Too many external links?
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Ok, so I am finally focusing more on SEO of my hobby website as I am notice the relavent keywords are not really onsite what I want, for example, according to analytics "post" is my most popular keyword which I assume is from the vbulletin forum.
My question today is that according to the moz scan, my forum has too many external links, my question is what are some measures I can do whether within the vbulletin forum or custom coding to reduce the amount of links/increase power?
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You basically have three options regarding your links:
1. Make administrative changes to limit the links. Take a look at the following URL: http://www.rcnightmare.com/forum/. The page has over 250 links which is too many for SEO optimization. Every forum section has 3 links: the forum section name, the last post and the last poster. 40 sections x 3 links each = 120 links. Additionally some sections such as Electric Monster Trucks has a group of subsections. Add to that the category links, the normal navigation links, the footer links and the sidebar links and you wind up with 251 total links.
A key component of SEO is optimization. Your site is presently designed so all your content is accessible. From a SEO perspective, the more popular/important content should be more accessible, and the less popular content should be less accessible. As the forum owner it is up to you to make some decisions.
2. Make programming changes to limit the links. You could remove the link to the last poster, as an example. That one change would remove 40 links. You could also make changes to the links in your navigation, footer and sidebar. There can be positives and negatives to these changes.
3. Disregard the issue. You can ignore the issue and live with the understanding your forum articles wont rank as well in search engines. You can try to adjust your other site pages to be better optimized.
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