Too many on page links - created by filters
-
I have an ecommerce site and SEOmoz "Crawl Diagnostics Summary" points out that I have too many hyperlinks on most of my pages.
The most recent thing I've done that could the culprit is the creation of number product filters. Each filter I put on the page is creating a hyperlink off that page. As an example, there's a filter available for manufacturers. Under that, there are 8 new filter links, thus new hyperlinks. On one category there are 60 new links created because of filters.
I feel like these filters have made the user experience on the site better BUT has dramatically increased the number of outbound links off the page. I know keeping it to under 100 is a rule-of-thumb but at the same time there must be some validity to trying to limit them.
Do you have any recommendation on how I can "have my cake and eat it too?"
Thanks for any help!
-
Hi Jake,
Thanks for the question.
First off, I highly recommend reading this article by Dr. Pete: How Many Links are Too Many? (he get's asked this question a lot!)
Short answer: over 100 links isn't necessarily bad. If you're consolidating those links via rel=canonical Google is likely doing this in their crawl, and therefor reducing the crawling of every single URL in order to save bandwidth. If those pages rel canonical to each other, you may not have a problem. I would recommend checking your parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools, just to be safe.
That said, I've often found that reducing the number of links on a page often improves user experience. There's a certain psychology around limiting choices that makes decisions easier for users. I'm not saying this is right for your situation, but it's always best to question your assumptions.
Cheers.
-
Hi Irving,
First, thanks for your comments. No, I am using a custom, in house CMS, not Magento.
My terminology was mistaken. I was calling these outbound links but SEOMoz is basically labeling them in a warning label:
" Issue: Too Many On-Page Links" and that I need to limit them to 100 or less.
-I do have canonical tags setup for each of these filter pages but are you saying I also need to handle that inside WMTs also?
-Although these links are hyperlinks to internal pages, in the sense they are outbound relative to the specific page but point to Dynamically created pages one the same site, should I not worry about them? I just cannot think of "above the board" way to show these to the user but not have them hurt me from the big G's perspective.
I have a quick capture attached:
Thanks,
Jason -
you're using magento i take it
by outbound link you mean links to another website? if you don't mean that then it's ok - the filter URLs are parameters being appended so you need to address them in the parameter handling section of WMT to tell Google not to index them as individual pages or you will be creating a duplicate content issue.
add canonical tags too, to tell Google only index the main page, not the appended filter URLs
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
-
Creating Tables with Multiple Links
Hello, Is Creating Tables with Multiple Links and using schema markup bad SEO? For example I have a real estate website which I have a hierarchy of home page -> County pages -> city pages-> blog posts.. However at the bottom of the county pages I list the city pages i serve under a table with links..
On-Page Optimization | | sqc0 -
Building a new page: What on-page SEO would you build in?
Hi all, Building a new page for a fairly competitive keyword. Need to make sure the on-page SEO is pretty top notch, because link building (including internal links) will be difficult. I've optimised the meta description, the alt tags and image names, and included the keyword in the Title Tags. Not a great deal I can do with regards to optimising for mobile or considering migrating to the AMP project because this is handled externally. What else would you suggest? Cheers in advance, Rhys
On-Page Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine1 -
Canonical home page references - logo link
should a website's logo be linked to the "abc.com/index.html" page or to the "abc.com" domain root? Is one better for the search engine robots?
On-Page Optimization | | mtishman1 -
To Many Links On Page
I'm having a problem on a crawl warning for our main site. The warning is that every one of my pages has to many links, a little over 1,000 on almost all of them. I think this is because our category list on our left hand sidebar has so many categories, and that sidebar appears on every last one of our pages even all the way into our products. Can anyone take a look and tell me if this is the reason why and what I could possibly do about this? Thanks in advance! www.Ocelco.com
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean0 -
Exstinguishing Page Rank?
Hi Guys, Here is a thought. Google gives more weight to links in content, less to navigation etc.. Therefore if they say give 50% of a pages rank to a link within content and 50% to the the other elements. What happens to the total pagerank from a page if you have not utilized in page content links? (is it lost) If this is the case, and you have a site that does not use content links on every page, are you loosing value (and hard earned) pagerank. Google did mention sometime back about pagerank being exstinguished with the nofollow tag. I would be interested to hear what others think? Cheers Scott
On-Page Optimization | | Jurnii0 -
Source page leading to a 404 pages in reports
Hi everybody, I wonder how to find and quickly correct 404 errors in my crawl reports : SeoMoz says me "http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead" is 404, but I can't figure out a source page where a link to that url appears. I tried a google link:http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead request, with no more luck. I imagine the trick is trivial, but I need it 🙂 Moreover, why do not show a list of pages referring to this 404 page on reports ? Thanks, Loïc
On-Page Optimization | | mandinga0 -
Internal Linking
Hi Everyone, Should i be careful of how many internal links I have on one page? For example if i have a page that contains 700 words, can i have 5, 10, 15 internal links linking to other pages on my website? Is there a ratio for best practice. I know that internal linking is important for spiders to crawl your website but at the same time dont make it look spammy. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for any help.
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780 -
Should H1s be used in the logo? If they are and it is dynamic on each page to relate to the page content, is this detrimental to the site rather than having it in the page content?
On some sites, the H1 is contained within the logo and remains consistent throughout the site (i.e. the company name is in the of the logo). If the h1 in a logo is dynamic for each page (i.e. on the homepage it is company name - homepage) is this better or worse to have it changed out on the logo rather than having it in the page content?
On-Page Optimization | | CabbageTree0