Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Removed Site-wide links
-
Hi there,
I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords?
Thanks
-
Hi Geoff.
1. These are not websites I own, I had asked the webmaster to remove these site-wide links which they did.
2. They are not hosted on the same server.
3. The anchor text was keyword specific.
4. As a preventative measure, however it looks like this has back-fired.
5. Not to my knowledge, check PR and all is still the same.
6. Yes, they do have other links pointing to it, however in terms of percentage very little, as these were site-wide which was going into the thousands.
Some keywords have disappeared that were not in the site-wide links, which is a concern, maybe there is something else going on?
Shall I get the webmaster to re-instate these site-wide links?
-
Hi Anthony,
As a preventative measure, however it looks like it's backfired. The site-wide links were not on spammy websites, there were high PR, lots of social interaction etc.
Would you ask to get these back on site-wide?
-
There are so many questions here really before it's clear what the cause could be, some of these include:-
- Are these from other sites you own? One would presume so if you access to remove the links?
- If so, are these sites hosted on the same server as the domain they were pointing to?
- Did the sitewide links contain keywords as the anchor text or were they branded?
- Why did you choose to remove the sitewide links in the first place?
- Did any of the other websites containing these sitewide links suffer recently as a result of algorithm updates or decline in rankings.
- The page(s) that the sitewide links were pointing to, does this have other existing links still pointing to it? What % were they were reduced by after the removal of the sitewide links? And of those existing, are they a mix of nofollow/dofollow?
Often, the removal of mass of backlinks will cause a drop as you've experienced. Normally because it's a major shift in the link profile and doesn't look 'natural', providing there was legitimate reasons and there are no other issues that can be raised against the domain in question, often, ranking positions are pretty much reinstated again.
Incidentally, how we often get round this scenario is to keep the sitewide link in place but write a script to only make the link on the homepage followed - and all the others add the nofollow link relationship.
-
Are you doing this as a preventative measure or had you already seen a significant drop in rankings before making this decision?
I would only remove them if they are on spammy sites. Then, focus on getting some more good, branded links to even out your backlink profile.
-
Hi Geoff,
I am removing site-wide links externally.
-
Are you removing sitewide links on other domains pointing to your website or are you referring to sitewide internal linkage within your own site?
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
-
Removing Toxic Back Links Targeting Obscure URL or Image
There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
10,000+ links from one site per URL--is this hurting us?
We manage content for a partner site, and since much of their content is similar to ours, we canonicalized their content to ours. As a result, some URLs have anything from 1,000,000 inbound links / URL to 10,000+ links / URL --all from the same domain. We've noticed a 10% decline in traffic since this showed up in our webmasters account & were wondering if we should nofollow these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Link Building Ideas for a health site
Hi, I am trying to rank a health related website. This is the url: www.ridpiles.com Domain age is 1 year 6 months. Done Directory submissions Blog Comments + Forum posts Done Social Bookmarks Article submissions (Not much) I have done competitor analysis. All of my competitors are just had links from directories and some link exchanges. They got links from quality sites like Yahoo dir. I know my site is far better than my competitors and has 100% unique content. I have submitted to yahoo directory inclusion, but still no luck i hadn't accepted into it. I am planning to go for a sponsered review but dont know, weather the link will be valuable for that much of money. I was left with Guest Blogging. I see this is the only option for me to build links. But i have a very tough competiton, i must compete with most reputed sites like webmd.com etc, i need to get more good links. But i cant get what other ways to get authoritative links. If Guest blogging is the only option for me, how many posts do i need to do daily? And can someone suggest me good Guest blogging sites? Anyhelp would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0 -
Site Architecture: Cross Linking vs. Siloing
I'm curious to know what other mozzers think about silo's... Can we first all agree that a flat site architecture is the best practice? Relevant pages should be grouped together. Shorter, broader and (usually) therefore higher volume keywords should be towards the top of each category. Navigation should flow from general to specific. Agreed? As Google say's on page 10 of their SEO Starter Guide, "you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content ." OK, we all agree so far, right? Great! Enter my question: Bruce Clay (among others) seem to recommend siloing as a best practice. While Richard Baxter (and many others @ SEOmoz), seem to view silos as a problem. Me? I've practiced (relevant) internal cross linking, and have intentionally avoided siloing in almost all cases. What about you? Is there a time and place to use silos? If so, when and where? If not, how do we rectify the seemingly huge differences of opinions between expert folks such as Baxter and Clay?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DonnieCooper7 -
Getting Google to Correct a Misspelled Site Link...Help!
My company website recently got its site links in google search... WooHoo! However, when you type TECHeGO into Google Search one of the links is spelled incorrectly. Instead of 'CONversion Optimization' its 'COversion Optimization'. At first I thought there was a misspelling on that page somewhere but there is not and have come to the conclusion that Google has made a mistake. I know that I can block the page in webmaster tools (No Thanks) but how in the crap can I get them to correct the spelling when no one really knows how to get them to appear in the first place? Riddle Me That Folks! sitelink.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TECHeGO0