Pin It Button, Too Many Links, & a Javascript question...
-
One of the sites I work for has some massive on-page link problems. We've been trying to come up with workarounds to lower the amount of links without making drastic changes to the page design and trying to stay within SEO best practices. We had originally considered the NoFollow route a few months back but that's not viable. We changed around some image and text links so they were wrapped together as one link instead of being two links to the same place. We're currently running tests on some pages to see how else to handle the issue.
What has me stumped now though is that the damned Pinterest Pin Button counts as an external link and we've added it to every image in our galleries. Originally we found that having a single Pin It button on a page was pulling incorrect images and not listing every possible image on the page... so to make sure that a visitor can pin the exact picture they want, we added the button to everything. We've been seeing a huge uptick in Pinterest traffic so we're definitely happy with that and don't want to get rid of the button. But if we have 300 pictures (which are all links) on a page with Pin It buttons (yet more links) we then have 600+ links on the page. Here's an example page: http://www.fauxpanels.com/portfolio-regency.php
When talking with one of my coders, he suggested some form of javascript might be capable of making the button into an event instead of a link and that could be a way to keep the Pin It button while lowering on-page links. I'm honestly not sure how that would work, whether Google would still count it as a link, or whether that is some form of blackhat cloaking technique we should be wary of.
Do any of you have experience with similar issues/tactics that you could help me with here? Thanks.
TL;DR Too many on page links. Coder suggests javascript "alchemy" to turn lead into gold button links into events. Would this lower links? Or is it bad? Form of Cloaking?
-
This test showed a little light on what is indexed typically: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really
-
Loading link via JS is fairly standard technique. (See http://sharethis.com/ or http://www.addthis.com/). Google will index some JS created content so you may have to delay the link tag creation until a mouseenter event to get the desired effect.
Added bonus: using well written JS code can lighten the code weight of the page allowing it to load faster. Currently, each Pin icon contains a div, a link and an image tag. If you use prototyping, JS can replicate all this content from the attributes of the primary image tag very quickly. (I see you load jQuery so this task is very easy to accomplish)
Also, move the rel="words" in the link into the img tag as an alt attribute. Current the images lack alt tags which isn't the best. Using keywords in the rel attribute isn't correct. It is supposed to mark up the relationship to between items and "Stacked Stone Panels" isn't a relationship. You may have been thinking of the title attribute.
Next, you are loading WAY too many resource files (mainly js). A few items twice. Try combining them into a few minified files. There is a lot of work that could be done to speed up the site: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130320_PT_12RV/ over 25 seconds to load.
Think about making a sprite of the images, it would save a ton of requests and downloads. Also, pagination, if done correctly, could save a lot of time.
-
Thanks guys! My coder is going to look over all of the best possible ways we could implement this and then we're going to see about doing a little testing on one of our galleries. Thanks again.
-
To my knowledge, Google does only "simple" Javascript. For instance
will be spidered as a link. if you have your click event do something more arcane (like call a function) it won't be. If you want to further obfuscate it from Google, add your click event by using an observer (like JQuery's $().click() function).
Google, to my knowledge, has never spidered AJAX. AJAX may not contain any human readable content.
-
No known negatives associated with doing that? If not then we might give it a test run on one of the galleries.
-
There was no negative impact after the Pin It button was added and effectively doubled the number of on-page links.
As for the Ajax loading idea, that was actually another one of the ideas that my coder had but I wasn't sure of what the effect would be on Googlebot indexing and following images. Though all the newer photos do get added to the top which would be visible if we implemented that.
-
That is definitely a lot of links... but have you noticed a negative SEO impact because of the pin it buttons? Having that many links isn't ideal, but it probably won't affect your site that much.
Alternatively, you can try loading some of the images via AJAX so that they aren't all displayed at once, and only load when the user scrolls down.
-
In my opinion I believe the correct implementation is to use the JavaScript event. I've seen it implemented this way on a few ecommerce sites that I know are doing well.
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
-
Is Sitewide Credit Link Good or Bad in 2015?
We are a web design agency thus we get a good number of links (footer) from our client's site. According to Matt Cutt, Google considers all the sitewide links to 1. So is it okay to have those links? Note: Those links are do-follow and most with 2 anchor text. "Web Design" by "Company Name" and "Website Development" by."Company Name". Thanks
Web Design | | Jubaer961 -
Can external links in a menu attract a penalty?
