Link juice distributed to too many pages. Will noindex,follow fix this?
-
We have an e-commerce store with around 4000 product pages. Although our domain authority is not very high (we launched our site in February and now have around 30 RD's) we did rank on lots of long tail terms, and generated around 8000 organic visits / month.
Two weeks ago we added another 2000 products to our existing catalogue of 2000 products, and since then our organic traffic dropped significantly (more than 50%).
My guess is that link juice has been distributed to too many pages, causing rankings to drop on overall. I'm thinking about noindexing 50% of the product pages (the ones not receiving any organic traffic). However, I am not sure if this will lead to more link juice for the remaining 50% of the product pages, or not.
So my question is: if I noindex,follow page A, will 100% of the linkjuice go to page B INSTEAD of page A, or will just a part of the link juice flow to page B (after flowing through page A first)?
Hope my question is clear
P.s. We have a Dutch store, so the traffic drop is not a Panda issue
-
Has the number of pages indexed changed? Specifically, do you have a sitemap and have you looked at what GWT is reporting for number of pages indexed? Maybe some of your pages dropped out of the index and that's why you're not getting as much traffic?
Also, do a quick look at your pages and make sure something silly didn't happen when the products were added, like a rel canonical setting everything to the home page, or 5000 items suddenly getting a noindex, or your analytics program suddenly being stripped from some of your pages and that's why you're missing visits.
-
it will follow the link and pass juice, however it just won't be indexed and therefore not show in the SERPs.
Page A will therefore pass juice (using its follow) to any pages linking off it.So if Page A links to Page Z, juice from X will page through A to Z (being diluted by A)
-
Hi Richard,
I didn't mean nofollow, but noindex,follow. Imagine this situation:
Page A has noindex,follow
Page B has index,follow
Page X has 1 internal link to page A and 1 internal link to page B
Will the linkjuice from page X divide between page A and page B? Or will page B get all the juice (since page A is not indexed?).
Thanks,
Stefan
-
If you have 10 links and 5 are no-follow, only the remaining 5 will pass juice.
-
Great tips regarding deeplinking and link distribution, thanks for that. However, I am still wondering what happens with link juice that is sent to a page with noindex,follow. Will all juice go to an indexed page instead, or will part of the juice go to the noindexed page (and get lost)?
-
Yes, rankings have dropped sitewide (according to SEOmoz web app). Unfortunately I don't have CTR data.
-
Do you have a history of;
1. Rankings
2. Impressions and CTR (Google Webmaster Tools)
-
Directories allows you to target deeper pages, so I would start with some strong sites there. If you run a clothing store, then target some deep links into Shoes, Mens Clothing, Outdoor, etc.
-
a) to EGOL's point, I would get more juice by obtaining more links from high quality sites. I like getting Facebook LIKE icons on each product as well as ShareThis so that you, as well as others, can share the products socially. (share through the ShareThis and using the LIKE button on the page shows others who are visiting that people are interacting with the product and encourages them to do so also).
a1) When building links, try to get good link into the product category pages and not all to the home page. If the deeper you go, the juice gets diluted, build strong inbound links to deeper pages.
b) I would evaluate how your juice is distributed on the site. perhaps you are diluting your juice too much by the time it reaches the products.
-
Thanks. We are of course working on more link juice, but it will take time unfortunately
Here's some data (all organic):
Traffic
May 1-15: 2.900
June 1-15: 1.600Landingpages
May 1-15: 750
June 1-15: 530Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 2.000
June 1-15: 1.300And i've broken it further down into short vs long tail (1-2 word phrases and 3+ word phrases):
SHORT TAIL
Traffic
May 1-15: 1.400
June 1-15: 1.000Landingpages
May 1-15: 550
June 1-15: 400Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1.000
June 1-15: 700LONG TAIL
Traffic
May 1-15: 1.500
June 1-15: 600Landingpages
May 1-15: 200
June 1-15: 130Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1000
June 1-15: 600As you can see, both the number of traffic sending keywords and landing pages have dropped significantly for both short and long tail terms. These really seems like a sitewide trend and followed shortly after we doubled the number of product pages. According to Google Trends and our supplier there's no noticable drop in search volumes or orders (this is a product that's been sold throughout the year).
