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.
Link Age as SEO factor?
-
Hi Guys
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspxWe will be doing the standard redirects etc
However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24sHe says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect.
Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space.
So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect.
-But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about.
So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ?If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?
-
Do you have the option of not displaying the extension on your URL? That way no matter what underlying language you use, you have the same URL and don't have to worry about updating links in the future.
-
The dev team is aware of the duplicate posting issue. I delete duplicate posts when I see them, but occasionally get errors myself.
-
Link age is not a factor.
Strength of domain/page the link is coming from is a factor. (would you want a day old link from the front page of SEOmoz, or a two year old link from your buddies blog?)
The only reason link age is thought to be a factor is that the older the link, the older the page the link is coming from, and the older the page the more time it has had to build more authority, thus pass more juice.
Great idea on getting those links manually changed!!!
-
Ho ho ho! Very whimsical indeed
For your sanity you should know there has been issues with this for all of us recently - and Delete Reply doesn't work
( Hmmm, I wonder if SEOMoz will get penalised for all of this duplicate content???
) -
From a developer's point of view: If you do not already have the new system in place, I would suggest a MVC move rather than aspx on the dotnet platform and put a cfm handler in place to map the pages at the controller level. Goggle will not know know there has been a change and you site will perform much faster. Microsoft is tending to move away from the aspx to the more structured mvc version anyway.
-
apparently I was quick enough to answer it twice before you could answer once
I tried to delete the 2nd post but I get a site error. C'est la vie!
-
Update your links to get back 100% of your link juice back.
See here for more info: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/48932/link-age-vs-domain-age
EDIT: DANG! How quick are you Ryan ;o) Were you at Vivid Lime's house when he started writing the question?!?
-
If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?
My answer to you is NO. But you should be aware there is at least some dispute on the topic.
The SEOmoz point of view (which I agree with): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/age-of-site-and-old-links-whiteboard-friday
Another point of view: http://www.the-system.org/2011/01/google-algorithm-change-attacks-spam-or-does-it/
-
If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?
My answer to you is NO. But you should be aware there is at least some dispute on the topic.
The SEOmoz point of view (which I agree with): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/age-of-site-and-old-links-whiteboard-friday
Another point of view: http://www.the-system.org/2011/01/google-algorithm-change-attacks-spam-or-does-it/
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 it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
SEO Impact of High Volume Vertical and Horizontal Internal Linking
Hello Everyone - I maintain a site with over a million distinct pages of content. Each piece of content can be thought of like a node in graph database or an entity. While there is a bit of natural hierarchy, every single entity can be related to one or more other entities. The conceptual structure of the entities like so: Agency - A top level business unit ( ~100 pages/urls) Office - A lower level business unit, part of an Agency ( ~5,000 pages/urls) Person - Someone who works in one or more Offices ( ~80,000 pages/urls) Project - A thing one or more People is managing ( ~750,000 pages/urls) Vendor - A company that is working on one or more Projects ( ~250,000 pages/urls) Category - A descriptive entity, defining one or more Projects ( ~1,000 pages/urls) Each of these six entities has a unique (url) and content. For each page/url, there are internal links to each of the related entity pages. For example, if a user is looking at a Project page/url, there will be an internal link to one or more Agencies, Offices, People, Vendors, and Categories. Also, a Project will have links to similar Projects. This same theory holds true for all other entities as well. People pages link to their related Agencies, Offices, Projects, Vendors, etc, etc. If you start to do the math, there are tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links. While our users enjoy the ability to navigate this world according to these relationships, I am curious if we should force a more strict hierarchy for SEO purposes. Essentially, does it make sense to "nofollow" all of the horizontal internal links for a given entity page/url? For search engine indexing purposes, we have legit sitemaps that give a simple vertical hierarchy...but I am curious if all of this internal linking should be hidden via nofollow...? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhariani2 -
Is CloudFlare bad for SEO?
I have been hit by DDoS attacks lately...not on a huge scale, but probably done by some "script kiddies" or competitors of mine. Still, I need to take some action in order to protect my server and my site against all of this spam traffic that is being sent to it. In the process of researching the tools available for defending a website from a DDoS attack, I came across the service offered by CloudFlare.com. According to the CloudFlare website, they protect your site against a DDoS attack by showing users/visitors they find suspicious an interstitial that asks them if they are a real user or a bot...this interstitial contains a Captcha that suspicious users are asked to enter in order to visit the site. I'm just wondering what kind of an effect such an interstitial could have on my Google rankings...I can imagine that such a thing could add to increased click-backs to the SERPs and, if Google detects this, to lower rankings. Has anyone had experience with the DDoS protection services offered by CloudFlare, who can say a word or two regarding any effects this may have on SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterfish1 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
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 | | rayvensoft0 -
Do links in the nav bar help SEO?
If I am building a Nav bar should I use my keywords or make it easier for the user to find what they are looking for. IMO one should ALWAYS make a site based on user experience. If it Google and other SEs do count Nav links, would it be best to place more important keys first?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
RSS feeds- What are the secrets to getting them, and the links inside then, indexed and counted for SEO purposes?
RSS feeds, at least on paper, should be a great way to build backlinks and boost rankings. They are also very seductive from a link-builder's point of view- free, easy to create, allows you to specifiy anchor text, etc. There are even several SEO articles, anda few products, extolling the virtues of RSS for SEO puposes. However, I hear anecdotedly that they are extremely ineffective in getting their internal links indexed. And my success rate has been abysmal- perhaps 15% have ever been indexed,and so far, I havenever seem Google show an RSS feed as a source for a backlink. I have even thrown some token backlinks against RSS feeds to see if that helped in getting them indexed, but even that has a very low success rate. I recently read a blog post saying that Google "hates aRSS feeds" and "rarely spiders perhaps the first link or two." Yet there are many SEO advocates who claim that RSS feeds are a great untapped resource for SEO. I am rather befuddled. Has anyone "crackedthe code" onhow to get them,and the links that they contain, indexed and helping rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tclendaniel0 -
Does capitalization matter for SEO?
Two places capitalization comes into play: (1) on-page use (title, h1, body text, img alt text, etc) (2) external anchor text I didn't think it mattered from Google's point of view for on-page usage (is this correct?) but I notice that OpenSiteExplorer' s 'anchor text distribution' tab shows different counts for the same keyword if it's capitalized in different ways (eg seomoz.org is listed separate from SEOmoz.org). Is that just OSE or does Google treat the keyword/phrase different based on its capitalization, too? And if so, then should I be creating external links to my site with the 'regular' and 'Capitalized' versions of my key phrases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scanlin1