Flow of internal link equity
-
I've recently come across this:
A site changes the URL of one internal page to something more search friendly, and 301's the old to the new as you would expect.
They don't change the link on the homepage in the navigation. Instead they keep it to the old URL so they go through the 301 to get to the page even though it's internal.
They say if they change the URL it will reset the internal flow of link equity to that page.
I've not come across this before and so am not sure what to think. I mean I can see what they're saying but I would have though that it being internal would mean it's different and that the flow to internal pages would just kind of resume as-was quite soon afterwards.
Any views?
-
Steve... "P" for Pope too!
-
Hehe I felt the need to go check out the pope's new site from that, nice amount of links as one would expect but some awful on-site... the whole thing is an image, and then tables instead of CSS on other pages... and no analytics
-
...and refuse to give it upper-case on principle
Bad attitude... you will never get a link from the Pope's new site until you start using "G".
-
"Ask them if they ever hunt rabbits.
Then ask if they try to kill them by shooting straight at them or if they try to hit them with a ricochet. :-)"
EGOL, it may get me into trouble but I swear to god I am actually going to do that... I'm going to ask them that exactly how you've said it because I just won't be able to resist it now lol.
Thanks... for the burst of laughter and for the answer I needed!
P.S. All Viewers: Before anybody points it out, I know god is meant to have a capital G but I'm an anti-theist and refuse to give it upper-case on principle (I get corrected on that purposeful typo a lot so thought I'd nip it in the bud this time).
-
They don't change the link on the homepage in the navigation. Instead they keep it to the old URL so they go through the 301 to get to the page even though it's internal.
Ask them if they ever hunt rabbits.
Then ask if they try to kill them by shooting straight at them or if they try to hit them with a ricochet.
They say if they change the URL it will reset the internal flow of link equity to that page.
If you have trouble extracting them from this thinking then I don't think that they are ready for your services. You will be pulling teeth through every step of the job.
-
Yeah that's pretty much what I was thinking but then could they be right? I mean there doesn't seem to be any data anywhere to show if it does have an affect on the linked-to page (however minimal). Somebody somewhere must have tested it.
It does make sense to keep it seen as a moved page and not a new one to keep whatever trust it's built up but surely as an internal page, any new page that replaces it wouldn't take long to pull that same trust back in anyway (this is based on the fact that it's not exactly got a lot of equity anyway).
-
Yep, that sounds like a load of old cobblers to me. Surely, you change a page, you update your navigation?
"reset the internal flow of link equity?" - really? So, are they implying that if they link to the new page in the navigation, it will somehow affect the ranking of said page. But if they use the 301 it will be fine?
Sounds like someone not really getting what is going on here behind the scenes. I can only imagine that they want googlebot to crawl that link to realise the page name has been updated and have somehow extrapolated this from that train of thought with the intention of making sure it is seen as a moved page rather than a new one.
Marcus
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
-
Redirect inbound links to youtube?
I have a website that's been going for 10 years or so, doesn't get huge traffic but it's fairly consistent. About 5 years ago I put the same content on youtube- instructional how to videos. The website offers slightly better content because there are images to accompany the step by step text below the videos. The text is more or less the same on youtube and my website. Recently, youtube has started to vastly out-perform my website. For every page/video on my website, there is a youtube page. They're basically competing against each other. Over the years I have accrued a fair number of links to my website. My question is, should I redirect my inbound links to the relevant youtube pages and sacrifice my website? Thanks! Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madegood0 -
Dynamic referenced canonical pages based on IP region and link equity question
Hi all, My website uses relative URLs that has PHP to read a users IP address, and update the page's referenced canonical tag to an region specific absolute URL for ranking / search results. E.g. www.example.com/category/product - relative URL referenced for internal links / external linkbuilding If a US IP address hits this link, the URL is the same, but canonicalisation is updated in the source to reference www.example.com**/us/**category/product, so all ranking considerations are pointed to that page instead. None of these region specific pages are actually used internally within the site. This decision was done so external links / blog content would fit a user no matter where they were coming from. I'm assuming this is an issue in trying to pass link equity with Googlebot, because it is splitting the strength between different absolute canonical pages depending on what IP it's using to crawl said links (as the relative URL will dynamically alter the canonical reference which is what ranking in SERPs) Any assistance or information no matter how small would be invaluable. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos0 -
Is it OK that the root didn't have any internal links?
