Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Too many backlinks from one domain?
-
I've been in the process of creating a tourism-based website for the state of Kansas. I'm a photographer for the state, and have inked a nice little side income to my day job as a web designer by selling prints from Kansas (along with my travels elsewhere). I'm still in the process of developing it, but it's at least at a point that I need to really start thinking about SEO factor of the amount of backlinks I have from it going back to my main photography website.
The Kansas site is at http://www.kansasisbeautiful.com and my photography website is http://www.mickeyshannon.com.
This tourism website will serve a number of purposes:
- To promote the state and show people it's not just a flat, boring place.
- To help promote my photography. The entire site is powered by my photography.
- To sell a book I'm planning to publish later this year/early next year of Kansas images.
- To help increase sales of photography prints of my work.
What I'm worried about is the amount of backlinks I have going from the Kansas site to my photography site. Not to mention every image is hosted on my photography domain (no need to upload to two domains when one can serve the same purpose). I'm currently linking back to my site on most pages via a little "Like the Photos? Buy a print" link in the top right corner. In addition, when users get to the website map, all photo listings click back to a page on my photography site that they can purchase prints. And the main navigation also has a link for "Photos" that takes them to my Kansas photo galleries on my photography website as well.
The question I have: Is it really bad SEO-wise to have anywhere from 1 to 10+ backlinks on every page from one domain (kansasisbeautiful.com) linking back to mickeyshannon.com? Would I be better served moving all of the content from kansasisbeautiful into a subdirectory on my photography site (mickeyshannon.com/kansas/) and redirecting the entire domain there? I haven't actually launched this website yet, so I'm trying to make the right call before pushing it to the public.
Any advice would be appreciated!
-
Thanks for the reply! I will certainly try to build my content up in ways that get it linked from many different sources. I was just concerned that the large amount of backlinks from one domain would negatively affect me. That's great that it won't! Thank you!
-
The backlinks shouldn't hurt you as long as you aren't doing anything spammy. This can happen quite naturally with a lot of websites.
The important thing to know is that 1,000 links from a single domain won't help as much as 1,000 backlinks from 1,000 different domains. Try to balance it out with backlinks from a variety of different websites. That way you'll have a more natural backlink profile.
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
-
Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?
Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile0 -
Too many on page links
Hi I know previously it was recommended to stick to under 100 links on the page, but I've run a crawl and mine are over this now with 130+ How important is this now? I've read a few articles to say it's not as crucial as before. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Keep multiple domains or combine them?
I need some help figuring out if I should combine multiple domains or if I should let them be separate? I have domain1.com, domain2.com, and domain3.com. Well, domain1.com owns domain2.com and domain3.com. And currently domain1.com points to domain2.com and domain3.com from the homepage. They are going through some changes at their business, and now the option is on the table to combine the domains or still let them be separate as long as they link to each other. What is the best way to handle this and are there more things I should go through before making a decision? None of them have a ton of links to them, and they aren't super robust, but would just to have some advice. Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
H2 Tag Backlink - is this safe?
I have found that my site is getting a link from a good site, but my concern is that the link is in a H2 tag in the footer of the front page of the site Would getting a link from a site wrapped in H2 tags be safe? The anchor is my sites brand name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1 -
Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken. Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have? Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)? Many thanks for any help with this matter. Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoSheikh0
