How is link juice split between navigation?
-
Hey All, I am trying to understand link juice as it relates to duplicate navigation
Take for example a site that has a main navigation contained in dropdowns containing 50 links (fully crawl-able and indexable), then in the footer of said page that navigation is repeated so you have a total of 100 links with the same anchor text and url. For simplicity sake will the link juice be divided among those 100 and passed to the corresponding page or does the "1st link rule" still apply and thus only half of the link juice will be passed?
What I am getting at is if there was only one navigation menu and the page was passing 50 link juice units then each of the subpages would get passed 1link juice unit right? but if the menu is duplicated than the possible link juice is divided by 100 so only .5 units are being passed through each link. However because there are two links pointing to the same page is there a net of 1 unit?
We have several sites that do this for UX reasons but I am trying to figure out how badly this could be hurting us in page sculpting and passing juice to our subpages.
Thanks for your help! Cheers.
-
Hi Keri,
thanks for the follow up. As for the specific question no I have not really found a concrete answer. Currently we have left the duplicate navigation alone and focused on more pressing updates. Sorry that I don't have more info to share.
-
Hi Joshua,
I'm following up on older unanswered questions, and wondering what you decided to do in this case. Did you change anything, or leave it as is? Do you have anything interesting to share with us that you learned?
Thanks!
-
Hey Damien, thanks for the response. Ya I had originally thought about no following one set of links but then found out what you just pointed out, that the nofollow doesn't work that way anymore. We actually have more links then that per page (that just happens to be a round number) but what I am trying to figure out is since about half of them are duplicates am I really losing anything? since they only link to about 50 unique pages are those pages being passed the same amount of juice as they would be if they were only being linked to once per page (instead of being linked to in the main nav and footer)?
-
I'd be wary of having so many links on one page. I say 100 links is a max per page but obviously I'm sure there's going to be sites out there that rank with more than that; but as a general rule...
You used to be able to add nofollow to your links and preserve your PR but I believe if you add that now the link will get no juice and you still lose some. It's more of a 'I don't sponsor this' sort of thing. Hope I explained myself okay there!
DD
-
Thanks for posting. I understand what chapter four says but it doesn't seem to answer my question. My understanding is that google only counts the first link on a page when passing link juice although it splits link juice across all of the links on a page. So according to this understanding only the navigation contained in the dropdowns at the top of the page will pass link juice, thus only half of the possible link juice is passed since the links in the footer don't pass any juice (even though they are factored in to how much juice each link passes). Is that a correct understanding? The example in the book does not discuss what happens to how link juice is calculated and passed when two links on one page point to the same subpage.
-
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
-
Can I safely asume that links between subsites on a subdirectories based multisite will be treated as internal links within a single site by Google?
I am building a multisite network based in subdirectories (of the mainsite.com/site1 kind) where the main site is like a company site, and subsites are focused on brands or projects of that company. There will be links back and forth from the main site and the subsites, as if subsites were just categories or pages within the main site (they are hosted in subfolders of the main domain, after all). Now, Google's John Mueller has said: <<as far="" as="" their="" url="" structure="" is concerned,="" subdirectories="" are="" no="" different="" from="" pages="" and="" subpages="" on="" your="" main="" site.="" google="" will="" do="" its="" best="" to="" identify="" where="" sites="" separate="" using="" but="" the="" is="" same="" for="" a="" single="" site,="" you="" should="" assume="" that="" seo="" purposes,="" network="" be="" treated="" one="">></as> This sounds fine to me, except for the part "Google will do its best to identify where sites are separate", because then, if Google establishes that my multisite structure is actually a collection of different sites, links between subsites and mainsite would be considered backlinks between my own sites, which could be therefore considered a link wheel, that is, a kind of linking structure Google doesn't like. How can I make sure that Google understand my multisite as a unique site? P.S. - The reason I chose this multisite structure, instead of hosting brands in categories of the main site, is that if I use the subdirectories based multisite feature I will be able to map a TLD domain to any of my brands (subsites) whenever I'd choose to give that brand a more distinct profile, as if it really was a different website.
Web Design | | PabloCulebras0 -
Is The HREF Link "Title" Tag Needed on Mobile Websites?
Hello To Those Who Are Wiser Than I, I am wondering if the href link "title" tag is needed, or serves any purpose, on mobile websites? Also, does it effect SEO in any way? I ask because generally the href link title tag provides more information to the user when they scroll their mouse over the link - but this action does not happen on mobile! Users have no mouse and thus no extra information would be displayed. I'm really wondering if it still matters for SEO purposes on mobile though. -The UnEnlightened
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Is it still necessary to have a "home" page button/link in the top nav?