How would you act upon this?
-
I agree with Dan. Let this go for a while to see what happens.
... more important.... before I went to tearing up the site I would go get more linkjuice.
-
Hi!
I would be very careful about guessing what caused the drop in traffic to begin with, before you go adding noindexes everywhere.
Try to find a correlation to the drop in traffic. Did rankings drop? CTR? Amount of brand searches? What type of organic traffic dropped, long-tail or head terms? Also, you may want to compare the amount of unique visitors compared to the past and check the amount of new visits compared to the past.
I'd investigate a little more before taking action.
-Dan
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
-
Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content. And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rignite0 -
Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?
Hi, Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page? The situation:
Technical SEO | | jmueller
our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article). Now we could end up with something like this: Which one will be regarded by google & co?
First?
Last?
None? Thanks a lot,
Jan0 -
Linking without loosing link equity.
Hi, I was wondering if anyone had a solution to linking without loosing link equity? From what I have read using 'no follow' on both internal and external links DOES NOT pass any equity across the link to the link target, but also, the latest thought goes that it DOES loose link equity (as if it were a FOLLOW' link). So is there a method of retaining link equity using another method? Thanks
Technical SEO | | James770 -
My seo company has a footer link that links to my site by keyword will this effect my rankings
My old SEo company has a footer link by keyword to my site so it acts like a site wide link will this effect my rankings. My site was in the top 5 for many keywords now page 2 and 3 so I am trying to see what has effected it as we havent changed what we do
Technical SEO | | Casefun0 -
NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW - Any SEO benefit to these pages?
Hi I could use some advice on a site architecture decision. I am developing something akin to an affiliate scheme for my business. However it is not quite as simple as an affliate setup because the products sold through "affiliates" will be slightly different, as a result I intend to run the site from a subdomain of my main domain. I am intending to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW the subdomained site because it will contain huge amounts of duplication from my main site (it is really a subset of the main site with some slightly different functionality in places). I don't really want or need this subdomain site indexed, hence my decision to NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW it. However given I will, hopefully, be having lots of people link into the subdomain I am hoping to come up with some sort of arrangement that will mean that my main domain derives some sort of benefit from the linking. They are, after all, votes for my business so they feel like "good links". I am assuming here that a direct link into my NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX subdomain is going to provide ZERO benefit to my main domain. Happy to be corrected! The best I can come up with is to have a "landing page" on my main domain which links into parts of my main domain and then provides a link through to the subdomain site. However this feels like a bad experience from the user's point of view (i.e. land on a page and then have to click to get to the real action) and feels a bit spammy, i.e. I don't really have a good reason for this page other than linking! Equally I could NOINDEX,FOLLOW the homepage of the affiliate site and link back to the main domain from there. However this also feels a bit spammy and would be far less beneficial, I guess, because the subdomain homepage would have many more outgoing links than I envisaged for my "landing page" idea above. Also, it also looks a bit spammy (i.e. why follow the homepage and nofollow everything else?)! The trouble, I guess, is that whatever I do feels a bit spammy. I suppose this is because IT IS spammy! 🙂 Has anyone got any good ideas how I could setup an arrangement like I described above and derive benefit to my main domain without it looking (or being) spammy? I just hate to think of all of those links being wasted (in an SEO sense). Thanks Gary
Technical SEO | | gtrotter6660 -
Should i redirect my lost links to my home page
Hi, as some of you maybe aware, i had a major problem last year that has caused me nothing but trouble. in short, my hosting company lost me over 10,000 pages from my site and i had to rebuild the site from stratch which is still on going. I lost thousands of links to my site and i have been over the past week pointing the pages not found to the sections that is best suited to them. But i am just wondering if it would harm my site if i also point some of those links to my home page. I was a page rank four before disaster happened to my site and now i am a page rank two and i want to build this up. so i am just wondering if i should point some of those good links to my home page i am redirecting the pages using 301 in my htaccess file any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
No. of links on a page
Is it true that If there is a huge number of links from the source page then each link will provide very little value in terms of passing link juice ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050