How to Link a Network of Sites w/o Penguin Penalties (header links)
-
I work for a network of sites that offer up country exclusive content. The content for the US will be different than Canada, Australia, Uk, etc.… but with the same subjects.
Now to make navigation easy we have included in the header of every page a drop down that has links to the other countries, like what most of you do with facebook/twitter buttons. Now every page on every site has the same link, with the same anchor text.
Example:
Because every page of every site has the same links (it's in the header) the "links containing this anchor text" ratio is through the roof in Open Site Explorer. Do you think this would be a reason for penguin penalization?
If you think this would hurt you, what would you suggest? no follow links? Remove the links entirely and create a single page of links? other suggestions?
-
If 50% of your links are [Exact] keywords, there is a good shot of the penguin.
I would recommend going back and changing the links from the [Exact] terms to the brand name.
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
-
Is "Author Rank," User Comments Driving Losses for YMYL Sites?
Hi, folks! So, our company publishes 50+ active, disease-specific news and perspectives websites -- mostly for rare diseases. We are also tenacious content creators: between news, columns, resource pages, and other content, we produce 1K+ pieces of original content across our network. Authors are either PhD scientists or patients/caregivers. All of our sites use the same design. We were big winners with the August Medic update in 2018 and subsequent update in September/October. However, the Medic update in March and de-indexing bug in April were huge losers for us across our monetized sites (about 10 in total). We've seen some recovery with this early June update, but also some further losses. It's a mixed bag. Take a look at this attached MOZ chart, which shows the jumps and falls around the various Medic updates. The pattern is very similar on many of our sites. As per JT Williamson's stellar article on EAT, I feel like we've done a good job in meeting those criteria, which has left we wondering what isn't jiving with the new core updates. I have two theories I wanted to run past you all: 1. Are user comments on YMYL sites problematic for Google now? I was thinking that maybe user comments underneath health news and perspectives articles might be concerning on YMYL sites now. On one hand, a healthy commenting community indicates an engaged user base and speaks to the trust and authority of the content. On the other hand, while the AUTHOR of the article might be a PhD researcher or a patient advocate, the people commenting -- how qualified are they? What if they are spouting off crazy ideas? Could Google's new update see user comments such as these as degrading the trust/authority/expertise of the page? The examples I linked to above have a good number of user comments. Could these now be problematic? 2. Is Google "Author Rank" finally happening, sort of? From what I've read about EAT -- particularly for YMYL sites -- it's important that authors have “formal expertise” and, according to Williamson, "an expert in the field or topic." He continues that the author's expertise and authority, "is informed by relevant credentials, reviews, testimonials, etc. " Well -- how is Google substantiating this? We no longer have the authorship markup, but is the algorithm doing its due diligence on authors in some more sophisticated way? It makes me wonder if we're doing enough to present our author's credentials on our articles, for example. Take a look -- Magdalena is a PhD researcher, but her user profile doesn't appear at the bottom of the article, and if you click on her name, it just takes you to her author category page (how WordPress'ish). Even worse -- our resource pages don't even list the author. Anyhow, I'd love to get some feedback from the community on these ideas. I know that Google has said there's nothing to do to "fix" these downturns, but it'd sure be nice to get some of this traffic back! Thanks! 243rn10.png
Algorithm Updates | | Michael_Nace1 -
Sub domains take away the pagerank/link juice of main website?
Hi all, I would like to know how sub domains will be collaborated with domain or main website in terms of authority, backlinks, link juice, etc...Link juice will be passed to sub domains from domain or vice versa? If there are large number of pages in sub domain, will that going to impact the ranking of main domain? Backlinks of sub domain are going to be a deciding factor for website ranking too? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What's the best way to go about building/using interactive snippets?
I'm starting to see interactive snippets (I guess they're called islands) like the attached image in our SERPs, so I figured I would look into experimenting with them, but I'm not entirely clear how to proceed. I have only seen them in adwords, so is that the only way you can use them? Is there some way to set them up or some service you need to set them up organically? Lost, but intrigued, Ruben SW7ak4d.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Search Engines Traffic for New Site?
Hi, Can anyone tell me please when a new website starts receiving traffic from the search engines? Regards
Algorithm Updates | | kywebsol0 -
Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?
Hello Community, Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed. We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000. Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000. When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report. So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well. Thanks for your feedback. Chris
Algorithm Updates | | cogbox0 -
Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years. Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products. The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed. The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable. Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
Algorithm Updates | | DavidWilsonSEO0 -
Youtube dofollow link to web site
Is there still a dofollow link back from a youtube channel to your web site? I filled in the site url in the profile, which in my understanding used to be the single dofollow link back to your web site. However, when I view the page source for the youtube channel it shows up as a nofollow link. Also, in OSE the link does not appear. Has this changed or am I just not doing this correctly?
Algorithm Updates | | uwaim20120 -
SEO Link building / Article Distributation
Quick question in regards to link building and OFF PAGE SEO... Why isn't Articles distributation via wire services considered a "Duplicate Content" issue by Google? i.e. If take the one article and post it accross 50 (do follow) websites, Press release sites, and blogs. I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this. Regard, Sammy
Algorithm Updates | | revsystems.com0