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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Analyzing a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages on Magento and not getting much organic traffic to level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: Primary Keyword Target: BODY MOISTURISERS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/bath-body/moisturisers.html Primary Keyword Target: LIP MASKS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/masks/lip-masks.html Plus another 40 other URLs at level 3 with low organic performance. Authority of the domain is strong, so it's not an authority issue I believe its internal linking. Besides linking form the blog and breadcrumbs is there anything we can do to improve internal linking to these level 3 pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
Using hreflang for international pages - is this how you do it?
My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics. The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up. I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc. What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple 🙂 Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /1 -
Robots.txt issue for international websites
In Google.co.uk, our US based (abcd.com) is showing: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more But UK website (uk.abcd.com) is working properly. We would like to disappear .com result totally, if possible. How to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JinnatUlHasan0 -
Can internal links from a blog harm the ranking of a page?
Here is the situation: A site was moved from its original domain to its new domain, and at the same time, the external wordpress.com blog was moved to a subdirectory, making it an onsite blog. The two pages that rank the highest on the site have virtually no links from the blog and no external links, while all the other pages are linked extensively from the blog and have backlinks. Their targeted keywords are not so much easier to rank than the other pages for that to be the sole cause. To confuse the matter even more, there was a manual penalty affecting incoming links which was removed last month. The old site, which has many backlinks to the new site, is still in Google's index. The old blog however, has been redirected page by page and is not in Google's index. Most of the blog posts are short 1-paragraph company updates and potentially considered low quality content because of that (?) The common denominator among the two highest ranked pages (I'm talking top 3 in SERP v. page 3 or 4) seems to be either the lack of external backlinks or the lack of internal links from the blog. Could there be an issue with the blog such that internal links from it are detrimental rather than helpful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
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 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Does title text of homepage effect ranking of sub pages?
Question is pretty much summed up in the title. I realize that title text on a specific page can effect the ranking of that page. But what I'm getting a feeling of lately is that google uses the title text of your homepage to effect the ranking of the site on a whole. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg1 -
Ideal number of Anchor text keyword variations
Let's suppose that I want to rank for the keyword "hotels". If I put this keyword in ALL of the link anchor texts then Google will very likely penalize the site. My question is: How many keyword variations should I use in anchors (provided I want to rank for just one KW i.e. "hotels")? Would one keyword variation be okay and is it fine to use main keyword in 80% anchors and the keyword variation(s) in just 20% anchor texts, such as : hotels 80% cheap hotels 20% Note: I do not want to rank for "cheap hotels", just want to use it as an anchor variation of my desired keyword "hotels". Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RightDirection0