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
-
Will my site get devalued if I add the same company schema to all the pages of my website?
If I add the exact same schema markup to every page on my website - is it considered duplicate content? Our CMS is telling me that if I want schema mark-up on our site that it has to be the same on every page on the website. This limitation is frustrating but I am trying to figure out the best way to work within their boundaries. Your help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Annette_Wetzel0 -
Links below linking (not sitelinks)
Hi All, Please can you let me know the name and / or point me at an article / blog / directory on how best to achieve additional links under a search engine listing (I don't mean site links) e.g. I do a search for 'home insurance' on Google.co.uk and under the listing for Compare the Market it has - home insurance, building insurance and landlords insurance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Vodafone0 -
No confirmation page on Google's Disavow links tool?
I've been going through and doing some spring cleaning on some spammy links to my site. I used Google's Disavow links tool, but after I submit my text file, nothing happens. Should I be getting some sort of confirmation page? After I upload my file, I don't get any notifications telling me Google has received my file or anything like that. It just takes me back to this page: http://cl.ly/image/0S320q46321R/Image 2013-04-26 at 11.15.25 AM.png Am I doing something wrong or is this what everyone else is seeing too?
Technical SEO | | shawn810 -
Solutions for too many on-page links?
We have just begun using SEO Moz a few months ago and have been busy cleaning up some of our warnings and errors. One of the errors that has been an issue is ... too many on-page links. I am trying to correct this issue and I am wondering how seo moz counts these links. For instance... we have links to many of our product categories in a drop down from our main menu, those same links are listed in our footer. Does this get counted as two or only one link. If two, should we make one of the link no follow or how would you best suggest correcting this. Our website is www.unikeyhealth.com Since the menu and the footer appear on virtually every page on our site correcting this issue will quickly sort out this problem. Thanks for any advice.
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
Internal followed links only 5
Dear members, As I understand the importancy of Internal Followed Links I want to increase them for www.ruijters.nl. What I do not understand that Open Site Explorer only counts 5 Internal Followed Links. These 5 Internal Followed Links must be the hypelinked images on the homepage? But the website in overall definately has more than 5? Any members who van help me out to fix this problem, so www.ruijters.nl can enjopy his linkjuice? Best Regards, Alain Nijholt
Technical SEO | | bmcinternetmarketing0 -
Off-page SEO and on-page SEO improvements
I would like to know what off-page SEO and on-page SEO improvements can be made to one of our client websites http://www.nd-center.com Best regards,
Technical SEO | | fkdpl2420 -
Weird href - is it still a follow link?
On many publication sites I have noticed weird links like I have never seen before <a <="" span="">href="http://test.com" onclick="linkClick(this.href)">Test</a> Are these still follow links? Is the only thing that determines a no follow link "rel=nofollow"? So as long as the link doesn't have that, it's good to go? Why might they have used a link like this? For tracking?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0