Best practices for controlling link juice with site structure
-
I'm trying to do my best to control the link juice from my home page to the most important category landing pages on my client's e-commerce site. I have a couple questions regarding how to NOT pass link juice to insignificant pages and how best to pass juice to my most important pages.
INSIGNIFICANT PAGES:
How do you tag links to not pass juice to unimportant pages. For example, my client has a "Contact" page off of there home page. Now we aren't trying to drive traffic to the contact page, so I'm worried about the link juice from the home page being passed to it. Would you tag the Contact link with a "no follow" tag, so it doesn't pass the juice, but then include it in a sitemap so it gets indexed? Are there best practices for this sort of stuff?
-
Here is my simplistic take:
- Create a logical site hierarchy that works for UX. Don't worry about link juice to pages like the contact page.
- Focus on linking to your most important (high ranking, high converting, revenue earning) pages from the home page and other high level pages.
-
To add on here, creating authority to your website comes from siloing your website. Meaning your keyword research and knowledge on certain subjects will guide you in setting up many pages in your "site" that can help in passing link juice to your most top-seeded-keyword-directories. As a result, the deeper you have pages that cover specific content of a certain category, the better your authority and page rank juice will develop. So worrying about your contact page should not be a huge concern.
You absolutely do not want to no follow any of your own pages.
-
First of all, nofollowing your links will not prevent you from losing link juice. In general, you do not ever want to nofollow your own pages.
If you really want to prevent link juice from going to your Contact page, you could use Javascript instead of an HTML link. However, this will break if the user does not have Javascript enabled.
In the big scheme of things, it is probably not worth your time worrying about linking to your Contact page. Link juice that goes to your Contact page is not lost, since the Contact page itself also links to your homepages and other pages, and thus keeps the link equity flowing.
As far as site architecture goes, just link prominently to your most important pages and less prominently to your secondary ones. Then focus your efforts on acquiring more links, because that will have more impact than fiddling with some links on your page.
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
-
Unsolved URL dynamic structure issue for new global site where I will redirect multiple well-working sites.
Dear all, We are working on a new platform called [https://www.piktalent.com](link url), were basically we aim to redirect many smaller sites we have with quite a lot of SEO traffic related to internships. Our previous sites are some like www.spain-internship.com, www.europe-internship.com and other similars we have (around 9). Our idea is to smoothly redirect a bit by a bit many of the sites to this new platform which is a custom made site in python and node, much more scalable and willing to develop app, etc etc etc...to become a bigger platform. For the new site, we decided to create 3 areas for the main content: piktalent.com/opportunities (all the vacancies) , piktalent.com/internships and piktalent.com/jobs so we can categorize the different types of pages and things we have and under opportunities we have all the vacancies. The problem comes with the site when we generate the diferent static landings and dynamic searches. We have static landing pages generated like www.piktalent.com/internships/madrid but dynamically it also generates www.piktalent.com/opportunities?search=madrid. Also, most of the searches will generate that type of urls, not following the structure of Domain name / type of vacancy/ city / name of the vacancy following the dynamic search structure. I have been thinking 2 potential solutions for this, either applying canonicals, or adding the suffix in webmasters as non index.... but... What do you think is the right approach for this? I am worried about potential duplicate content and conflicts between static content dynamic one. My CTO insists that the dynamic has to be like that but.... I am not 100% sure. Someone can provide input on this? Is there a way to block the dynamic urls generated? Someone with a similar experience? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Jose_jimenez0 -
Industry News Page Best Practices
Hi, We have created an industry news page which automatically curates articles from specific news sources within our sector. Currently, I have the news index page set to be indexed and followed by robots. I have the article pages noindex, nofollow, since these are not original content. Is this the best practice or do you recommend another configuration? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JoshGFialkoff0 -
Site links show spam
Hi folks, I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al. I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware. I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Our UE team has presented me with a site structure where the content (folders) does not match the hierarchical directory structure (in the CME)
Our UE team has presented me with a new site structure where the content (folders) does not match the hierarchical directory structure (in the CME). I.E Sub-sectors, sectors and product pages are ALL just 1 directory off the root. example.com/sector example.com/sub-sector example.com/productpage FYI 'normal' folder hierarchy would be; example.com/sector/ example.com/sector/sub-sector example.com/sector/sub-sector/productpage I cannot find any SEO disadvantages re; crawl, if anything the SE's will crawl more efficeitly with clearly less depth... higher 'deep content', and a better nav - which is technically a sound solution with link consistency throughout - 1 to 2 clicks to all pages. Only disadvantage might be a user confusion... which can be off-set with contextual breadcrumbs. Are there any PURE SEO disadvantages to a structure this illogical? Note - This does not abuse any Search Engine guidelines. Thanks for reading, Rich
Technical SEO | | richcowley0 -
Can URL re writes fix the problem of critical content too deep in a sites structure?
Good morning from Wetherby UK 🙂 Ok imagine this scenario. You ask the developers to design a site where "offices to let" is on level two of a sites hierachy and so the URL would look like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/office-to-let. But Yikes when it goes live it ends up like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk...s/residential/office-to-let Is a fix to this a URL re - write? Or is the only fix relocating the office to let content further up the site structure? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
For large sites, best practices for pages hidden behind internal search?
If a website has 1M+ pages, with most of them being hidden behind an internal search, what's the best way to get pages included in an engine's index? Does a direct clickpath to those pages need to exist from the homepage or other major hub pages on the site? Is submitting an XML sitemap enough?
Technical SEO | | vlevit0 -
Language/country redirect best practice?
Hi, What is SEO best practice when it comes to redirecting users from www.domain.com to their specific language/country, let's say www.domain.com/de for Germany? From what I heard in on of the whiteboard fridays, it seems to be Javascript based on IP and browser language, and then set a cookie - correct? Or should we let our users manually select their language/country at the first visit? Any suggestion appreciated, thanks!
Technical SEO | | rtora0 -
Link juice distributed to too many pages. Will noindex,follow fix this?
We have an e-commerce store with around 4000 product pages. Although our domain authority is not very high (we launched our site in February and now have around 30 RD's) we did rank on lots of long tail terms, and generated around 8000 organic visits / month. Two weeks ago we added another 2000 products to our existing catalogue of 2000 products, and since then our organic traffic dropped significantly (more than 50%). My guess is that link juice has been distributed to too many pages, causing rankings to drop on overall. I'm thinking about noindexing 50% of the product pages (the ones not receiving any organic traffic). However, I am not sure if this will lead to more link juice for the remaining 50% of the product pages, or not. So my question is: if I noindex,follow page A, will 100% of the linkjuice go to page B INSTEAD of page A, or will just a part of the link juice flow to page B (after flowing through page A first)? Hope my question is clear 🙂 P.s. We have a Dutch store, so the traffic drop is not a Panda issue 🙂
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0