Or is it not necessary to have a "home" tab/link because everybody by this time knows you can get to the home page by clicking on the logo?
Web Design | | FindLaw0 -
URL & Link Hierarchy - juice flow direction from backlinks?
Our site is very regional, so we focus all of our seo efforts on each of these region landing pages. For Example: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco We added an informational page (ex. reviews) and gave it a url like this: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco/reviews Question: Will external backlinks to domain.com/toys/.../reviews provide any link juice value to it's hierarchical parent page: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco?
Web Design | | 42Floors0 -
How to split organic traffic for A/B testing
This might be a silly questions as I may be missing something completely obvious here, but we are completely new to A/B testing. Our site doesn't receive a phenomenal amount of traffic although we are looking to set up some A/B testing for our popular products. Is there a way to split organic traffic for a specific product page. I'm aware that we need to experiment which one performs better in Analytics but I'm unsure how to redirect 50% of the organic traffic.
Web Design | | Jseddon920 -
Links not visible in "Google cache text version" but visible in "Fetch as Google" in Webmaster tool
Hi Guys, There seems some issue with the coding due to which Google is not indexing half of our menu bar links. The cached text version of http://www.99acres.com/ is not showing links present in dropdown "All India" , dropdown "Advice" and "Hot Projects" tab in blue bar on top menu whereas these links are visible in "Fetch as Google" in Google Webmaster tool. Any clue to why is there a difference between the links shown in Google webmaster and Google cache text version. Thanks in advance 🙂
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Is this CSS solution to faceted navigation a problem for SEO?
Hi guys. Take a look at the navigation on this page from our DEV site: http://wwwdev.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/handheld-microphones While the CSS "trick" implemented by our IT Director does allow a visitor to sort products based on more than one criteria, my gut instinct says this is very bad for SEO. Here are the immediate issues I see: The URL doesn't change as the filter criteria changes. At the very least this is a lost opportunity for ranking on longer tail terms. I also think it could make us vulnerable to a Panda penalty because many of the combinations produce zero results, so returning a page without content, under the original URL. This could not only create hundreds of pages with no content, there would be duplicates of those zero content pages as well. Usability - The "Sort by" option in the drop down (upper right of the page) doesn't work in conjunction with the left Nav filters. In other words if you filter down to 5 items and then try to arrange them by price high to low, the "Sort" will take precedence, remove the filter and serve up a result that is all products in that category sorted high to low (and the filter options completely disapper), AND the URL changes to this: http://wwwdev.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/IAFDispatcher regardless of what sort was chosen...(this is a whole separate problem, I realize and not specifically what I'm trying to address here). Aside from these two big problems, are there any other issues you see that arise out of trying to use CSS to create product filters in this way? I am trying to build a case for why I believe it should not be implemented this way. Conversely, if you see this as a possible implementation that could work if tweaked a bit, and advice you are willing to share would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Thank you to Travis for pointing out the the link wasn't accessible. For anyone willing to take a closer look we can unblock the URL based on your IP address. If you'd be kind enough to send me your IP via private message I can have my IT director unblock it so you can view the page. Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Internal linking for small site
I have a site with 13 pages, 6 are product pages, 5 are free tips pages (the other 2 are the home page and contact form). Currently I have the navbar at top of site with a "products" dropdown menu for the 6 product pages and a "Tips" dropdown menu for the 5 tip pages. All categories except the contact page are at the bottom as breadcrumbs, the homepage is "home" and the rest are relevant user friendly keyword anchor text. So I have 2 more pages to ad to "Tips" and am wondering whether to have a new 2nd level tips page that links to a 3rd level of 7 different tips pages, or keep it shallow as it is, with only 2 levels from the homepage to the other (now 13) pages, with a potential of 22 pages in the foreseable few years? (and some graphics work to make it user friendly like how Zappo's has categories to the side on each of its drop down navbar menu's and non-link text categories for its bottom of page breadcrumb links) Can those aforementioned pages linking to each other in the footer dilute link equity? (I think that's one of the primary reasons I'm curious). What do you think of this: http://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2012/08/08/internal-linking-101-5-best-practices/ (I guess I should no follow my contact page), could it be better to have a 2nd level page for "Tips" to get more equity to that page rather than across all 7 tips pages? I have read around about this on here (hence how I found out about Zappo's) and elsewhere and wanted ask to make sure.
Web Design | | Zoolander0