Keyword rich internal linking - problem?
-
Had an interesting situation today..
We write daily news articles on our site. In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links.
For example..
'Today McDonald's have announced that they are purchasing more blue widgets in order to increase their opportunity to appeal to a larger market.'
So in that sentence you can see one outbound link and one inbound to blue widgets on our site.
I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site..
I actually asked them why and this was their response.
'We're concerned because of the number of keyword-rich internal links in the article, and are worried that being included alongside them might be misinterpreted by Google as an artificial link.'
Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?.. but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.
-
On the subject of articles and pages that list headings of articles.. any idea on minimum text needed before something is regarded as 'thin content'?
I have a site with pages like that and was producing to thirty to forty pages per week (news items). I had thousands of those pages and would delete old ones about once a year. That site got hit in one of the first Pandas. I noindexed those pages right away and the site recovered within a few weeks. Now I continue doing the same. The anchor text is two to six words that are perfectly descriptive of the content or something snarky. Since the pages are not indexed I don't think that they are a problem.
I have had some slight panda problems that I think was caused by some pages that I added to a site almost ten years ago. It was a lot of photos with two to three sentence descriptions. So, I noindexed them and will beef all of them up to a couple hundred words and the really good ones up to 1000 word articles with several photos. But, I think that a couple hundred words would be adequate - but nobody knows for sure.
-
Thanks EGOL - You have been answering my questions since 2006 on SEOchat so appreciate you know your stuff on articles/blogs etc.
Nobody is paying us for links, there is no dodgy reciprocal or paid arrangement at all. We are writing news articles and linking out to relevant sources for that article (about 50% relevant to our industry, but 100% related to the article)
I think your point about the 2 and 2 is a valid point. Its a long job as our articles go back to 2007
On the subject of articles and pages that list headings of articles.. any idea on minimum text needed before something is regarded as 'thin content'?
-
In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links.
This sounds kinda systematic. If anybody is payin' you then you could have a problem. If nobody is payin or doing any favors back then just stop linking to these other sites. You don't have to. Or, if you worry about it then nofollow the links.
I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site.
Did you write the article without them asking you or paying you? If that is the case then just take the link down.
If you are publishing articles for others with links to them on request, for a fee, or as an article exchange then there could be a problem.
Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?..
If nobody is payin' or doin' favors then there is probably not a problem. But get out of the habit of linking to two internal and two external...two internal and two external...two internal and two external...two internal and two external...two internal and two external...two internal and two external...
See what it looks like?
but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.
Look at wikipedia. On my site, I do the same thing. If I have relevant article about widgets I link to it in the text of the article.
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
-
Replacing keywords by synonyms. Will it increase risk of google keyword stuffing penalization?
I have a page which is ranking already pretty well for a relative competitive keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Google also ranks us on first page for synonym of keyword we optimize the page for (even though synonym does not appear on our page). I am now considering to replace some occurences of the keyword in the page by different synonyms, in the hope that our ranking may further improve for these synonyms.
However I am concerned that google may penalize me for keyword stuffing if I am using a wide range of synonyms of one keyword on our page. My plan is only to replace some occurences of keyword with synonyms. I am a bit nerveous here since page is already ranking quite well in a competitive niche. Any thoughts?0 -
Magento Core_URL_Rewrite Problems
Hi Everyone, We are currently caught between a rock and a hard place with Magento and are wondering if anyone else had similar problems and could share their advice. Our Core_URL_Rewrite now containt 1.3 million records for an account that has 12000 products on 4 different store views. This has ballooned past the point that we are no longer able to reindex our URL Management. The option that is being suggested to us is to truncate the table and start over, though this will essentially kill our SEO for those pages.(Which as there are duplicates, I can only imagine how much they are going to be penalized by it) Would anyone have any advice other than truncating and starting over? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csworkwear1 -
Site wide links - should they be nofollow or followed links
Hi We have a retail site and a blog that goes along with the site. The blog is very popular and the MD wanted a link from the blog back to the main retail site. However as this is a site wide link on the blog, am I right in thinking this really should be no follow link. The link is at the top of every page. Thanks in advance for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Can internal links from a blog harm the ranking of a page?
