the News" section on our webpage. We are not sure what would be the best for SEO purposes. Should we link to the news websites that have the stories about our company, even if they have no link bank? Or should we just take screenshots of the news article and only link to articles that link back to us (this is what we a currently doing)? Here is our news page, http://www.buyautoparts.com/News/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joebuilder0 -
What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to build URL links too dilute link profile???
One of my sites has a very spamy link profile, top 20 anchors are money keywords. What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to help dilute the link profile by building links with URLs, Click Here, more Info, etc. I have been building URL links already, but due to the site age(over 12 years) the amount of exact match anchor text links is just very large and would take forever to get diluted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Fading Text Links Look Like Spammy Hidden Links to a g-bot?
Ah, Hello Mozzers, it's been a while since I was here. Wanted to run something by you... I'm looking to incorporate some fading text using Javascript onto a site homepage using the method described here; http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades/ so, my question is; does anyone think that Google might see this text as a possible dark hat SEO anchor text manipulation (similar to hidden links)? The text will contain various links (4 or 5) that will cycle through one another, fading in and out, but to a bot the text may appear initially invisible, like so; style="display: none;"><a href="">Link Here</a> All links will be internal. My gut instinct is that I'm just being stupid here, but I wanted to stay on the side of caution with this one! Thanks for your time 🙂 http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0