Will adding 1000's of outbound links to just a few website impact rankings?
-
I manage a large website that hosts 1000's of business listings that comprise an area that covers 7 state counties. Currently a category page (such as lodging) hosts a group of listings which then link to it's own page. From these pages links are present directly to the business it represents. The client is proposing that we change all listings to link to the representative county website and remove the individual pages. This essentially would create 1000's of external links to 7 different websites and remove 1000's of pages from our site.
Does anyone have thoughts on how adding 1000's of links (potentially upwards of 3000) to only 7 websites (that I would deem relevant links) would affect SEO? I know if 1000's of links are added pointing to 1000's of websites the site can be considered a link farm, but I can't find any info online that speaks of a case like this. -
do you have any evidence that linking out can improve domain authority, I don't think it can.,
Matt cuts once said that it can be beneficial to link out, well of cause it can, but can it make you rank higher?
The evidence shows it can make you rank lower, not higher
-
Thanks for all the info. We have has a solid SEO strategy to date and currently the site ranks VERY well for all of it's identified keywords. There is a well thought out site architecture and internal linking strategy currently. I know that generally adding external links can improve authority over time if they are relevant, authoritative sites, and done in moderation. To me, the biggest concern is that we are going from linking to the actual businesses from individual pages to having more of an overall listing page that links to 7 other "directory" sites. Also, I don't know how Google will interpret a website that only links to 7 other websites (I should mention that we are already currently linking to those 7 - before this proposed change - in many places across the website). I have already mentioned to the client if we move forward, we will be implementing nofollows on the links.
-
Yes there is hard data, google released and patented there PageRank algorithm,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
This page is a simple explanation
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
A no-follow will not save any PageRank,, it will only stop it reaching the linked to page.
-
Adding more internal links so the linkjuice isn't diluted over 1 link would be like playing black hat SEO... I'm sure it will be seen as spam. A nofollow is enough. Still, a directory of only 7 sites without the inner pages is useless.
-
Is there any hard data to back that up? Just curious if there has been a study done over a ton of pages, links, etc.
-
Yes it would. When you link out you lose PageRank.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerankTo minimize the lose of PR, you can add more links to your own site on the same page.
If you have a page and you have 3 internal links, and 1 external link. you are giving away 25% of your PR. but if you have 99 internal links and 1 External links you are only giving away 1%.
You are also losing content, and depending on your internal linking structure, you are more than likely going to lower the PR of your home page by removing sub-pages, again I refer to http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
Using no-follow will not help you, all link lose link juice.
There are way of using JavaScript to do this, but one day that may come back to bite you. -
Couple of questions:
The Website is a directory and yet it points to only 7 outbound Websites?
What about using nofollow for all those links?
On the content side, you are about to loose much of the site's content, you should expect a massive traffic drop. What's the point of a Directory if it only links to 7 Websites without offering any extra valuable content?
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
-
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
Are clean mobile URL's necessary?
Adding code to redirect/clean up ugly URL's slows down mobile site performance, so it is necessary if we are already using rel=alternate tags on our desktop/www pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Technical Question on Image Links - Part of Addressing High Number of Outbound Links
Hi - I've read through the forum, and have been reading online for hours, and can't quite find an answer to what I'm searching for. Hopefully someone can chime in with some information. 🙂 For some background - I am looking closely at four websites, trying to bring them up to speed with current guidelines, and recoup some lost traffic and revenue. One of the things we are zeroing in on is the high amount of outbound links in general, as well as inter-site linking, and a nearly total lack of rel=nofollow on any links. Our current CMS doesn't allow an editor to add them, and it will require programming changes to modify any past links, which means I'm trying to ask for the right things, once, in order to streamline the process. One thing that is nagging at me is that the way we link to our images could be getting misconstrued by a more sensitive Penguin algorithm. Our article images are all hosted on one separate domain. This was done for website performance reasons. My concern is that we don't just embed the image via , which would make this concern moot. We also have an href tag on each to a 'larger view' of the image that precedes the img src in the code, for example - We are still running the numbers, but as some articles have several images, and we currently have about 85,000 articles on those four sites... well, that's a lot of href links to another domain. I'm suggesting that one of the steps we take is to rel=nofollow the image hrefs. Our image traffic from Google search, or any image search for that matter, is negligible. On one site it represented just .008% of our visits in July. I'm getting a little pushback on that idea as having a separate image server is standard for many websites, so I thought I'd seek additional information and opinions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCF0 -
Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hi all, my site www.uniggardin.dk has lost major rankings on the searchengine google.dk. Went from rank #2-3 on important keywords to my site, and after the latest update most of my rankings have jumped to #12 - #20. This is so annoying, and I really have no idea what to do. Can it cause bad links to my site? In that case what will I have to do? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xpeztumdk
Christoffer0 -
Deleting Website Section, Preserve Links with 301?
