Site Wide Internal Navigation links
-
Hello all,
All our category pages www.pitchcare.com/shop are linked to from every product page via the sidebar navigation.
Which results in every category page having over 1700 links with the same anchor text.
I have noticed that the category pages dont appear to be ranked when they most definately should be.
For example http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html is not ranked for the term "moss control" instead another of our deeper pages is ranked on page 1.
Reading a previous SEO MOZ article
· Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
I recently had my second run-in with a penalty at Google that appears to punish sites for excessive internal linking with "optimized" (or "keyword stuffed anchor text") links. When the links were removed (in both cases, they were found in the footer of the website sitewide), the rankings were restored immediately following Google's next crawl, indicating a fully automated filter (rather than a manual penalty requiring a re-consideration request).Do you think we may have triggered a penalty?
If so what would be the best way to tackle this? Could we add no follows on the product pages?
Cheers
Todd
-
Thanks for your help!
Thats great!
-
Lol,
Sure, so what i showed you now, that you are serving 2 URLs with the same content. this is will be a severe problem when people will link to you to shop/moss-control/ for example. and you are focusing your link building, internet linking to this shop/moss-control/index.html. a Duplicate content filter will be flagged and will loose ranking for both.
the steps needed now, are to 301 redirect your shop/moss-control/ to shop/moss-control/index.html
-
Thanks again.
This is a little over my head now sorry Wissam.
Could you elaborate a little more? (in terms a lamen like me will understand)
Cheers
-
Todd,
your not, its my bad, need to input more into my answers.
so here is a screenshot of an http header response for shop/moss-control/
http://markup.io/v/fvjrfw5a3te5
and this is another screenshot of an http respons for shop/moss-control/index.html
http://markup.io/v/ggt61a170rfw
Both are showing a 200 response, means no redirect. please feel free to ask more
-
Sorry If I'm being really stupid here Wissam!
But when I click both the links you just provided the URLs are identical?
We have a 301 redirect set up so that both go to http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html
Again apologies if I'm missing something!
-
Todd,
When you access www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/ it will show you the exact content if you go to www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html.
Google See these two URL as 2 different URLs with same content, hence your content is duplicated
this is an article of how to deal with DC from Google Blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html
-
Hi Wissam,
Looking at this http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control is directed to
http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html
I cant see any duplicates?
-
Great! Thanks Richard.
They dont use no follows and they are ranking just fine! Must be down to some other factors.
Thanks for your help.
Todd
-
http://www.americanmuscle.com/
American Muscle has many, many links all pointing to category pages and they rank #1-3 on most all Mustang related searches.
I have not counted their links, but I am sure if there was a penalty for excessive internal linking, American Muscle would be a candidate.
-
Thanks for the response. We certainly have duplicate content issues that I'm looking to address but none of the product or sub category pages are affected so I'm convinced it;s down to excessive internal linking.
Open site explorer shows over 1700 internal links pointing to the category pages with the same anchor text.
Unless anyway has any direct advice on accessive linking I'll have to address all of the above and see how it goes,
Thanks anyway.
Todd
-
Thanks again I've freshened the content on the category pages so hopefully that will help also.
-
Todd,
One URL have /index.html and the other URL is without.
and i dnt thing you have been penalized for excessive internatl links.
and I would add more content to accommodate additional links.
-
I would not think that you are being penalized as many large sites would also be. I do not have time this morning to look over your site in detail (sorry), but run it through the Campaign manager and see what errors crop up. As Wissam mentioned, you may have canonical issues that need to be resolved. SEOmoz has many article on canonicalization.
I hope this helped
-
Hi Wissam
Thanks for the advice.
It appears the 2 URLs you gave me that point to the same content are identical? http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html
I've created some other internal links pointing to category pages but not within product or sub categories so i'll try that also.
I also plan on deep linking to these category pages but I'm worried that we have been penalised for so many internal links?
If we have been penalised I would imagine these additional external & internal links would make little difference.
Todd
-
I found multiple issues that can help you serve Google with the page you want to rank.
- I think there is an issue of Duplicate content your having with your website.
your page can be accessed by going to http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/ and http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html so what i would do is either 301 redirect or rel canonical
- In side Moss Control category items and pages try to do internal linking to the main directory.
For example http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/hard-surface-moss-killer/index.html i would link from this page to the main category
- try do to some link building to these Main category pages, (social bookmarking) blogs, articles, etc.
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
-
Shopfiy Technical SEO: Internal Linking Structure
Hi Community, While Shopify’s canonical tag properly points to the preferred version of the URL (i.e./product/product-title), internal links still point to the various non-canonical versions throughout the site. For example, in collection pages, each product thumbnail links to non-canonical URLs (i.e. /collection/collection-title/products/product-title). I know it is not good as we have to keep the linking consistent. So, I read a blog post by Moz and changed the internal link to the canonical URL(i.e./product/product-title). My change is from{{ product.url | within: collection }} to {{ product.url }}. Very interestingly, I can manage the change for some collections but some collections don't work. Can you please suggest how I can change fix the linking for all collection pages? One of the collection example that works: https://shopmtn.eu/collections/dirty-rigger ; One of the collection example that doesn't work: https://shopmtn.eu/collections/truss My Shopify Template: Parallax. THANK YOU VERY MUCHbN1Heqq zoyDPco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media0 -
Will link juice still be passed if you have the same links in multiple, outreach articles?
We are developing high quality, unique content and sending them out to bloggers to for guest posts. In these articles we have links to 2 to 3 sites. While the links are completely relevant, each article points to the same 2 to 3 sites. The link text varies slightly from article to article, but the linked-to site/URLs remain the same. We have read that it is best to have 2 to 3 external links, not all pointing to the same site. We have followed this rule, but the 2 to 3 external sites are the same sites on the other articles. I'm having a hard time explaining this, so I hope this makes sense. My concern is, will Google see this as a pattern and link juice won't be passed to the linked-to URLs, or worst penalize all/some of the sites being linked to or linked from? Someone I spoke to had suggest that my "link scheme" describes a "link wheel" and the site(s) will be penalized by Penguin. Is there any truth to this statement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Is it OK that the root didn't have any internal links?
Hi guys; In a website with more than 20,000 indexed pages, Is it normally that homepage (root) didn't have any internal links, while other important pages have enough internal links? Consider that in a top menu in header of all pages, I added homepage link, so the home page link repeated on all indexed pages, but google didn't count it and the website technology is angular js thank you for helping me
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
ECommcerce internal linking structure best practice
Hi, Can anyone advise on the best internal linking practice for an eCommerce website? Should the introduction copy on each category page contain naturally placed links down to sub categories and products and should each sub category link back up to the main category page. Is there a 'best practice' method of linking categories, sub categories and products? In terms of internal linking product pages, I presume the best practice would be to link other relevant products to each each? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SmiffysUK0 -
Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Best linking practice for international domains
SEOMoz team, I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property. Let's say you have brandname.DE (German site) brandname.FR (French site) brandname.CO.UK (British site) Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google. Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
Transfer link juice from old to new site
Hi seomozzers, The design team is building a new website for one of our clients. My role is to make sure all the link juice is kept. My first question is, should I just make 301s or is there another technique to preserve all the link juice from the old to new site that I should be focusing on? Second Question is that ok to transfer link juice using dev urls like www.dev2.example.com (new site) or 182.3456.2333? or should I wait the creation of real urls to do link juice transfer? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0