Hi guys; In a website with more than 20,000 indexed pages, Is it normally that homepage (root) didn't have any internal links, while other important pages have enough internal links? Consider that in a top menu in header of all pages, I added homepage link, so the home page link repeated on all indexed pages, but google didn't count it and the website technology is angular js thank you for helping me
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
Strange internal links and trying to improve PR ? - Please advise
Hi All, I've been looking at the internal links on my eCommerce site to try and improve PR and get it as efficient as possible so link juice isnt getting wasted etc and I've come across some odd ones I would like some advice on My website currently has between 125-146 links on every page (Sitemap approx 3500 pages). From what I read ,the ideal number of links is under 100 but can someone confirm is this is still the case ?..Is it a case of less is more , in terms of improving a page PR etc ? in terms of link juice strength etc so it's not getting diluted to unnecessary pages. One of my links is a bad url ( my domain + phone number for reason) which currently goes to a 404 page ?. - Is this okay or do we need to track down the link and remove it. I don't want link juice getting wasted as it's on every page. Another one of my links is my domain.name/# and another one with some characters after the # which both to the home page. Example www.domain.co.uk/# and www.domain.co.uk#abcde both go to homepage. Is this okay or am I potentially getting duplicate content as If I put these urls in , they go to my home page. I have a link on every page which opens up outlook (email) on the contact us. Should this really be changed to a button with a contact us form opening up instead ? I currently have 9 links on the bottom on every page i.e About it , delivery , hire terms,.contact us , trade accounts , privacy, sitemap. When I check , these pages seem to be my strongest pages in terms of PR. Is that because they are on every page?.. Should I look to reduce these links as they are accessible from the navigation menu apart from privacy and sitemap. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Internal links to preferential pages
Hi all, I have question about internal linking and canonical tags. I'm working on an ecommerce website which has migrated platform (shopify to magento) and the website design has been updated to a whole new look. Due to the switch to magento, the developers have managed to change the internal linking structure to product pages. The old set up was that category pages (on urls domain.com/collections/brand-name) for each brand would link to products via the following url format: domain.com/products/product-name . This product url was the preferential version that duplicate product pages generated by shopify would have their canonical tags pointing to. This set up was working fine. Now what's happened is that the category pages have been changed to link to products via dynamically generated urls based on the user journey. So products are now linked to via the following urls: domain.com/collection/brand-name/product-name . These new product pages have canonical tags pointing back to the original preferential urls (domain.com/products/product-name). But this means that the preferential URLs for products are now NOT linked to anywhere on the website apart from within canonical tags and within the website's sitemap. I'm correct in thinking that this definitely isn't a good thing, right? I've actually noticed Google starting to index the non-preferential versions of the product pages in addition to the preferential versions, so it looks like Google perhaps is ignoring the canonical tags as there are so many internal links pointing to non-preferential pages, and no on-site links to the actual preferential pages? I've recommended to the developers that they change this back to how it was, where the preferential product pages (domain.com/products/product-name) were linked to from collection pages. I just would like clarification from the Moz community that this is the right call to make? Since the migration to the new website & platform we've seen a decrease in search traffic, despite all redirects being set up. So I feel that technical issues like this can't be doing the website any favours at all. If anyone could help out and let me know if what I suggested is correct then that would be excellent. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Guy_OTS0 -
Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords. I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu. I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together. Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County) I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google. I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text. When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu) Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rnperki
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about? A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them. Many Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
I currently have a client that has multiple domains for multiple brands that share the same IP Address. Will link juice be passed along to the different sites when they link to one another or will it simply be considered internal linking?
I have 7 brands that are owned by the same company, each with their own domain. The brands work together to form products that are then sold to the consumer although there is not a e-commerce aspect to any of the sites. I am looking to create a modified link wheel between the sites, but didn't know if my efforts would pay off due to the same IP Address for all the sites. Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HughesDigital0 -
First Link Priority question - image/logo in header links to homepage
I have not found a clear answer to this particular aspect of the "first link priority" discussion, so wanted to ask here. Noble Samurai (makers of Market Samurai seo software) just posted a video discussing this topic and referencing specifically a use case example where when you disable all the css and view the page the way google sees it, many times companies use an image/logo in their header which links to their homepage. In my case, if you visit our site you can see the logo linking back to the homepage, which is present on every page within the site. When you disable the styling and view the site in a linear path, the logo is the first link. I'd love for our first link to our homepage include a primary keyword phrase anchor text. Noble Samurai (presumably seo experts) posted a video explaining this specifically http://www.noblesamurai.com/blog/market-samurai/website-optimization-first-link-priority-2306 and their suggested code implementations to "fix" it http://www.noblesamurai.com/first-link-priority-templates which use CSS and/or javascript to alter the way it is presented to the spiders. My web developer referred me to google's webmaster central: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353 where they seem to indicate that this would be attempting to hide text / links. Is this a good or bad thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dcutt0