Too many external links?
-
Ok, so I am finally focusing more on SEO of my hobby website as I am notice the relavent keywords are not really onsite what I want, for example, according to analytics "post" is my most popular keyword which I assume is from the vbulletin forum.
My question today is that according to the moz scan, my forum has too many external links, my question is what are some measures I can do whether within the vbulletin forum or custom coding to reduce the amount of links/increase power?
-
You basically have three options regarding your links:
1. Make administrative changes to limit the links. Take a look at the following URL: http://www.rcnightmare.com/forum/. The page has over 250 links which is too many for SEO optimization. Every forum section has 3 links: the forum section name, the last post and the last poster. 40 sections x 3 links each = 120 links. Additionally some sections such as Electric Monster Trucks has a group of subsections. Add to that the category links, the normal navigation links, the footer links and the sidebar links and you wind up with 251 total links.
A key component of SEO is optimization. Your site is presently designed so all your content is accessible. From a SEO perspective, the more popular/important content should be more accessible, and the less popular content should be less accessible. As the forum owner it is up to you to make some decisions.
2. Make programming changes to limit the links. You could remove the link to the last poster, as an example. That one change would remove 40 links. You could also make changes to the links in your navigation, footer and sidebar. There can be positives and negatives to these changes.
3. Disregard the issue. You can ignore the issue and live with the understanding your forum articles wont rank as well in search engines. You can try to adjust your other site pages to be better optimized.
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
-
How should we handle re-directory links? Should we remove these links?
We are currently cleaning up bad links that were purchased by a previous SEO agency. We have found links on anonym.to pages that redirect traffic to our site automatically. How should this be handled? Should we remove these links?
Technical SEO | | Lorne_Marr0 -
Too many navigational links
Hi there, I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages. Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure. 1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?). This is the situation: The website is a webshop The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here. Now here's the problem: The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option. But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues. Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this? Note: pages have good organic positions and authority. Thanks a lot. Marcel0 -
What I doing wrong when trying to search for links from external websites to my website
This is just the little frustrating question nothing important but I’m sure somebody will know the answer. In the white board Friday this week Rand suggested at one point that when you’re searching for results links to your website if you put a - followed by site followed by your url like –site:yourwebsite.com you get the results of pages with links on other websites but excluding your own webpages but it just doesn’t work I get no results just an error message, any idea why? If I remove the - I get tons of results but there on my own webpages……….
Technical SEO | | whitbycottages0 -
Link building question
ok so we paid the top firm in seo to help us build an seo strategy and i think we have a good one. We are changing our link building tactics and making more Pr related links and creating awesome content on blogs or our own site to generate traffic and links to our site. We have data from our engineer which should be interesting and we are going to sponsor events, do some link baiting with some of our articles, get a pr firm to get us some good articles on major sites and go to events around phily where we will have unique content and a unique perspective such as car shows ect. The problem is even though all the content will be linked to our site how do we link them. We got hit by penguin but in these articles or blogs should we use the anchor text for the word we are using. The company says dont do it right now bc we got hit with penguin and should only use the brand. I have no idea how only using the brand and not the keywords will magically make us rank for certain keywords. Anyone have an opinion. Thank you and we do pretty well with seo but we did get little bit of a hit with penguin that we are eliminating links and making a new way of thinking when it comes to link building. We also just hired a designer so we are going to build 100s of pages on the site to increase seo with unique content and that is also a goal of ours for the year. We have two marketers on staff and 4 programmers so we are able to do anything. Our urls are terrible but the rest of the site is pretty good
Technical SEO | | goldjake17880 -
Can I turn off Google site links?
I thought at one time I had turned off the option to have Google sitelinks. I did this so that each of our pages that had a strong presence would occupy a unique slot on the first and second page of Google. This was important to us as we were battling some reputation management issues and trying to push out negative listings from the front page. Recently I noticed sitelinks were back up and when going into Google Webmaster Tools, I could figure out how to opt out of them. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BRConsulting0 -
Redirection help to retrieve broken links
Hi, my hosting company after they updated my joomla website lost thousands of pages of content, i am now searching for all broken links and re doing the content to get my links back, but i am having a problem understanding how to redirect these links. For example, i have now managed to retrieve this page http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think but the old url for this page was http://www.in2town.co.uk/Have-Your-Say/Liberal-Dem-Leader-says-He-Will-be-The-Next-Prime-Minister-What-Do-You-Think/menu-id-4953 i do not have the unfriendly url for this page, so what i am trying to find out is, how to tell google that the above page is now http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think in my joomla site. if anyone could please explain how to do this with joomla 1.5 then you will make me very happy as then i will be able to retrieve some of my lost links
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
InSite Linking Best Practices
When creating links within your website, is it bad to have a anchor text link pointing back to the same page? Say the page the homepage is optimized for "credit cards". If I have a "credit cards" anchor text link on the page the link points to, is that bad practice? Secondly, if it's better to put that link on a different page, wouldn't I be placing a keyword that's optimized for a different page on the wrong page? (hopefully I'm making sense) Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Links from Youtube Channel
I stumbled across this blog post: http://garyreid.com/youtube-removes-nofollow/ and also this one : http://www.kevin-barnes.com/youtube-secret-authority-loophole/ which talks about no-follow links from your Youtube Channel Page. We've setup a Youtube channel, and have begun updating it regularly, however the link appears to be a redirect-type link -presumably this means no link juice is passed? The code of the link on our Youtube channel: http://www.pretavoir.co.uk The second blog mentions building PA on your Youtube channel by commenting on other videos which then links back to your channel page - if that juice can't go to your site, then I assume the technique is of limited use? Apart from boosting your Youtube Channel's rankings of course, which I guess can't hurt.
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0