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
-
Homepage canonical url with splash or not with splash? All other links are without but logo links with splash
Hello, There is so much contradicting information about the homepage canonical URL. Many websites have all the links without the trailing splash but their homepage URL still contains the splash. Now Moz is an example with this. Their urls don't have the splash, and their canonical does not have the splash. Why is it so and why so much different ways people have it?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Long-tail with few searches vs. Generic with many
Our business is a contract packager/manufacturer of products sold to very prominent brands who sell through retail. For example, we make the sunscreen under a brand’s name, which you might then find on the shelf in Target or CVS. As I’ve optimized our pages, I’ve attempted to go long-tail, which has been simply to add “…contract packaging” or a variation after the particular product. So, instead of trying to compete in “sunscreen”, which would pit me against big-box distributors and prominent brands and sellers of sunscreen, I’ve optimized for “sunscreen manufacturers.” “Sunscreen” has 31K – 72K searches, with an 81 Difficulty and 67 Potential. “Sunscreen manufacturers” has a low 13 Difficulty and a decent 54 Potential, but only 51 – 100 searches. Some of my terms have only 0 – 10 searches, but I’ve been thinking that it’s better to compete for fewer but more qualified / buyer-intent searches and have generally lower Difficulty. Can you please tell me if this is a smart strategy, or if I should instead try to compete in higher-volume terms but much greater Difficulty? Thanks a lot for everyone's help.
On-Page Optimization | | Beau_W0 -
Do a bunch of footer internal links help or hurt?
We are an ecommerce site... In days gone by, having a bunch of footer links with your top products / categories was a good idea - as it created a ton of internal links to these products. Now, I am hearing that those links "dilute" the value of our other links on a page - and essentially, there is more harm than good from these. Does anyone know what I am talking about (the olds days) and should we still be doing this? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Ted_Cullen0 -
Catergories not appaearing in google help!
Hi I call upon the seomoz experts again this time regarding getting our categories to show in google when you type in our company name Tidy Books. Ive added 3 pictures 1 of our UK store www.tidy-books.co.uk 2 of US store - www.tidy-books.com 3 of a competitor who has over taken us and had the Google mark up we require. Would some love help some help in the last few months we've lost a few places and traffic is going down Thanks everyone ItiqzWV 6g8e1Zy I2qEJCc
On-Page Optimization | | tidybooks0 -
Best way to nofollow affiliate links?
I don't "nofollow" affiliate links but I have quite a few. Doing them one by one would just be an impossible job. Would it be best to get a plugin that nofollows EVERYTHING? What would google prefer? I need to DOFOLLOW some links because those sites deserve it.
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
Should I have content on my home page or links to my articles
Hi, i have asked this question a couple of times without any luck so i am hoping third time lucky. My site www.in2town.co.uk has dropped in the rankings for two of my important keywords, lifestyle magazine and lifestyle news, so i am just wondering if i have to much content on the page for google to understand what the page is about. i am thinking to just have the links on my page instead of the intro to the articles, for example another online magazine does this, http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ Can anyone please let me know if i should keep the intro to the articles or if i should go with the links idea like femalefirst does to help google understand that we are a lifestyle magazine any advice would be great
On-Page Optimization | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Too Many On-Page Links Reported By SEOmoz
Hi, I recently did run a crawl report for my blog dapazze.com, and found that SEOmoz is reporting many pages on my blog having more than 100 internal links. I opened OSE, and made a search for one of my pages which was reported to contain more than 100 links. And I found it to contain 464 internal links. Here is the link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=dapazze.com%2F2012%2F10%2Fwin-a-commentluv-premium-single-site-and-multi-site-license-worth-about-154-giveaway-of-october%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0 Please have a look at it. I have chosen - Show "All" links from "only internal" pages to "this page" option in OSE, which reports me this. I see almost every page in my blog linking to every page. This is not the problem for me. I have also tried to make a search for some popular bloggers, like ProBlogger.net, ShoutMeLoud.com, HellBoundBloggers.com, etc, and all of them have the same problem. Should I be worrying about this problem? What is the problem actually?
On-Page Optimization | | rahulchowdhury0 -
On page links?
Hi all, Ive be going through the pages in my site getting rid of errors so i can the work of a clean slate and get the best for my site. However, i have a large amount of pages which is flagged up by seo moz pro tool as too many on page links. How bad is this in terms of seo rankings? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | wazza19850