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
-
'Security error' for links accessed via Facebook on Android phones
Hi, This is not strictly a SEO/inbound marketing question, so please excuse me for that--- but I think this awesome community could certainly help 🙂 We recently migrated a client website to https (SSL from Godaddy; the hosting provider is a different one). All that went fine. The problem though is that when a link from the website is shared on Facebook or sent via Whatsapp, and a user tries to open the page on any Android device, it throws up a Security Error. On the Facebook app, it doesn't allow the user to go any further. It seems that this problem is not unique and many others have raised it in various forums -- we've tried many of the options mentioned; have tried to work with Godaddy support as well ---- but the problem persists. Any solution(s)/fixes will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Manoj
Web Design | | ontarget-media0 -
Do Follow Link In Footer Only: How Do I Do it?
In a past Q&A forum about web design companies adding footer links to the websites they make, I really liked Irving Weisses' solution where he stated: "I think the best solution is a dofollow homepage ONLY footer link. This is the highest PR page, usually the most traffic so good visibility for advertising, you're not creating tons of sitewide links with identical anchor texts, and the owner is only leaking some PR on their homepage." I want to implement this but would like to know the best way to do this. I deal Wordpress 95% of the time. Is there a plugin or CSS code that would allow me to put a Do follow link in the footer but make the link disappear on all the other pages? Thanks in advanced everyone 🙂 Wesley Barras, Houston, TX
Web Design | | Wesley-Barras0 -
Having a second homepage for a site would affect my SEO?
Hello guys, One of our clients is planning to have a new landing page for any users hitting the site for the first time. (returning users will still see the current homepage based on cookies ... in other words, the site would technically have 2 home pages). According to this client, they are planning to do something like this: https://www.websitename.com/ (for returning visitors) https://www.websitename.com/newuser (for first time visitors) Our instinct is that is not great to have 2 home pages (that would affect the SEO campaign we are managing for this company) and we are not sure how to handle this. That's why we would appreciate your opinion regarding this topic: From an SEO perspective, do you think this is a good idea? If not, what would you guys do differentiate first-time visitors vs returning visitors without affecting SEO? Maybe just a pop-up? Thanks in advance for your help !
Web Design | | Robertnweil10 -
Best Place for Back Linking
Does anyone have a good list or know where I can find one to show me the best sites to create some organic back links to mine, preferably without paying for them? Thanks to those who help, Craig Fenton IT
Web Design | | craigyboy0 -
What is wrong with our site?
Hello Seomoz friends. I've about to pull all my hair out and need to turn somewhere. Our site, www.sightmax.com has been around since 2004. We used to be ranked at the top of page two on google under the keyword "live chat". We are no on page 4, heading to page 5. Can anyone take a look at the site and see if anything jumps out at you? The only way we have been able to get on the first page, is the pay for google adwords (which we've been doing every month for 7 years). Again, the site www.sightmax.com and the keyword is "live chat". Any help or feedback would be appreciated SO MUCH! Thanks! Eric
Web Design | | EricWeber0 -
How to serve a Mobile & Full Site using one URL?
Hello, Does anyone know of any resources or tutorials that outline how to serve a smartphone-formatted website using the same URL as the full site? I know that one solution is using media-queries to serve a seperate CSS stylesheet, but you still have the full HTML source code. In other words, I might want to serve a smartphone & desktop user different content, but under one URL. WP Touch (Wordpress Plugin) is a perfect example of what I mean, but how is it technically achieved? It serves two different sets of HTML for smartphone & full, but using one URL http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch-pro/
Web Design | | petecampbell-bmi0 -
Redesign of an ecommerce site
We are thinking to redesign our ecommerce site and was wondering would we loose our google rankings in any way? That's something we don't want. We want to achieve a better and cleaner looking website. It's a more like template redesign. But adding extra functionalities. We will add upselling and crossselling features to product pages. Some products have reviews and some don't. If a product doesn't have a review random testimonials will replace the reviews. We will redirect all urls's if category structure changes. All content title, headings remain same. Any suggestions are welcome 🙂
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons. However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week. However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint. Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know): - Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile. - Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically. This would make the page go on forever though. - Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin. - Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc Any input would be greatly appreciated asap! Thanks Mike
Web Design | | MikeATL0