Sitewide Footer Links & Sister Sites
-
Hi
We have a number of sister sites across Europe - the sites are under a different domain name, but have a very similar layout & product offering.
When looking at duplicate content, they are flagged as being a moderate risk with similar content - we don't duplicate product content, however it's similar.
We also link to them in the footer in a drop down - not anchor text links - however this is still seen by Google.
I don't think I'll be able to remove links to our sister companies, but should I implement the Href lang if the sites are slightly different? Or find another way to link to them?
Here's an example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key & https://www.manutan.fr/fr/maf
-
Hi Thomas,
This is interesting and great advice thank you. I think the hard sell may be internal, but it's something I'll look at proposing to the company.
I'll do my research and put a case together.
Thank you
-
Daniel is 100% right about that. Rather not it's hreflang or simply stopping a bunch of links into every page on your website.
It kills your crawl budget.
See; https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/webinars/top-5-tips-successful-seo-audit/
Daniels advice is excellent I have a client who received 20 as much traffic after approximately seven months of removing links that were on every single page. This led to googlebot indexing much deeper and being able to index things that it was ignoring before.
-
Hi Dan
Yeh I have looked at that one thank you. It's something I'll need to get buy in from, but worth looking at doing
-
Hi Becky,
Even if the links are within a drop down, it's not to say that Google can't crawl them.
Here's a video from Matt Cutts where advises against using cross-domain links in the footer and suggests using a country locator page as per my example from Apple's website - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNbVU2ihU0
Dan
-
Hi
Yes they're in the footer, does Google still class the fact that it's a drop down as a concern with links if they're in the footer?
I thought as they weren't anchor text links that it wouldn;t be as much of an issue?
-
Hi Becky,
The main reason I think it would be flagged up would be because the links to each sister site are located in the footer and therefore appear on every page of the websites! Perhaps you have thousands of links in total from each site to the other.
I recently had this same issue come up with one of my clients and we chose to build a separate page, linked to when users can select their country. Check out http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ to see what I mean. That way there is just one link to each sister site rather than hundreds or thousands.
That should be a relatively simple, quick fix to implement.
Hope that helps
Daniel
-
they are almost identical normally you want to utilize the same domain name see
https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
I would look at the back link profiles as well as let me know if they are like for like when it comes to text?
sincerely,
Thomas
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 it helpful for seo to have helpful links at the footer?
HI, suppose my homepage has good content but no external links to other sites for more info. and no helpful internal links in the footer to learn more. and my competition has 9 internal links in the footer which links to other pages on the site who has more SEO boost? I know the answer , does it really makes a difference or its minute?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL1 -
Benefit of getting more then one link from a site?
Hi Guys, Is there any benefit (purely for SEO - link building) to getting more than one link from a domain if you already have 1? From my understanding, even if you had 100 links from a domain, that really counts as 1 for link authority. So from this, i don't see much point in getting more then 1 link. Is this a right assumption? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Own Domains shown as Spam Links in Open Site Explorer
Hi ! I have 7 Domains that I bought that point to the same webspace as my main domain. In Open Site Explorer they are showed as spam links. So to solve the issue I redirected the links to an empty subdirectory on the same server which is different from the directory the main domain is linking to. But nevertheless the domains are still showing up as spam. Why might that be? What can I do to get rid of these domains? In fact I only need the main domain. Cheers, Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Org & edu citations or links
One of my clients is a physician and I have achieved excellent SERP positioning for multiple targeted terms, but need to build a bit more domain authority in hopes of climbing one or two more positions and bumping a strong local competitor. I am segueing into the the off-page SEO work and was wondering if anyone would be willing to share their favorite search queries or tips for seeking-out potential citation or back link sources on .org or .edu sites which are relevant to my client's area of expertise? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Can pages compete with each other? Inbound links & domain authority, How to determine problem areas?
Heyy, I'm having some pretty big SEO issues. 😞 We have had some drops in our ranking. We're 5th page or worse depending on location for a few of our keywords that we used to rank well for. There are all sorts of random non relevant sites outranking us for the term "stickley" and "stickley furniture" One thing I noticed is that we are ranking for a different page for each keyphrase. Our home page is ranking for "Stickley" and our stickley page is ranking for "Stickley Furniture" Is this normal? I guess Google is just picking what it see's as what's more relevant. Is it possible that these two pages are "competing?" Do similar phrases linking to different pages cause pages to "fight" or unevenly disperse link juice? I'm having trouble knowing which page I should send inbound links to since Google seems to be linking similar keywords to different pages. How much should I stress about which pages I receive links on? Is it true that any inbound link to a site site will help increase its overall domain authority and overall SEO? What should I be focusing on? I've added 301 redirects for non WWW as well as tried to make the pages well optimized for SEO. Should I just add more related content to the pages? I know backlinks are important but I'm having a really hard time figuring out how to get links that aren't just spammy forum post footers or junk directory submissions. The thing that bothers me is we were ranking well and then suddenly are way back. We have never done any black hat SEO of any sort. I feel a bit stuck and confused at the moment 😞 Thanks in advance for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SheffieldMarketing
-Amy0