Are sitewide links bad for SEO?
-
I have 11 real estate sites and have had links from one to another for about 7 years but someone just suggested me to take them all out because I might get penalized or affected by penguin.
My main site was affected on July of 2012 and organic visits have dropped 43%...I've been working on many aspects of my SEO but it's been difficult to come back.
Any suggestions are very welcome, thanks
-
Hi Matias. Now that it's been a few months, I was curious to see if you were able to get your traffic back. Let us know if there has been some progress and what actions helped cure the curse.
-
Cody, what you explained is kind of similar to my situation, the 11 sites I have are all Real Estate sites and they contain different "area" information (because they cover different geographic areas) but they share the same database of properties for sale.
We do have set different search results pages to avoid showing the same properties on every site, but, there is a link to similar properties on each property page which eventually the crawler ends up indexing all properties within the database so when you mention ..."every site had the same products"... this could be a similar situation.
As of now, I am waiting to see what happens next with my rankings, I guess I am a little lost on how long will it take until some signals are reflected on the serps, any idea?
Cheers and thanks a lot for writing about your experience with this.
-
"Also, the bounce rate on these referrals was over 50%, compared to a site average of around 20%, so the web visitors didn't enjoy it either."
That's a good point - how do visitor view the links.
-
I've had websites get rid of penalties, with a lower case "p," just by getting rid of their site wide links. When we got rid of the links the rankings jumped from the 100's up to the top 5. When the site owner put the links back up the site dropped back into the 100's. We went back and forth several times with the same effect, so I'm positive that it was related.
Just an FYI, we pushed to get rid of the links altogether because every site had the same products, and sending them to a different website made little sense. Also, the bounce rate on these referrals was over 50%, compared to a site average of around 20%, so the web visitors didn't enjoy it either.
-
Moosa,
Yes, the first thing I did was to remove all these links ...as of now, I am going through all my external links and cleaning some directory links that I had from many years ago which might seem spammy to penguin.
Really appreciate your comments, cheers
-
Michael, these links were on the footer of each site. I think I was hit algorithmically because I haven't received any message from Google but like I said, my organic visits are down by 43% compared to last year.
Thanks a lot for your input, cheers
-
I have answered this kind of question before as well and I will stand on my point even today! Although they all are your website and may be linking them all on each other seems logical and user friendly to you but search engine will still find it questionable and might hit you by some penguin update.
In my opinion, try to remove links if it is possible for you (no-following is not an option in my opinion) and if not at least link to other website intelligently!
Let’s say you have 11 websites and each is targeting to different location so add a link where you are talking about some other location instead of adding them all in footer or sidebar!
Hope this helps!
-
Generally speaking if you have site-wide do-follow links (typically footer) I would switch to no-follow immediately. If you are purely inter linking your portfolio Google is likely to spot those links are there trying to game the system.
Even if those links are offering real value to the visitor I would set to no-follow, but the way you describe that does not appear to be their primary purpose. What context and how do they appear on the page?
Also you say that you have been hit. Was this a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty? So you are fighting the right fight have you compared your analytics with the algorithm history dates?
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
What to do about this subdomain for SEO?
This is a bit of an unusual structure and I'm having difficulty explaining the question so pardon my being a 'noob', haha. The website I'm working on has some content under Forums that is hosted on another domain. The main website is https://yournorthside.org.au/ and if you select under the main Nav > Forums > Lived Experience it will take you to https://yournorthside.saneforums.org/t5/Lived-Experience-Forum/ct-p/lived-experience-forum. So it's as if it's a subdomain. (notice even the appearance of the main menu changes, weird) Apparently, saneforums.org has a requirement for that content to be on that subdomain. So therefore it's not part of my sitemap and now crawled or indexed. My question is is this structure okay? What are the implications for SEO? Should I be looking to implement some type of no follow link or something? Or is it actually beneficial in terms of all their content gives us 'link juice'? Can you link me to any resources / articles that give further insight?
Technical SEO | | kelseyc0 -
Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
Hi, I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers. This is how they do it: 1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS. 2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites. 3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name. 4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites. What I have done currently: 1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts. 2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week. Problem now is: When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google. Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google. Question: 1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this? 2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow? 3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues? Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword 5CGkSYM.png
Technical SEO | | ahming7770 -
SEO Redirect
If we have several hundred domain names currently using a park page, would we be better served having them redirect to our corporate homepage for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | mkessler0 -
SEO Ultimate Plug in problems for SEO MOZ
Hi Newbee here! SEO ultimate seems to work ok for other url I have on this problem. http://www.pureescapism.co.uk and performing the on page grader for hair salon broadstairsI have canonicalizer on for the plug in and I have made it the rel=canonical targetIt tells me I haven't.Further down I don't get a tick also and am told : Remove all but a single canonical URL tag.Not aware I have more than one.I am also told : No More Than One Meta Description Element ( Cant see how I can do that either as I havent changed any code)Help please
Technical SEO | | Agentmorris0 -
Does Bitly hurt your SEO?
I often use bit.ly or Google URL shortener in links when other websites post my articles so I can track clicks. However, I am thinking this may HURT my SEO given that it is taking away a back link to my website. Is that logic correct ? If so, what is a good way to be able to track clicks if a website posts your article without jeopardizing the SEO value?
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports1 -
Too many links on my site
Hi there everybody, I am a total SEO newbie and i am burning with questions. I had my site crawled and found out that it contains too many links. The reason is that it is a site where I constantly write news and articles and each one of them is a new Joomla item, thus a new link. I actually thought lots of content is good for SEO. How am I supposed to reduce the link amount?
Technical SEO | | polyniki0 -
Onpage linking
On my homepage, I currently link to about 40 internal pages. I'm considering altering the internal linking structure to have 50-100 links on the 2nd level pages. If I was to do this, I'd only need 8 homepage links. Do you think the 8 pages linked from the homepage would go up in the SERPs as the pagerank would be less diluted? I've heard so many mixed views on this. Be interested to see what people here think. Thanks, Pete
Technical SEO | | PeterM220