What damage can internal duplicated hidden links do to rankings?
-
Hi, I have a rental website, www.akilar.com, for Spain. My question is, on the home page we have links to the seperate regions of the country. Somehow in the redesign of the site, these links have been placed on every page of the site and hidden in the code at the top. The links are there as well on each page in the header, these are additional. The page quantity is over 2000 pages. Also this is taking the internal links well over the limit. In anyones opinion what damage has this caused as our rankings of late have fallen. Thanks very much for your help!
-
Great, you are very welcome! Please, keep me posted with your recovery progress.
All the best,
-
Hi Again, Thanks for your comments and confirmation. We have now removed all of them so hopefully will be a major help! Thanks again
-
Yes, I think that may be definitively a possibile cause for your lower rankings. Can't you rewrite those links in a way to make them visible?
-
Hi Fabrizo, Thanks. As we restructured pages they would rise, get to about position 11/12 then start falling. This was just noticed in the code as was not supposed to be in the template as it seems. Frankly noticed it once we ran the site through here. Thanks
-
Yes, I think any kind of hidden contents may be damaging. Have you noticed traffic drop right after that change? Was that the only difference applied to the 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
-
How should we handle re-directory links? Should we remove these links?
We are currently cleaning up bad links that were purchased by a previous SEO agency. We have found links on anonym.to pages that redirect traffic to our site automatically. How should this be handled? Should we remove these links?
Technical SEO | | Lorne_Marr0 -
Are bad links the reason for not ranking?
Hello Moz community. I'm looking here for some input from the experts on what could be wrong with a site I'm working on. The site is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll get the idea. We want to rank the site first page on Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) for the keyword "refacciones Audi" and some other brands (refacciones = replacement parts would probably be a good translation, just FYI). Now, our page hasn't been completely optimized, so in my mind it's OK not to be on first page yet. However, our main competitor is ranking first page for all the keywords we want to rank for, but when you check their site, you'll find there is hardly any content, no keywords are being used in their content, all pages have the exact same title and meta description, their catalog is in a completely different domain. In short, no SEO whatsoever. Looking at Moz data, our site has a DA of 26, while our competitor's has a 10. They have no external backlinks at all, while we have a few hundred. This leaves me scratching my head: how can a completely non-optimized site outrank us? I decided to check our backlink profile, and a previous SEO agency seems to have built MANY fake blogs with lots of backlinks with rich anchor text. Quite a big percentage of our backlinks are of this kind, so this is the only thing I can think can be affecting our ranking. Will disavowing be our solution? If you'd like to check, our site is: www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx Our competitors' is: www.saferefacciones.com ANY help will be extremely appreciated as I feel a bit lost. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EduardoRuiz1 -
Links below linking (not sitelinks)
Hi All, Please can you let me know the name and / or point me at an article / blog / directory on how best to achieve additional links under a search engine listing (I don't mean site links) e.g. I do a search for 'home insurance' on Google.co.uk and under the listing for Compare the Market it has - home insurance, building insurance and landlords insurance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Vodafone0 -
Are these redirects damaging my rankings
Hi, just been going through my google webmaster tools and i have found a number of soft 404 errors and was shocked to see these redirects going to my home page. | URL | Response Code | Detected |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
| --- | --- | --- |<colgroup><col style="width: 45px;"><col style="width: 80px;"><col><col style="width: 120px;"><col style="width: 90px;"></colgroup>
| | 1 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/475-gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity | | 7/25/13 |
| | 2 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1068-coronation-street-nick-proposes-to-leanne | | 7/28/13 |
| | 3 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1086-coronation-street-fiz-nearly-gets-tyrone-in-trouble-with-kirsty | | 7/28/13 |
| | 4 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1155-coronation-street-kylie-considers-telling-david-about-her-affair | | 7/28/13 |
| | 5 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1157-coronation-street-fiz-is-worried-when-kirsty-pays-her-a-visit | | 7/28/13 |
| | 6 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/750-actress-hilary-duff-is-sued-over-car-accident | | 7/25/13 |
| | 7 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/843-what-your-dogs-bottom-scooting-behaviour%E2%80%99-really-meansI would have thought that the developer who upgraded my site would have either had these blocked or directed them to the correct page. i am now guessing that there are going to be hundreds of these appearing and would like some serious advice.normally with old pages i would have them going to the relevant articles or pages but it seems the developer has redirected hundreds of these to my home page, which i guess is going to confuse google. i would like to know if this will confuse google have all these pages going to my home page.i have tried to find out where the developer in my site has redirected the pages as they are not in my htaccess file, i use joomla.can anyone let me know what i should be doing with these to solve the problemmany thanks |0 -
Ranking overseas
I have a well established website that I market as the busness being based in London, how hard would it be for me to start ranking for phrases in America? (An increasing amount of our work is being carried out in America.) What exactly would it entail? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
A query about internal linking. Have I got this right?
Hi Guys I think this sounds like a right noobie question, but I am amongst friends so here goes. So our website is an ecommerce site selling magazines. There are certain magazines, for example Vogue, where we sell the UK version, USA, italian, spanish, french etc there's basically 13 different Vogue magazines on our site. The more niche ones attract some good long tail traffic. However, the UK version is competitive and so requires some extra umph to get us a half descent rank. However, when you search "vogue magazine subscription" for example, it's our italian vogue which is listed first. When I looked into this, I found that we had linked out from our UK Vogue to Italian vogue. Could this have given the italian vogue a marginal boost, as it had the additional internal links? What I have now done is add to some, not all, of the variations something along the lines "you will find the UK Vogue magazine here" where "UK Vogue Magazine" is the anchor text. Is this the right thing to do? Will this identify that the UK Vogue page is the higher priority page, or the more important page? I was also going to add to a category page a "Top 10 Womens magazines" section, and link to Vogue from there. Am I barking up the right tree? Thanks Guys Paul
Technical SEO | | TheUniqueSEO0 -
404 and Duplicate Content.
I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships. But I have a couple of questions. I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it. I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about? I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses! -Brandon here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com I welcome any advice or input!
Technical SEO | | floridaoutdoorsrv0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0