Sitewide links (please help)
-
Is there a tool in MOZpro where i can check my sitewide links?
Is there any helpful articles regarding sitewide links? Im confuse about (1) how to detect sitewide links (2) are they harmful or not (3) how to remove them.
Sample Scenario
I have 5 websites (www.sample.com) targeting 5 different counties
www.samplecn.com (china)
www.sampleny.com (new york)
www.samplekr.com (korea)
www.samplejp.com (japan)
www.samplesg.com (singapore)On each website i have a flag logo on every single page/ header allowing users to select the other websites. After 4 months, i end up with 200,000 backlinks from all the other 4 websites
Why am i worried: I find myself ranking #1 for a lot of the keywords for the 4th months straight now without doing much SEO optimization. And there are alot of websites below me which have better and more informative site than me. Should i be worried? am i doing something called "sitewide links"?
-
Open Site Explorer can show you if your site has sitewide backlinks, but I would not rely only on OSE for a link analysis of that kind, because the total amount of URLs its crawls in not the biggest one around.
As Ray-pp you can use also other tools like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO (or Cognitive SEO, which is particularly effective when it comes to link analysis), but I would always start from the "incoming links" page of Google Webmaster Tools.
To answer to your first question (how to detect sitewide links): sitewide links are very easy to detect. If you see that a domain is linking to yours with hundreds or even thousands backlinks, that is because they are sitewide links, or - classifying them - a single link published in a website element that repeated as it in every page of a site (i.e.: footer, sidebar, header).
In the specific case of your sites, the interlinking due to the "flag" menu is a classic. Normally they should not represent a problem, because Google recognizes they are systemic to certain kind of web design for multi-country or multilingual websites.
On the other hand, though, Matt Cutts once suggested that a better solution would be creating a country selector page reachable via internal linking from the header or the footer, so to avoid the creation of an always increasing number of sitewide sitelinks.
-
Hi kevinbp,
I'm not sure there is a tool in Mozpro to identify sitewide links, but we can use two other tools to help with that fairly easily.
Ahrefs has a neat link tool and does break out sitewide links. If you plugin your domain into the report, then go to 'Inbound Links,' and click on 'Sitewide' you will see a list of URLs that include a sitewide link to your domain.
Google Webmaster Tools
I like to use GWT to help identify internal sitewide links. You can view internal links in the Search Traffic > Internal Links report. Generally, pages with very high link count have sitewide internal links pointing to them.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
A must have tool for SEO analysis. You can crawl your site with this spider and get link counts. Similar to the GWT report above, you can identify pages that have/use sitewide links by viewing the amount of links that are inbound to specific pages.
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
-
On-Page / Site Optimization+Link Building -check help!
HI all, have also Question One, i don't understand how is this website : competitor website http://hack-clash-royale. com/ beter them my website i analze i have more more backlink and my website is strong have good seo but not on first position, you can tell me what is problem, my website is 4-5# and competitor 1-2# .. thanks
Link Building | | Fahad5Saleem0 -
Self linking
There are 10 links on page that point to this page where they exist (link to the page itself). Does it influence on ranking?
Link Building | | templatemonster0 -
Sitewide link to a sister site question
I own two websites that are somewhat related. On Site A, in the nav bar below the header I had a link to Site B. The nav bar shows on all several hundred pages. A few weeks ago I got nervous about this as I was doing some reading about sitewide links. Not exactly sure if they were a bad thing or not in this specific case, I decided to change the nav bar so that the link to Site B only showed up on Site A's home page. Well, within a week or so my site started dropping from its long-held #1 position for its main, high-volume keyword, slipping a bit every few days. Today it is #4. My question is, would the removal of the sitewide links and replacement of them with just a link on the homepage cause something like this to happen? And, I'm thinking about putting the sidewide menu link back in -- is this a bad idea? Note: the ranking on Site B is very important, with double the RPM of Site A.
Link Building | | bizzer0 -
Link quality
Hi, Having read dozens of your blogs and found them highly informative, i have to ask a question. I am kicking oout our SEO company and have taken over the SEO myself with some excellent results. Our SEO providers tell me that links from any site (irrelevent of their DA) are good, providing they are comming from a relevant source. We are in the security industry and according to MOZ, we have a DA of 52. If i can get a link to our site from another company in our industry but they have a DA of 10, is this really beneficial for me? Info i have read in Moz blogs suggest it is n ot a good idea. Please help. many thanks Daddy Smurf
Link Building | | DaddySmurf0 -
Reciprocal links
Are they worth anything, if they are from relevant sites? I'm I better off avoiding linking back wherever possible?
Link Building | | littlesthobo0 -
Text Link vs image link?
Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Link Location: In main page or inner "Link" page?
My question is what´s best of Link Building: have it in main page or in internal Link Pages. I have the problem that have to reduce the number of outgoing links in my mainpage to rank better, but do not want to miss any linkjuice. How Linking in Main Page or Internal Pages affects SERP for your website? And should they be Follow or not Follow? Thanks in advance Maria Jesus
Link Building | | goperformancelabs0 -
Links on the same keyword
When is linking from one particular keyword to much. At what point could link building from one keyword be considered spam and potentially delist a site ? Is it possible for a site to be delisted for having to many links from the same keyword ? Heard linking from the website name is more important following recent changes. I try and link from a selection of 3 to 4 keywords. Thanks for your help
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect0