Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
-
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link?
thanks
-
You shouldn't be penalized if these are simply sister sites that are linked together in the header. This is common practice with a number of media websites, for example:
- xojane.com nav links over to xovain.com
- msnbc.com runs footer links to nbcnews.com, today.com, cnbc.com, and breakingnews.com
- cnet.com runs footer links to cbsinteractive.com
- foxnews.com runs header links to 7 other properties
- etc.
To be conservative, I would suggest linking with the brand name of the other site - don't use a commercial anchor text. In other words, link to it as "brand name" or "brandname.com", but don't link to it as "sports news".
-
Hi
No, it won't cause your organic traffic to go down. If it were me, I don't see a reason for it to be included in the top navigation because top navigation should only be utilized for pages directly on the site.
That's just my opinion though - I still like the idea of having a partners or sisters site page where you link out to other sites like this one. Or, having it as a dropdown list item in your navigation under "About Us" or something along those lines.
Let me know if this makes sense. Good luck!
-
thanks for the feedback. We have not received a Manual Action in Webmaster Tools about it, but I was wondering if may be the cause of our organic search traffic going down a lot. I feel like it is related to the rest of the site – just a sports version of what we are doing with celebrities.... do you see a reason to get rid of the nav bar link?
-
Hi Erik
There a ton of reasons for getting a manual action - bad, thin, or duplicate content, spammy link building tactics, or more - if you have one, I suggest you see what type of manual action it is, and act accordingly.
Now, for your link in the navigation, there could be potential for that link to be considered spam, although I don't see it being super likely. The reason being, it will be recorded as coming from every page that the top navigation appears on your site, and it's not topically relevant to celebrity news.
What I would do instead is link to the site through content opportunities with branded anchor text, or developing a page that is dedicated to sister sites or company websites. Although you will have to be careful and not link to 100 websites or go overboard.
You also have to consider that another website linked to in your top navigation could potentially be a bad user experience as it is inconsistent.
Hope this all helps! 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
-
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
"Turning off" content to a site
One site I manage has a lot of low quality content. We are in the process of improving the overall site content but we have "turned off" a large portion of our content by setting 2/3 of the posts to draft. Has anyone done this before or had experience with doing something similar? This quote from Bruce Clay comes to mind: “Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.” What are your thoughts? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ThridHour0 -
Help! A site has copied my blog!
My site tanked on July 21 and I have been working so hard to bring it back up but nothing is working. Today I looked at "Links to Your Site" on Google Webmasters and I see a copy of my site on another URL. mysite.eemovies.org/mycategory/mypost The domain name is eemovies.org and then all my stuff is wrapped around it and all my content is there! How do I stop this?!
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
New jobboard: Can redirecting folder (site.com/jobboard) to subdomain (jobboard.site.com) hurt SEO?
Hi there, I'm planning to implement a jobboard on my website which needs to be installed on a subdomain (jobboard.site.com) but I'd really like to use site.com/jobboard for promoting this jobboard (jobboard collects external industry jobs). Are there any possible disadvantages when I set up a 301 redirect from jobboard.site.com to site.com/jobboard? Also: What if I want to move this jobboard to a unique domain one day (e.g. jobboard-industry-xy.com), Would that be tricky (as I'd basically have to redirect the folder-to-subdomain redirect to an external domain and therefore get a folder-to-subdomain-to-external-domain redirect...)? Cheers, Thomas
On-Page Optimization | | stl990 -
No link data in GWT
Has anyone had this problem - no data in the links section of GWT? I haven't set a preferred domain, so I don't understand what's up.
On-Page Optimization | | HeatherBakerTopLine0 -
What shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?
We have 2 English language bookselling websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but 60%-70% of the content on site remains the same. The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk (for United Kingdom) and one is on brandname.com(For United States) The precautions that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are: used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD Geotarget settings done for USA and UK respectively through webmaster tools Launched backlink campaign to gain from local sites and directory respectively have tried to differentiate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in: Author Vis a vis Written by Format vis a vis binding type Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on What remains the same: 1. Product detail pageTitle 2. Product detail page Meta Description 3. Product Name- That is Title of the book which cannot be changed anyways 4. About the product text –The memo or “About the Book” that comes along with the book and is same across each booksellers site. This is impossible to be differentiated as the database have more than 3 Million books brandname.com which is older (2 Yrs) of the two has traffic around 2500-3000 daily visits while the brandname.co.uk which is 5 months old has 150-200 daily visitors. Both sites have around 4 Million pages. Need suggestions what are we doing wrong and what extra can be done to boost organic traffic?
On-Page Optimization | | CyrilWilson0 -
Do I really have too many links on my startpage?
My site www.poker-coaching.net is built with Joomla, and I have one main menu that links all articles (app. 120) in one language from the start page. The site has a language selection menu with translations available in 4 other languages, and for each language, there are another 80 articles linked from the main page. The SEOMOZ crawling report now say that I have too many links from the main page. I always thought it was a good thing for SEO to have articles linked from the main page - do I need to restructure my site and start building multi-level menu structures, where I would have a main menu on the start page and the next level menu would only be shown after a user clicks on a main menu item?
On-Page Optimization | | CatfishTPA0 -
Nofollow all outgoing links?
If nofollow keeps link juice from leaking from a site, why not use nofollow on all external links? What would be the benefit of an external link that does not use nofollow? Best, Christopher
On-Page Optimization | | ChristopherGlaeser0