Here is the situation: A site was moved from its original domain to its new domain, and at the same time, the external wordpress.com blog was moved to a subdirectory, making it an onsite blog. The two pages that rank the highest on the site have virtually no links from the blog and no external links, while all the other pages are linked extensively from the blog and have backlinks. Their targeted keywords are not so much easier to rank than the other pages for that to be the sole cause. To confuse the matter even more, there was a manual penalty affecting incoming links which was removed last month. The old site, which has many backlinks to the new site, is still in Google's index. The old blog however, has been redirected page by page and is not in Google's index. Most of the blog posts are short 1-paragraph company updates and potentially considered low quality content because of that (?) The common denominator among the two highest ranked pages (I'm talking top 3 in SERP v. page 3 or 4) seems to be either the lack of external backlinks or the lack of internal links from the blog. Could there be an issue with the blog such that internal links from it are detrimental rather than helpful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Rankings disappeared on main 2 keywords - are links the issue?
Hi, I asked a question around 6 months ago about our rankings steadily declining since April of 2013. I did originally reply to that topic a few days ago, but as it's so old I don't think it's been noticed. I'm posting again here, if that's an issue I'm happy to delete. Here it is for reference: http://moz.com/community/q/site-rankings-steadily-decreasing-do-i-need-to-remove-links Since the original post, I have done nothing linkbuilding-wise except posting blog posts and sharing them on Facebook, G+ and Twitter. There are some links in there which don't look great (ie spammy seo directories, which I'm sending removal requests to) although quite a lot of others are relevant. Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've tried to make the site more accessible - we now have a simple, responsive design and I've tried to make the content clear and concise. In short, written for humans rather than search engines. As of the end of November, 'nuts and bolts' has now disappeared completely, and 'bolts and nuts' is page 8. There are many pages much higher which are not as relevant and have no links. We still rank highly for more specialised terms - ie 'bsw bolts' and 'imperial bolts' are still page 1, but not as high as before. We get an 'A' grade on the on-page grader for 'nuts and bolts, and most above us get F. I was cautious about removing links as our profile doesn't seem too bad but it does seem as if it's that. There are a fair few questionable directories in there, no doubt about that, but our overall practice in recent years has been natural building and link earning. So - I've created a spreadsheet and identified the bad links - ie directories with any SEO connotations. I am about to submit removal requests, I thought two polite requests a couple of weeks apart prior to disavowing with Google. But am I safe to disavow straight away? I say this as I don't think I'll get too many responses from those directories. I am also gradually beefing up the content on the shop pages in case of any 'thin content' issues after advice on the previous post. I noticed 100s of broken links in webmaster tools last week due to 2 broken links on our blog that repeated on every page and have fixed those. I have also been fixing errors W3C compliance-wise. Am I right to do all this? Can anyone offer any suggestions? I'm still not 100% sure if this is Panda, Penguin or something else. My guess is Penguin, but the decline started in March 2013, which correlates with Panda. Best Regards and thanks for any help, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
For those of you that used LINK DETOX.
Did you go ahead and remove all the TOXIC and HIGH RISK links? Just the toxic? Were you successful with the tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Does the home page must get the biggest amount of internal links?
Hi All, I have an e-commerce website with thousands of unique pages. The site is built with quick access through the navigation bar to the main product categories. All of the product pages have navigation trees in them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
What happened is that in one of the main categories I have so many pages (products) that it actually gets more links than the home page - it is getting the links both from the menu (in each page in the site) and from the product pages that belong to that category whereas the homepage gets only the one link from the menu. Is that OK or should I add a level in the navigation tree that points to the homepage? Thanks0 -
Outgoing affiliate links and link juice
I have some affiliate websites which have loads of outgoing affiliate links. I've discussed this with a SEO friend and talked about the effect of the link juice going out to the affiliate sites. To minimize this I've put "no follows" on the affiliate links but my friend says that even if you have no follow Google still then diminishes the amount of juice that goes to internal pages, for example if the page has 10 links, 9 are affiliate with no follow - Google will only give 10% of the juice to the 1 internal page. Does anyone know if this is the case? and whether there are any good techniques to keep as much link juice on the site as possible without transferring to affiliate links? Appreciate any thoughts on this! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ventura0