Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Cross Linking two related ecommerce websites
-
Hi Guys,
Hope you'll be able to help me with a technical problem I am facing right now.
We are a company right ? We own 2 webistes.
Let's say one sells car parts, the other one buys second hand car parts to refurbish them and sell them. (It is not our case, just an example very similar to ours).
Both are ecommerce websites, with large catalogues (7000 skus). sellparts sells a lot and is a big actor in its market. buyparts.com doesn't work nad has a really low DA.
My new SEO external consultant, which I am not too convinced about, is telling me to cross link the sites on product level using cross-linking extensions. He want have them do-follow.
That would mean having hundreds or thousands of links with really similar linking patterns.
buy [parts] [model ] [make]
sell [parts] [model ] [make]
That to me seems a bit too much and I am worried it compromises the sellparts site's SEO.
So should i no-follow the links ? Or do it differently ?
-
That's really true.Perhaps the best solution is to have another shop @ sellparts.com/buyparts
Perhaps the best affordable solution is to have another shop @ sellparts.com/buyparts ?
It then could be another site on the same Magento install with different shopping cart extensions.
I really appreciate your help. Thanks.
-
Keeping all of your business on one domain will help with your branding, since there is a natural overlap in buyers and sellers of auto parts. It will expose your buyparts business to everyone to comes to the sellparts domain.
My preferred method would be to keep all of the pages in folders on the sellparts domain. That is best for SEO purposes since Google does not give subdomains the full benefit of their root domain. I would work hard or pay for development to make that happen.
My very last resort would be to use a subdomain. The pages on the subdomain would not perform as well as if they were on the root domain.
-
That answer, truly, is a spot on. Combining sites is actually what our competitors are tending to do.
The matter is that buying and selling on the same site is a really tricky thing to do on a Magento based website as shopping cart aren't prepared for that and custom development is a nightmare on the long run.
One last question. What about if, buyparts would be on a subdomain where shopping carts wouldn't be shared. The development would be easier.How do you think it could affect the SEO ?
How do you think it could affect the SEO ?
Thanks.
-
If these sites belonged to me, I would not place site-wide links on either of them that point to the other. In this situation, links from BuyParts will probably be of little to no value in lifting the rankings of SellParts since it is so much stronger.
If I thought that many customers of these sites would be natural customers of the other, then I would combine the sites. I would test this by making a large pdf of parts that I am willing to buy, placing it on the SellParts domain and linking to it from several obvious places saying "we also buy parts, click here for our buy list".
That is what I would do if these sites belonged to me.
-
You are absolutely right and I am glad you pointed it. English isn't my first language...
Buyparts.com has a REALLY low traffic and revenue as no SEO work has been done on it. It receives very few orders a month although the potential is good.
Nonetheless, it will never make the profits of sellpart.com. sellparts.com represents 99% or our revenue.
Thanks
-
"buyparts.com doesn't work"
I don't want to give a response without having a clear understanding of this.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 24, 2019, 11:18 AM | Kahuna_Charles1 -
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 18, 2019, 7:24 PM | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance?
Hi, If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 7, 2017, 5:49 AM | kadut1 -
Two divisions, same parent company, identical websites
A client of mine has intentionally built two websites with identical content; both companies sell the same product, one via an 80 year old local brand, well known. The other division is a national brand, new, and working to expand. The old and new divisions cannot be marketed as a single company for legal reasons. My life would be simple if the rules for distinguishing between nation's could apply, but I only have city X, and The U.S. I understand there is no penalty for duplicate content per se but I need to say to Google, "if searcher is in city X, serve content X. If not, serve content U.S. Both sites have atrocious DA and from what GA tells me, the National content appears to have never been served in a SERP in 3 years. I've been asked to improve visibility for both sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 22, 2017, 9:27 AM | kc_sunshines0 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 26, 2015, 6:01 PM | MiguelSalcido0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 23, 2013, 6:11 PM | rayvensoft0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 7, 2013, 8:15 PM | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 8, 2011, 12:40 PM | rball10