On-Site Directory - Delete or Keep?
-
We have 2 ecommerce sites. Both have been hit by Penguin (no warnings in WMT) and we're in the process of cleaning up backlinks.
We have link directories on both sites. They've got links that are relevant to the sites but also links that aren't relevant. And they're big directories - we're talking thousands of links to other sites.
What's the best approach here? Do we leave it alone, delete the whole thing, or manually review and keep highly relevant links but get rid of the rest?
-
Were you requiring reciprocal links for a link in your directory? If so, I'd burn the whole thing to the ground and ask for removal of links where possible. If you really think it helps users, you could add nofollow to the links instead. Without knowing more about the directory, how it was run, and your link profile, it's hard to give solid advice.
-
If you want to go through the 1000's of links you have and identify the ones that are bad, or from bad neighborhoods, make sure to spend the 50$ on a report from Link Detox (http://www.linkdetox.com/). This will help you identify things quickly and allow you to make some quick decisions on link profile management. If it's a big project, take a 1 month subscription to the software, and make sure use it fully to identify the entire problem. Don't forget to use the link disavow tool if needed (if you are looking to keep any valuable links) or try to isolate them to contact later and help fix the issue.
If you plan on getting rid of them all - just dump the entire thing and start from scratch, but it'll be a long road back with best practice work.
Hope it helps! It's worth the $$$ and investment when you run into problems like Penguin or Panda
-
Without knowing more than what you've written, I'd first ask if those directories have any back links going to them and before you'd be able to answer, I say just delete the darn things--they're not helping you. 1. If they've got back links going to them, those back links are likely to be of low quality and by deleting the directories, you negate those links 2. Even if they don't have a pile of low quality back links, it sounds like they're poorly curated, they're not doing anyone any good. 3. You've got a Google penalty on both sites, you've got a directory on both sites, you've got to clean house--just get rid of them.
If the sites in the directory are are industry specific but you can't vouch for most of them and your sites aren't about being a resource for people trying to find those industry-specific sites, just get rid the darn things.
-
if you want to pass of google should not care if relevant but.
You say.
"We have link directories on both sites. They've got links that are relevant to the sites but also links that aren't relevant. And they're big directories - we're talking thousands of links to other sites."
Big directories will hurt you unless they help the end user lose them.
I agree that we need to know more about what kind of sites they are to tell you as Moz.com has a directories like recommend seo's, but its relevant to Moz so it will not hurt and helps the end user ask your self if I went here to would this help me?
Hope this helps,
Thomas
-
Firstly I would ask what the purpose of your link directories were in the first place? How do people submit to your directories and what value do they add to your site apart from possibly having too many links on some of your sites pages? Do you have a lot of spammy sites submitted? I personally would look at cutting this facility as Penguin has hit a lot of link directories and as you say there are a lot of irrelevant sites in your directory! Are your directory pages indexed on a "site:" search in Google?
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
-
Site with both subfolders and subdomains
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | medi_
I'm working on a website that has a quite extensive subfolder structure for product and multilingual purposes.
domain.com/en
domain.com/it
domain.com/fr
domain.com/en/category
domain.com/it/category
domain.com/fr/category
domain.com/en/category/product
domain.com/it/category/product
domain.com/fr/category/product
domain.com/en/category/product/region
domain.com/it/category/product/region
domain.com/fr/category/product/region
and so on... We will soon be launching a completely different service, which would make the subfolder structure become even more complex. As John Mueller recently stated that Subdomains and Subfolders are treated the same by Google, I am now considering building that new service under subdomains for product reason, and for the sake of clarity. 1- Would my subdomains inherit the authority of my main domain?
2- Do I have to keep the language folders with the subdomain structure?
e.g.:
new-service.domain.com/en
nouveau-service.domain.com/fr
nuovo-servizio.domain.com/it OR
new-service.domain.com
nouveau-service.domain.com
nuovo-servizio.domain.com Looking forward to reading you!0 -
Is there an issue with my site?
Been mostly hanging around top of page two for the last couple of years for “Liverpool Wedding photographer” although got myself on page 1 for “Liverpool photographer” I have split the title of the page to target these two keywords. I took the Liverpool photographer off the title to see if it was being detrimental to the “Liverpool wedding photographer” I didn’t see no increase in ranking so put it back as I get a bit of commercial work from it. Since last year I have got onto page 1 at least three times around position 5-6. Within a week or two I start sliding down again and end up back at top of page two. I could understand this slow push out if my competitors were busy SEO wise but from what I have seen they are not. There is a guy using the keywords in URL and calls himself “Liverpool wedding photographer” last time I checked he literally had no links but is in the first 5 positions. I have I think a better link profile than every one else. Although I am on and off with Facebook and Instagram, (more off) so that probably isn’t helping. Although I have a colleague in the video side of things and he doesn’t use social media at all and it hasn’t harmed him. A few years ago I was burned quite badly by a total charlatan. He sunk my home page to page 4. He talked the talk about creating landing pages but his methods were shoddy to say the least. I can’t believe I was taken in by him, although I was only with him for 2 months. He was still using spammy link techniques to generate lots of toxic links for me! I disavowed all of his links and put the keywords back on the home page and was back to my usual top of page 2 position within a week. Since then I have disavowed all directory links and anything not wedding related. I have an article which ranks 1st or second for “Nikon CLS”. I have also another article of 2000 words or so on another reasonable placed photography website. A few links from other vendors or people I have taken photographs for. I have about 10 featured weddings with a link on 4 good weddings blogs. I don’t think a massive amount of blog comments although I have stopped doing this. If I look at most of the competitors these are their main links, with directories as well! Last winter I put a quite substantial article about documentary wedding photography on my home page. I flew to number 2, although I photographed The World Transformed (the alternative labour conference in Liverpool). I got a lot of clicks to a gallery page (few thousand off social media} so I don’t know if that coincided with it. Same thing – watching the website go down a few positions every day until within just over a week or two I was about 4<sup>th</sup> on page 2! Its like my website is on a spring which can push into page 1 but rebounds back to top of page 2. I am staring to worry that my site has been marked as a bad character in some way because I get what seems to be rough treatment from google compared to my peers. I have written I think 4 or 5 (1500 word) articles the last couple of months talking about lenses and wedding photography related topics and Google pushed me back to page 1, peaking At position 5. I was there for a few weeks and then the slide happened again. Bit demoralised at the moment, what to do? Any help or pointers would be most appreciated. Best wishes. David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Multiple Ecommerce sites, same products
We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Link juice site structure?
If we have a top nav with contact us, about us, delivery, FAQ, Gallery, how to order ect but none of these we want to rank and then we have the usual left hand nav.are we wasting juice with the top nav and would we be better either removing it and putting them further down the page or consolidating them and adding an extra products tab so the product pages are first.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Disavowing Links for Subcategory of Site
Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site? We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site. Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site. Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect. Thanks --
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0