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
-
Site wide decrease in featured snippets
Hi, As of April we have seen a huge drop in the number of featured snippets and I'm unsure why. No major changes have been made to the site. We did submit to to Google news at a similar times (failed unfortunately) I have plotted our featured snippets and competitors featured snippets form data from Semrush and most our competitors have seen a fall in number of featured snippets. There has also been a large fall for some categories specifically. But overall we have seen the largest drop out of everyone. (See attached Graph) Does anyone have any clues as to why Google would remove multiple featured snippets from one website in particular. Thanks. OwseH
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sally940 -
Site deindexed after HTTPS migration + possible penalty due to spammy links
Hi all, we've recently migrated a site from http to https and saw the majority of pages drop out of the index. https://www.relate.org.uk/ One of the most extreme deindexation problems I've ever seen, but there doesn't appear to be anything obvious on-page which is causing the issue. (Unless I've missed something - please tell me if I have!) I had initially discounted any off-page issues due to the lack of a manual action in SC, however after looking into their link profile I spotted 100 spammy porn .xyz sites all linking (see example image). Didn't appear to be any historic disavow files uploaded in the non https SC accounts. Any on-page suggestions, or just play the waiting game with the new disavow file? Hku8I
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTI_Digital0 -
How much SEO damage would it do having a subdomain site rather directory site?
Hi all! With a coleague we were arguing about what is better: Having a subdomain or a directory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Let me explain some more, this is about the cases: Having a multi-language site: Where en.domain.com or es.domain.com rather than domain.com/en/ or domain.com/es/ Having a Mobile and desktop version: m.domain.com or domain.com rather than domain.com/m or just domain.com. Having multiple location websites, you might figure. The dicussion started with me saying: Its better to have a directory site.
And my coleague said: Its better to have a subdomain site. Some of the reasons that he said is that big companies (such as wordpress) are doing that. And that's better for the business.
My reasons are fully based on this post from Rand Fishkin: Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO - Whiteboard Friday So, what does the community have to say about this?
Who should win this argue? GR.0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
301 Externally Linked, But Non-Producing Pages, To Productive Pages Needing Links?
I'm working on a site that has some non-productive pages without much of an upside potential, but that are linked-to externally. The site also has some productive pages, light in external links, in a somewhat related topic. What do you think of 301ing the non-productive pages with links to the productive pages without links in order to give them more external link love? Would it make much of a difference? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Does link juice pass along the URL or the folders? 10yr old PR 6 site
We have a website that is ~10yrs old and a PR 6. It has a bunch of legitimate links from .edu and .gov sites. Until now the owner has never blogged or added much content to the site. We have suggested that to grow his traffic organically he should add a worpress blog and get agressive with his content. The IT guy is concerned about putting a wordpress blog on the same server as the main site because of security issues with WP. They have a bunch of credit card info on file. So, would it be better to just put the blog on a subdomain like blog.mysite.com OR host the blog on another server but have the URL structure be mysite.com/blog? I have tried to pass as much juice as possible. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonsixtwo0 -
I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location. I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance. What would your recommendation be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lagunaitech1 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770