It looks like a linkfarm
-
Hello,
I have 15 online shops owned by one company and the web developer put in the header of each website a link to the 15 other sites. It looks like a link farm but they are all for one company. And in some shops we have a huge number of products i.e. huge number of outgoing links to other shops, like a total of a million outgoing follow link to the other 15 online shops.Yes we have it almost 2 years ago and we didn't get penalized by Google and it seems that Google discovered that all are owned by one company.My questions are:1- Will we be penalized in future by Google if they think that they are a kind of spam links?2- What will happen if I changed these links to no follow links? Or if I removed them from the header?3- Do these outgoing links effect the ranking?4- Does PR is still a metric to Google since they calculate it depends on a formula based on the incoming and outgoing links?Thanks in AdvancedHousam Smadi
-
Agreed. It's hard to tell how the site is set up from the description.
-
Could you share your URL so that the community can look at the website?
-
Hi there
If it were me, since they are the same company, just different products, I would consolidate it all under one website to keep consistency with the brand.
I would structure it in a logical fashion for user experience and update my internal links / sitemap.
This is just me - if you wanted to look into that route, I would talk to your team and review the following:
- All KPIs that matter most to your visibility / performance
- Your site's goals over time
- Google Search Console performance over time (impressions / rankings)
- Take a look at your competitors
- Check your on-site SEO
- Check your backlinks
- Check your content
- Check your information architecture
- Learn more about your audience
- Are you capturing your audience at the right points? Do you have content to do so?
- Are you doing everything you can do develop your brand(s) right now?
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Thanks for your answer Patrick,
All of these websites are within the same companies but they are different types of products i.e. one website is about mailboxes and other is about home accessories... But we refers in the header all of our websites.
We also have a main website which contains everything but the others are important because the domain name is more relevant for each product category and we are ranked well for them.
Do you think if I nofollowed them, I will not lose ranking because of the huge number of missing inbound links for the sites on next Google crawl?
Regards,
-
Hi there
I would make some point of reference that associates all of these shops together. Maybe at the footer like a copyright or a trademark to the main parent company. That way there's an association and it doesn't look like you're just randomly linking to 15 different websites via 15 different websites. You could possibly even do this under an "About" section with company site listings, so it's on one page and not just living in the header. I would nofollow them as well so you show you are not trying to sculpt their authority.
Are these websites all different companies within the company, or different products? If it's products, I would consider putting these under one website and categorizing appropriately.
You should check out the Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands? Whiteboard Friday from Moz. There are some great tips there.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Ranking subpage for main keyword instead of homepage – somehow I feel like our homepage is penalized
Hello guys, I hope this question isn't too broad – but I run out of ideas and I feel like there is some technical issue with our site which sees us penalized: Search: German Google
Technical SEO | | Maggiathor
Website: www.elementspure-hotel.de
Keyword: Hotel Bremen Right now we're ranking between 40 and 50 with the subpage /zimmer. a lot of sites with lesser DA scores and a lot more SEO Issues are ranked higher. The homepage is optimized for hotel bremen, yet /zimmer page ranks first, which I just don't understand
(Page Authority is much higher, Keyword density)
– I've run the site through a lot of tools and there aren't any severe issues Search Console doesn't say anything in regards to errors My suggestions which I can't confirm:
– There are some redirection issues (http/https/www/nonww/)
– Backlink issues (a lot of backlinks are from www.elements-pure.de)
– Over optimization penalties? Tank you! Magnus0 -
I've had a sudden a increase in crawl issues as of yesterday (like 300 from a steady 10, does anyone else have this issue?
the main issue is that it's now indexing both www and http:// - anyone else got this issue or had any changes suddenly on their crawl results?
Technical SEO | | beckyhy0 -
Bringing a large news site back on line - anything to look out for?
Hi, I'm advising an online news site site that has been completely offline for almost 6 months, and is now looking to start back up again. The site seems to be completely gone from google's cache. This might mean moving to new hosting, but with the same URL. The archive has about 7000 original articles. Most of these are date specific news, although there are some longer investigative pieces that are more timeless. Is there any difference (from an SEO/digital marketing perspective) between putting the whole archive online at once, or gradually republishing the old articles? Is there anything I should be aware of, when restarting a website of this size? Thanks - Chris
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
What to look for when evaluating a forum solution from an SEO perspective
Hi, I am investigating forum solutions. I would be interested in hearing people's thoughts / experience on what criteria and requirements to consider purely from an SEO perspective when looking at a forum solution.
Technical SEO | | JagexSEO0 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
I am cleaning up a clients link profile and am coming across a lot of directories (no surprise) My question is if an obvious fre for all generic directory doesn't look to have been hit by any updates is it a wise move recommending tit for removal?
I am cleaning up a clients link profile and am coming across a lot of directories (no surprise) My question is, if an obvious free for all generic directory doesn't look to have been hit by any updates is it a wise move recommending it for removal on the basis that it is a free for all directory and could be hit in teh future?
Technical SEO | | fazza470 -
Facebook likes for a blog - are posts or root domain more important?
I've just added the facebook plugin for my wordpress blog. I've activated the like buttons on each post and I share the posts on facebook - so when someone likes it on facebook, it reflects on the blog post. In my blog sidebar I've added the Like widget. I can either put the URL for it as my blog root domain (not many likes yet) or my facebook page (lots of likes, so more impressive) I've been hearing about Likes etc counting towards SEO, so I'm wondering if anyone can tell me whether developing Likes for my blog root domain will have any significant benefit over the Likes I am getting for the individual posts?
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
Facebook Like button issue
In looking through my top pages in Google Analytics, my #2 page (oddly enough) looked like this "/?fb_xd_fragment=". Apparently, this is because we added the Facebook Like button to many of our pages. But I'm worried these show very skewed PageView data and lower Time Spent on each page. The average time on this page is 5 seconds whereas the average sitewide time is much higher. Further, it shows 9,000 pageviews coming from only 250 Unique Visitors. I'm sure this is messing with our SEO. Is there a fix for this? Should I even be worried about it? I heard that I can remove it from my GA stat reporting, but I don't want it to be causing problems in the background. Please advise..my boss wants to keep the Facebook Like button the pages as it has brought us some good response. The page that this is on is: www.accupos.com Maybe there's an alternate version of the Facebook Like that we don't know about... I would appreciate any help on this DM
Technical SEO | | DerekM880