Internal Anchor Text Penalty Clarification
-
I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.
Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer.
We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer.
Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text.
I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories.
If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site?
Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice?
Thanks.
-
Here's a dated thread (2009) from Rand.
And another from a daily blog a few days ago.
Rand's blog #2 is what concerns me.
Take this page for example (Alan, hold your breath this is a CMS site). The intent is to channel the juice to those pages.
Every page on our site has a similar link strategy. I've tried to link according to the product "neighborhood" or to similar/related pages. The only exception is the link to our western horse tack page. I've tried to link to the western tack page from just about every other product and category page.
The result is a sizable increase in page authority, but just recently the page rank has dropped significantly.
My understanding from other threads is that a person can "stuff" anchor text and accrue a penalty for it.
Alan, is your article suggesting an html sitemap is not necessary if I'm conducting targeted linking on product and category pages?
-
nor me.
but seeing you have added a sitemap to your footer, it may be that you have changed your internal linking stucture and the flow of link juice around your site.
Havering a sitemap on every page means your link juice is not being used to its otimum
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
-
I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.
A penalty for internal anchor text?
I've never heard of that.
-
I literally just got off the phone with Jake over at Virante (in NC) and one thing he was mentioning was Anchor Text penalization and that it occurs on the keyword level. If/when you get dinged on the keyword level and presumably with 1700 products that could be some serious keyword cannibalization. Try just using the/a brand name URL [http://www.youdomain.com] or [http://www.afilliatesdomain.com] when utilizing Anchor Text. Google will not penalize you on a "brand level" whereas they might for being hyper-prolific with "Green Widgets" or some other generic popularized keyword (phrase).
Shameless Plug: follow me @derZukunft
Good luck and good on ya,
Cheers,
Brian
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
-
More internal links pointing to internal page vs homepage
I was looking at our GSC internal links section and I saw that we have 901 internal links going to our compare rates form and 890 going to our homepage. At the end of most of our content I add a call to action to our compare rates form. Is this SEO friendly or should I have more pointing to the homepage and less pointing to our compare rates page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Penalties for duplicate content
Hello!We have a website with various city tours and activities listed on a single page (http://vaiduokliai.lt/). The list changes accordingly depending on filtering (birthday in Vilnius, bachelor party in Kaunas, etc.). The URL doesn't change. Content changes dynamically. We need to make URL visible for each category, then optimize it for different keywords (for example city tours in Vilnius for a list of tours and activities in Vilnius with appropriate URL /tours-in-Vilnius).The problem is that activities overlap very often in different categories, so there will be a lot of duplicate content on different pages. In such case, how severe penalty could be for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
Adding some unique text to search
I do not know how to easily explain that but I will try 🙂 We are running the yellow pages in our country, where most (all) of the companies are listed. Each company has their keywords that are used in our search. All of those search keywords are indexed by Google and it goes something like that domain.com/search/keyword So far this page only lists the companies that match the search query. So that's not much content. I'm thinking about adding a sentence that would go something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
The search query lists the companies of our country that do KEYWORD. So far COUNT was found. That seems pretty short and I am not sure if that does a lot of help for Google. But I cannot think of more text. Any ideas? Or should I give up on the idea of adding anything at all?0 -
Ranking problems with international website
Hey there, we have some ranking issues with our international website. It would be great if any of you could share their thoughts on that. The website uses subfolders for country and language (i.e. .com/uk/en) for the website of the UK branch in English. As the company has branches all over the world and also offers their content in many languages the url structure is quite complex. A recent problem we have seen is that in certain markets the website is not ranking with the correct country. Especially in the UK and the US, Google prefers the country subfolder for Ghana (.com/gh/en) over the .com/us/en and .com/uk/en versions. We have hreflang setup and should also have some local backlinks pointing to the correct subfolders as we switched from many ccTLDs to one gTLD. What confuses me is that when I check for incoming links (Links to your site) with GWT, the subfolder (.com/gh/en) is listed quite high in the column (Your most linked content). However the listed linking domains are not linking at all to this folder as far as I am aware. If I check them with a redirect checker they all link to different subfolders. So I have now idea why Google gives such high authority to this subfolder over the specific country subfolders. The content is pretty much identical at this stage. Has any of you experienced similar behaviour and could point me in a promising direction? Thanks a lot. Regards, Jochen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online-Marketing-Guy0 -
ALT Tag Labels that Use Near Duplicate Text-SEO No, No???
Greetings Moz Community: About 280 pages of my 650 page commercial real estate website are listing pages. Each listing page contains between two and five photos, each with a corresponding ALT tag. My developer has set up the labeling of the ALT tags in the following manner. I can create a label for the first photo, but each subsequent photo automatically gets the same label plus a number tagged to the ALT. Like this: alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 0"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 1"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 2"
alt="Flatiron Loft for Rent - Photo 3" Is this method neutral, positive or negative for SEO? I am concerned that this manner of labeling ALT tags might risk triggering a duplicate content penalty. In early July I migrated the site from Drupal to Wordpress. We changed the URL structure (adding a sub-directory) for the listings at that time. Google is refusing to index about 100 listing pages. Any chance the ALT tags are contributing to Google's reluctance to index the URLs? I might also add that images are hosted on Amazon's CDN. A sample listing URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/278-21st-street-flatiron-loft-for-rent
Note: (/listings/278) were added to the URL in July, representing the listing sub directory plus the listing number. I Look forward to hearing the opinion of the MOZ community!!! THANKS!!!
Alan1 -
Moving Part of a Website to a Subdomain to Remove Panda Penalty?
I have lots of news on my website and unlike other types of content, news posts quickly become obsolete and get a high bounce rate. I have reasons to think that the news on my website might be partly responsible for a Panda penalty so I'm not sure. There are over 400 news posts on the blog from the last 4 years so that's still a lot of content. I was thinking of isolating the news articles on a subdomain (news.mywebsite.com) If the news play a part in the Panda penalty, would that remove it from the main domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1 -
How long does a Google penalty last if you have fixed the problem??
Hi I stupidly thought that it would be a good idea to set up a reciprocal links page on my website named 'links'. I did this because my competitors were linking to these pages so I though it would be a good idea and I genuinely didn't know that you could be punished for this. Within about 3 weeks my rank dropped about 3 pages. I have since removed the links and the page was cached last Friday but the site still appears to have a penalty. I assumed when Google cached the page and saw the links were not there anymore that the penalty would be lifted. Anyone got any ideas? ps. The competitor websites had broken their links pages into various categories relating to the website i.e. related directories etc. so this might be why they weren't penalized.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BelfastSEO0