How can I reduce my warnings for excesive links on our site?
-
Our campaign overview shows well over 100 warnings that could be hurting our google ranking based on excessive links on pages. Each page listed, however, is simply due to listing the brands we carry, and linking to the products.
Is there a way to do this without hurting our ranking? A better way than linking, perhaps?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks much, everyone. Relatively new to learning SEO, I saw the warnings that came up for it and immediately grew concerned. I believe that for now, I'm going to leave them as is, and worry about the stronger warnings and errors first, then perhaps visit this subject again with a web designer who might have some options on how to cut down the links but still make this a useful page.
Again, thanks!
-
I'd tend to agree with Troy (and I'm thumbing up his replies). This isn't your home-page or sitewide navigation - having too many links on just this one page probably isn't worth worrying about too much. You could nofollow the tag links - they are redundant. Realistically, though, since they link to the same URLs, Google probably already ignores those links (even though we count them twice).
You could argue that maybe the page isn't that helpful for users and prune it down somehow, but purely from an SEO standpoint, it's not a big deal. The main issue with too many links is one of dilution. I wrote about it more here:
-
As an alternative to Derek's suggestion.. Use the same link for the logo and the text. Currently you are wrapping the img tag in one anchor and then the brand name in another. Try putting them both inside the same anchor with the
in between them.This eliminates 1 of the links from each brand. Then perhaps remove that tag cloud as Troy suggested. Honestly I didn't even see the tag cloud there until Troy mentioned it in his answer.
-
Excessive links don't necessarily hurt your ranking if they are pointing to relevant, unique pages and enhance the user experience.
But if you want to cut down the number of links on the page, you can remove the anchor text link below each logo. Both the image link and text link are pointing to the same page. You will be able to slice the number of links on page in half.
-
My pleasure. To be honest, I'm still fairly new to it myself, so I'd be curious if anyone else had a different opinion. I just know that in the past, I've just ignored some pages that don't have anything on them that will necessarily bring home the bacon. Sometimes, a page that will be useful for a user will just look like a list of brands to a search engine, so...add it to the list of disallow'd pages in our robots.txt and let it go, imo.
-
Thanks,
That's very possible. Managing SEO like this is new to us, so I just figured I'd try and fix everything. If those particular warnings aren't too critical, then that's good to know, and we can move on.
Thanks again!
-
My initial thought is that having both the logos AND the tag cloud might be overkill and part of the problem. It's basically the same information twice.
The other thing is...maybe you don't worry about this page ranking? I mean...sure, you'll see warnings about this page, but maybe set this page to "no-index" and tune the rest of your site. This page isn't going to be the one to pull in organic search results, so I would think it can just be ignored. Focus on pages that will actually return results.
-
Yes, the page is this one: http://www.dvestore.com/brands/
We do have the brands somewhat broken out over the main site, but as most people do in our field, we have one page where you can look at all brands, each picture linking to the products we carry by them.
-
Do you mean that you have pages that list all the brands in one spot? Could you break those links into larger categories? That might help them to be more organized, more easily scanned and that would also be a better user experience, I imagine.
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
-
What is the Estimated Time for SERP Rankings to Replenish after a Site Redesign?
Hello Fellow Moz'ers, My company's website, www.1099pro.com, is currently OLD and not mobile-friendly! However, we rank #1 for out most important keywords and don't want to lose that ranking. I've recently redesigned our site, currently in testing, to use the same standard desktop pages but to also have responsive, mobile friendly, pages for different view ports. My question is if anyone knows an estimated time frame that search engines (mainly Google) takes to re-crawl the site and restore SERP rankings to their previous levels? The reason is because we are HIGHLY seasonal and if we are not back at our top rankings by early December, at latest (November would be better), then we stand the chance to lose a considerable amount of traffic/revenue. -The Unenlightened One
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Links not visible in "Google cache text version" but visible in "Fetch as Google" in Webmaster tool
Hi Guys, There seems some issue with the coding due to which Google is not indexing half of our menu bar links. The cached text version of http://www.99acres.com/ is not showing links present in dropdown "All India" , dropdown "Advice" and "Hot Projects" tab in blue bar on top menu whereas these links are visible in "Fetch as Google" in Google Webmaster tool. Any clue to why is there a difference between the links shown in Google webmaster and Google cache text version. Thanks in advance 🙂
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Too Many Links on One Page - What to Do?!
Hello Geniuses, Prodigies, and Experts of the Field, My website pages for www.1099pro.com have too many links on one page, something like 150-175, and I understand that each page should ideally be under 100. Most of these links, approx 105, come from dropdown navigation options in the header toolbar or the footer links. It is my take that these links make our site easier to navigate but I'm sure that they are hurting my pagerank / SERPs. Is there a best way to handle a situation like this? I'd really prefer not to alter the header/footer layout of the entire site by removing 50-75 navigational links. The only other idea I have is below but I have no idea if it would work. For any link that I do not care to pass pagerank, institute a "nofollow" parameter. This would be my favorite option if it is viable.
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Over Optimization & Footer Links for Crediting Web Design to a Company
With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | JoshGill270 -
Site Change / CMS Change
Hi Guys I have a very good client with whom we have been working with for over 2 years. When we 1st arrived, their website was built in Wordpress. During our SEO, the dleted the site and changed it to Drupal over night. Youc an imagin i went balistic and its been a horrid year in getting all the rrors down and redirects etc. Finally done I have just been informed that they will be deleting the website from Drupal to Joomla again! This is crazy as we have finally fix all the rrors and are driving quality traffic to the site. Now its back to square one... What do i do? ps the change from Drupal to Joomla is due to MYSQL issues
Web Design | | stefanok0 -
Best way to handle related content links in a sidebar?
My site contains tens of thousands of articles, studies, multimedia files, biographies, etc. To assist users with finding content that might be related to the page they're on, I use a side bar with 'also of interest' links to other, similar content on my site. This is, of course, pretty standard practice. Search engines -- Google in particular -- index these pages and then include the text in the sidebar links in search results. So, for example, on a given page I may have 20 links to related content, and the text in those links might be, 'A story about subject ABC.' When I search for 'A story about subject ABC,' Google returns not only the page titled (and containing the content) 'A story about subject ABC.' but also every page that links to it and happens to have that link text in the sidebar. What is the proper way to handle this kind of thing?
Web Design | | smorrison0