We have some instances of external links (i.e. pointing to another domain) in site menus. Although there are legitimate reasons (e.g. linking to a news archive kept on a separate domain) I understand this can be considered bad from a usability perspective. This begs the question - is this bad for SEO? With the recent panda changes we've seen certain issues which were previously "only" about usability attract SEO penalties, but I can't find any references to this example. Anyone have thoughts / experience?
Web Design | | SOS_Children0 -
Best Practice For Website Redesign & Migration
Hi, I'm looking to redesign my current live website to a new Wordpress site using "Studiopress Enterprise Theme". I'm new to Wordpress and therefore will be embarking on lots of testing & development.
Web Design | | Mark_Ch
I do not want to hurt my current live website whilst testing the new Wordpress site. However, it would be nice to bring the test site into the current live environment without changing untold urls, etc. Question
What is the best practice to setup this new Wordpress environment for my domain: www.sampledomain.co.uk How would you restrict Google, Bing, etc from indexing, etc. whilst testing in the live environment. What other consideration should I be aware of Thanks Mark0 -
Question on Breadcrumb and Canonical
Hi SEOmozers, I have another question. =] Thanks in advance. First question: How important is the breadcrumb for SEO? I know that breadcrumb makes better UX because it shows how the visitor landed on this page and the breadcrumb may show up in the search engine. But other than that, how important is it? Second Question: If I have a page that can be found via 2 locations, how should I handle this in regards to breadcrumb? For example, I have page A. You can access page A via Category A and Category B. Therefore, what I did was list Page A under Category A and when someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it will redirect to the page A that was found via Category A. The problem is on page A, the breadcrumb is Home > Category A > Page A. So if someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it redirects and the breadcrumb shows Home > Category A > Page A. What should I do with the breadcrumb for Category B > Page A? Should I create another page A and just use canonical on it? Should I create another page A but do not index it? or leave it as is? 1 Page A, can be access via 2 categories. Please advise. Thank you!
Web Design | | TommyTan0 -
Word Press Seo Errors/ Questions
Hi my name is Tina I am new here I hope you guys can help me out. I thought building my new site with Word Press was going to simplify things, however I have a ton of errors, and I am not sure what they are, or how to fix them. I am hoping someone could share with me a solution for these errors. I have 28 rel=canonical errors, I am not sure what this means, I understand it to mean my pages are similar, and this is to set a heirarchy between my pages. Please correct me if I am wrong. If I am correct would this be necessary to add if my main keyword was "widgets" and my home page was optimized for "widgets" and my next page was "blue widgets" and so on. While my pages are similar they are all optimized for different versions of my main keyword some using long tail keywords. Do you know of a plugin that can help solve this problem? Also does anyone have a plugin they recommend for G+ my G+ authorship verification is causing an error as well? I am using Head Space 2 I have used this seo plugin numerous times with great success it has been my favorite seo plugin. However, we have a portfolio that shows our clients websites, and on those pages Head Space will not let me enter a description tag. What plug in do you guys recommend with more control over each page? Another interesting issue is on one of our pages I optimized it for our Canadian clients, and now every page has been listed in Google.ca for the keywords it should have on Google.com. We are listed on Google maps, verified in Google places, and our address is on the site so they know we're from the USA however, the majority of our keywords are only listed in Google.ca. We're on page one for all of them, we are in the top three on most of them so that's not bad, but we want to be listed in Google.com as well. Any suggestions on this?
Web Design | | TinaGammon1 -
Drop Down Menus & SEO?
Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO? I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider? Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these? There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.
Web Design | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Will opening in a New Window pass all link juice?
Hey guys, We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things. Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site. The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder. My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link? Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated! Thanks
Web Design | | CodyWheeler0 -
How is link juice split between navigation?
Hey All, I am trying to understand link juice as it relates to duplicate navigation Take for example a site that has a main navigation contained in dropdowns containing 50 links (fully crawl-able and indexable), then in the footer of said page that navigation is repeated so you have a total of 100 links with the same anchor text and url. For simplicity sake will the link juice be divided among those 100 and passed to the corresponding page or does the "1st link rule" still apply and thus only half of the link juice will be passed? What I am getting at is if there was only one navigation menu and the page was passing 50 link juice units then each of the subpages would get passed 1link juice unit right? but if the menu is duplicated than the possible link juice is divided by 100 so only .5 units are being passed through each link. However because there are two links pointing to the same page is there a net of 1 unit? We have several sites that do this for UX reasons but I am trying to figure out how badly this could be hurting us in page sculpting and passing juice to our subpages. Thanks for your help! Cheers.
Web Design | | prima-2535090