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.
Cross Linking two related ecommerce websites
-
Hi Guys,
Hope you'll be able to help me with a technical problem I am facing right now.
We are a company right ? We own 2 webistes.
Let's say one sells car parts, the other one buys second hand car parts to refurbish them and sell them. (It is not our case, just an example very similar to ours).
Both are ecommerce websites, with large catalogues (7000 skus). sellparts sells a lot and is a big actor in its market. buyparts.com doesn't work nad has a really low DA.
My new SEO external consultant, which I am not too convinced about, is telling me to cross link the sites on product level using cross-linking extensions. He want have them do-follow.
That would mean having hundreds or thousands of links with really similar linking patterns.
buy [parts] [model ] [make]
sell [parts] [model ] [make]
That to me seems a bit too much and I am worried it compromises the sellparts site's SEO.
So should i no-follow the links ? Or do it differently ?
-
That's really true.Perhaps the best solution is to have another shop @ sellparts.com/buyparts
Perhaps the best affordable solution is to have another shop @ sellparts.com/buyparts ?
It then could be another site on the same Magento install with different shopping cart extensions.
I really appreciate your help. Thanks.
-
Keeping all of your business on one domain will help with your branding, since there is a natural overlap in buyers and sellers of auto parts. It will expose your buyparts business to everyone to comes to the sellparts domain.
My preferred method would be to keep all of the pages in folders on the sellparts domain. That is best for SEO purposes since Google does not give subdomains the full benefit of their root domain. I would work hard or pay for development to make that happen.
My very last resort would be to use a subdomain. The pages on the subdomain would not perform as well as if they were on the root domain.
-
That answer, truly, is a spot on. Combining sites is actually what our competitors are tending to do.
The matter is that buying and selling on the same site is a really tricky thing to do on a Magento based website as shopping cart aren't prepared for that and custom development is a nightmare on the long run.
One last question. What about if, buyparts would be on a subdomain where shopping carts wouldn't be shared. The development would be easier.How do you think it could affect the SEO ?
How do you think it could affect the SEO ?
Thanks.
-
If these sites belonged to me, I would not place site-wide links on either of them that point to the other. In this situation, links from BuyParts will probably be of little to no value in lifting the rankings of SellParts since it is so much stronger.
If I thought that many customers of these sites would be natural customers of the other, then I would combine the sites. I would test this by making a large pdf of parts that I am willing to buy, placing it on the SellParts domain and linking to it from several obvious places saying "we also buy parts, click here for our buy list".
That is what I would do if these sites belonged to me.
-
You are absolutely right and I am glad you pointed it. English isn't my first language...
Buyparts.com has a REALLY low traffic and revenue as no SEO work has been done on it. It receives very few orders a month although the potential is good.
Nonetheless, it will never make the profits of sellpart.com. sellparts.com represents 99% or our revenue.
Thanks
-
"buyparts.com doesn't work"
I don't want to give a response without having a clear understanding of this.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
We have two different websites with the same products and information, will that hurt our rankings?
We have two different domains, one for the UK and the other for the US, they have the exact same products, categories and information. (the information is almost the same in 400 products) We know that Google could recognize that as duplicate content, but will that actually hurt our rankings in both sites? Is it better if we create two completely different versions of the content on those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page
Scenario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links. Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
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 -
Cross linking between categories
Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ? I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... ) but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?0