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.
Are links in menus to external sites bad for SEO?
-
We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress.
I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site.
This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu.
So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?
-
Its not bad at all in my opinion, especially if its a sub domain.
All its going to do is pass on SEO value to your root domain.
If you'd like to keep the link juice on your blog intact, you could make the menu links no-follow.
Greg
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
-
What are best options for website built with navigation drop-down menus in JavaScript, to get those menus indexed by Google?
This concerns f5.com, a large website with navigation menus that drop down when hovered over. The sub nav items (example: “DDoS Protection”) are not cached by Google and therefore do not distribute internal links properly to help those sub-pages rank well. Best option naturally is to change the nav menus from JS to CSS but barring that, is there another option? Will Schema SiteNavigationElement work as an alternate?
Technical SEO | | CarlLarson0 -
Is SEO effected of putting an external link in the primary navigation of a website?
I have a customer, www.xxx.com. This site has good traffic, low bounce rate (28%), 2:00 min avg time on site, and 45% return visitor rating. No spam rankings, etc. Good load time. Another site, www.yyy.com, has sent out a request for them to add them as a new link in www.xxx.com's primary navigation - using a title such as "abc" (not the name of the company or site of yyy.com). This second site, www.yyy.com, has a bounce rate of 98%, avg time on site is :30, and 10.2% return visitor rate. No spam flags noted in Open Site explorer. Plus they are asking other sites similar to www.xxx.com to do the same thing. Questions/Concerns and Feedback appreciated: Will yyy.com's analytics and quality pass back to xxx.com and cause Google or algorithms to flag or penalize xxx.com? (It ranks #1 for quite a few things.) The relevancy between the sites is good -same industry, same business objectives. From a usability standpoint, isn't it more appropriate to place a link to another website in a different way? e.g. a promotional graphic wit a link or anchor text links? Isn't it more appropriate to ask another business for links - not using the primary nav of a site? (It seems yyy.com is essentially asking other sites for 'free advertising/promotion.' Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mundsack0 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Removing images from site and Image Sitemap SEO advice
Hello again, I have received an update request where they want me to remove images from this site (as of now its a bunch of thumbnails) current page design: http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/car-wraps/ and turn it into a new design which utilized a slider (such as this): http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/ They don't want the thumbnails on the page anymore. My question is since my site has a image sitemap that has been indexed will removing all the images hurt my SEO greatly? What would the recommended steps to take to reduce any SEO damage be, if so? Thank you again for your help, always great and very helpful feedback! 🙂 cheers!
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?
When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
What is the value of english links with foreign language anchor text for a foreign site?
I have a site in Spanish that is hosted in Spain with a .es TLD. I already have many Spanish-language links from websites in Spain, but I obviously want more and I'm finding I might need to look beyond typical Spanish sites. In talking to some of my link builders who work on my English/American sites, they are recommending that I build links on the normal article sites, blogs and web 2.0 sites that I normally build links on but that I make all the content English and insert the anchor text in Spanish. For example, if my site were about "weightloss", my keyword would be "perder peso" (in spanish). They are recommending that I have articles, reviews, etc written about weightloss in English with the anchor text "perder peso" worked into the English article. Most of the sites are English sites that are hosted in the US (article sites, web 2.0 properties, etc). My question is what is the value of these links? Does anybody have any experience with this?
Technical SEO | | jargomang0 -
First click on SEO redirecting to a competitor site?
I just experienced something VERY odd and wondered if any of you had an idea of what it might be. When I did a search on Google and clicked the top SEO listing I was taken to a competitor of the number 1 listed site i.e. NOT the site I clicked on. When I clicked the back button and clicked it again, I was taken to the correct site. This happened with two different searches and I was taken to two different sites. Could this be a clever/sinister cookie implemented by the competitor; a site I frequent regularly? Could this be malware implemented by an affiliate? Could this be a Google glitch?
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0