HI Mozers! I have a client who is deleting their community section of their website because they have little activity. I know there are some inbound links going the the community section. If I 301 redirect those links to the homepage instead, will that still preserve the SEO credit of the link -OR-is Google smart enough to know it's redirecting the the homepage and kill the link love? My initial thoughts are that Google will see that it's being redirected to the homepage and not count the link anymore, but I'm just guessing. Any ideas? Anyone have any experience in something like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SavvyPanda0 -
Website monitoring online censorship in China - what's holding us back?
We run https://greatfire.org, a non-profit website which lets you test if a website or keyword is blocked or otherwise censored in China. There are a number of websites that nominally offer this service, and many of them rank better than us in Google. However, we believe this is unfortunate since their testing methods are inaccurate and/or not transparent. More about that further down*. We started GreatFire in February, 2011 as a reaction to ever more pervasive online censorship in China (where we are based). Due to the controversy of the project and the political situation here, we've had to remain anonymous. Still, we've been able to reach out to other websites and to users. We currently have around 3000 visits per month out of which about 1000 are from organic search. However, SEO has been a headache for us from the start. There are many challenges in running this project and our team is small (and not making any money from this). Those users that do find us on relevant keywords seem to be happy since they spend a long time on the website. Examples: websites blocked in china: 6 minutes+
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org
great firewall of china test: 8 minutes+ So, here are some SEO questions related to GreatFire.org. If you can give us advice it would be greatly appreciated and you would truly help us in our mission to bring transparency and spread awareness of online censorship in China: Each URL tested in our database has its own page. Our database contains 25000 URLs (and growing). We have previously been advised that one SEO problem is that we appear to have a lot of duplicate data, since the individual URL pages are very similar. Because of this, we've added automatic tags to most pages. We then exclude certain pages from this rule that are considered high-priority, such as domains ranked highly by Alexa and keywords that are blocked. Is this a good approach? Do you think the duplicate content factor is still holding us back? Can we improve? Some of our pages have meta descriptions, but most don't. Should we add them on URL pages? They would be set to a certain pattern which again might make them look very similar and could cause the duplicate content warning to go off. Suggestions? Many of the users that find us in Google search for keywords that aren't relevant to what we offer, such as "https.facebook.com" and lots of variations of that. Obviously, they leave the website quickly. This means that the average time that people coming from Google are spending on our website is quite low (2 minutes) and the bounce rate quite high (68%). Can we or should we do something to discourage being found on non-relevant keywords? Are there any other technical problems you can see that are holding our SEO back? Thank you very much! *Competitors ranking higher searching for "test great firewall china": 1. http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org. They are only a frontend website for this service: http://www.viewdns.info/chinesefirewall. ViewDNS only checks for DNS records which is one of three major methods to block websites. So many websites and keywords that are not DNS poisoned, but are blocked by IP or by keyword, will be specified as available, when in fact they are blocked. Our system uses actual test locations inside China to try to download the URL to be tested and checks for different types of censorship. 2. http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html. This is a better service in that they seem to do actual testing from inside China. However, they only display partial results, they do not explain test results and they do not offer historic data on whether the URL was blocked in the past. We do all of that.0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Ranking A Website For Mulitiple Counties, Cities And Towns
Hello All, I am optimizing three websites for a services based company in the South Jersey Area. Of course within South Jersey there are certain counties, cities and towns I would like to show up for. For example- Pool Cleaning South Jersey Pool Cleaning Cherry Hill NJ Pool Cleaning Burlington County NJ Pool Cleaning Voorhies NJ Pool Cleaning. Do I need to create a page on my websites for every possible county, city and town I want to rank for? This would entail creating thousands of pages targeting these geographic keywords. I have seen other similar sites just list all the counties, cities and towns they service in the footer and it seems to work. Of course this would be beneficial for any business who is looking to not only rank in their home base but a predetermined radius around their home base as well. Thanks so much, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0