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.
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
-
Hello Mozzers,
I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow.
-
My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ?
-
Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated?
Any thoughts greatly appreciated
thanks
Pete
-
-
Hello Dirk & Mike
Many thanks for you advice and feedback.
Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url.
Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell..
Many thanks for taking the time to explain.
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
Personally I am not a big believer in trying to funnel link juice across the site - but theoretically yes, if you reduce the number of (unique) links on the home, the more link juice is passed to the categories below.
On the other side, the fewer links you have on the homepage, the more you are pushing content deeper in your site (number of clicks from the homepage to reach pages).
The other point - you can structure your URL anyway you want (best is to keep them quite simple so that they are easy to remember and not too long). For the depth - Google is looking at the number of clicks to reach this page (starting from home) - they are not counting the number of "/" in your url.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Edit: you might want to check these resources: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2316757/matt-cutts-on-linking-guidelines-how-many-links-on-a-page - and this one https://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
-
Pete,
You shouldn't have more than 200 links on one page. I don't see why you would need so many duplicate links, a few yes, but 50%?
2c
Thanks,
- Mike Bean
-
Hi Dirk,
Many thanks for your assistance and advice. The homepage does look quite busy with alot going on, thats why I thought it would be better to have the homepaqe more about branding etc and less about the trying to get every category etc on there etc on there as we are small business, so building trust /brand etc is vital as we can't compete with the majors who seem to have an instant advantage with higher da etc .. Most users come in on a category landing page as oppose to home to so I think that would improve user experience and make the whole thing alot less cluttered. Then I would have the room to improve other aspects such as my diy news etc.
Am I correct in assuming though by having less links , If I was to tone the homepage down , would improve the concentration of link juice to the child pages.
Also another thing I've noticed is that my level 2 categories do not sit directly underneath my level 1 categories from a URL point of view. We were wondering if this would confuse google even though we have everything in mini sitemaps etc.
Many Thanks
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
No need to worry about the duplicate links - to quote Matt Cutts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ) - nothing to worry about (as long as it's not 5000 internal links with over optimised anchor)
266 links on the home is a lot - but not an amount of links that is surprisingly high for an average e-commerce site (especially with the duplicates). Regarding the number of links I would rather think about usability than SEO. If having this much links on the page is making it easier for your visitors to go through your site - keep them. If this number of links is making them confused - try to reorganise & regroup the links. A small user test with a few people not too familiar with your site can learn you a lot about the usability factor and how many people are actually using the links to navigate (vs just using the internal search function)
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Does a non-canonical URL pass link juice?
Our site received a great link from URL A, which was syndicated to URL B. But URL B is canonicalized to URL A. Does the link on URL B pass juice to my site? (See image below for a visual representation of my question) zgbzqBy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice1 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page. Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products. While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links. Would love some guidance on: Maximum number of internal links on a page If Google frowns on really long category pages Anything else I should be considering when making this decision Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY2 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10