Am I Stuffing Internal Anchor Text?
-
We've got about 1,700 products and 6,600 pages on our site. I recently finished up adding similar product links and popular category links to our product and category pages in an effort to juice up the pages that sell and make us money.
I also added a category html sitemap in the footer.
A couple of the targeted category rankings are moving down.
Am I possible accruing a penalty for overusing anchor text?
Is this internal linking strategy poor form?
Thanks.
-
If you have your sitemap.xml and have submitted it to both Google and Bing, then you should be fine.
-
Agreed on the silo groupings (neighborhoods). I've got some retooling to do. Thanks for that.
Its interesting on the sitemap deal. Some pro's recommend it always. Some don't like them at all. Now you're commonly seeing product indexes and category indexes.
I'm inclined to get rid of it (I'm just afraid my site was not set up optimally so I'm retooling there as well).
-
If adding links, try to keep the links within the same category. For example on the product page you provided, I would have links to the other 5 horse turnout blankets.
The goal with internal linking is to focus category and silo groupings. Or if you think of each page and remember that everything on that page should be related to what you want to rank for.
And to answer your overall question, I don't believe the changes you have made would hurt you. But really try to focus your links as groups.
As for sitemaps, if you have correctly designed your site, a sitemap really isn't necessary, so I would probably get rid of it.
-
Thanks Brent. Here's a product page and here is our sitemap in the footer.
-
There are so many factors that could play into this. Yes and No. I would have to take a look at an example to get you a better answer.
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
-
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
SEO Impact of High Volume Vertical and Horizontal Internal Linking
Hello Everyone - I maintain a site with over a million distinct pages of content. Each piece of content can be thought of like a node in graph database or an entity. While there is a bit of natural hierarchy, every single entity can be related to one or more other entities. The conceptual structure of the entities like so: Agency - A top level business unit ( ~100 pages/urls) Office - A lower level business unit, part of an Agency ( ~5,000 pages/urls) Person - Someone who works in one or more Offices ( ~80,000 pages/urls) Project - A thing one or more People is managing ( ~750,000 pages/urls) Vendor - A company that is working on one or more Projects ( ~250,000 pages/urls) Category - A descriptive entity, defining one or more Projects ( ~1,000 pages/urls) Each of these six entities has a unique (url) and content. For each page/url, there are internal links to each of the related entity pages. For example, if a user is looking at a Project page/url, there will be an internal link to one or more Agencies, Offices, People, Vendors, and Categories. Also, a Project will have links to similar Projects. This same theory holds true for all other entities as well. People pages link to their related Agencies, Offices, Projects, Vendors, etc, etc. If you start to do the math, there are tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links. While our users enjoy the ability to navigate this world according to these relationships, I am curious if we should force a more strict hierarchy for SEO purposes. Essentially, does it make sense to "nofollow" all of the horizontal internal links for a given entity page/url? For search engine indexing purposes, we have legit sitemaps that give a simple vertical hierarchy...but I am curious if all of this internal linking should be hidden via nofollow...? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhariani2 -
Role of Home Page Text
My company operates a commercial real estate web site in New York City. We are competing against brands that can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on marketing and SEO. I am an independent without employees. I am trying to replace generic home page text (my web site is ww.nyc-officespace-leader.com) with more engaging language that will differentiate the site. In terms of SEO best practices, what constraints exist on home page text? Must it discuss the brand in a general way? Must it specifically describe the interior pages of a site? For new home page text, I wanted to take a practical approach and provide visitors with a checklist that would be useful for their search. The check list would be in the form 500-800 words or very practical advice, specific items they should be aware of before commencing a real estate search. No other site is taking this approach and it could save tenants time and grief. I am attaching a very rough mock up of the new text (forgive the grammar, really needs to be edited!). Is there any thing wrong with this approach? I may have stumbled on a good idea, however maybe nobody has taken this route because it is inappropriate for a home page. I would very much appreciate any comments or guidance anyone may have. Best, Alan Rosinsky 0d76Iv2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Varying Internal Link Anchor Text with Each New Page Load
I'm asking for people's opinions on varying internal anchor text. Before you jump in and say, "Oh yes, varying your anchor text is always a good idea", let me explain. I'm not talking about varying anchor text on different links scattered throughout a site. We all know that is a wise thing to do for a variety of reasons that have been covered in many places. What I'm talking about is including semi-useful links below the fold and then varying the anchor text with each page load. Each time Googlebot crawls a page, it sees different anchor text for each link. That way, Googlebot is seeing, for example, 'san diego bars', 'taverns in san diego', 'san diego clubs', and 'pubs in san diego' all pointing to a San Diego bar/tavern/club/pub page. I'm wondering if there is value in this approach. Will it help a site rank well for multiple search queries? Could it potentially be better than static anchor text as it may help Google better understand the targeted page? Is it a good way to protect a large site with a huge number of internal links from Penguin? To summarize, we're talking about the impact of varying the anchor text on a single page with each page load as opposed to varying the anchor text on different pages. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanOD0 -
Heavy Internal Linking Help
One of the sites I work on is a home improvement ecommerce website that does fairly well for its niche. One of the biggest problems that we're not sure how to adequately handle is a heavy internal linking issue. The homepage (http://www.fauxpanels.com/) has approx. 226 internal links which is mainly due to the navigation structure. There are far worse pages though (the Samples page http://www.fauxpanels.com/samples.php has over 800 internal links). For the most part, management doesn't want any massive changes to the navigation layout. The Top navigation bar has a number of dropdown menus when you hover, the Left Navigation Bar expands to show more choices, and the Bottom navigation bar in many instances is just repeats of links that can be found elsewhere. Also, the product links in the body of the page can be found linked in the Left Navigation. This is not what I would personally consider the best way to handle navigation but the Customer Service Department has gotten numerous calls and emails over the years about how much people love our navigation and how easy it is to find things. My thought was trying to lessen the amount of links by having things grouped more often into Category pages/hub pages where applicable so we can remove some of the links. We've also considered NoFollowing links but my understanding is that even if you NoFollow the link equity is still divided by the number of on-page links. So, any of you much more experienced SEOs have any idea how I can lessen the heavy internal linking without completely re-doing the site's navigation layout and not harming link equity, ranking, etc.? Or, conversely, would you consider having an average 200-300 internal links per page not to be a real issue given the positive effect it has apparently had on user experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
Should I move our blog internal....
I wanted to also ask the wider moz community this question. Our blogs are currently run on blogger/wordpress using a subdomain strategy - blog.website.com and has now gained a home page PR3. It's been running for 2-3 years. This runs contrary to best practice of website.com/blog. I'm now considering making the blog internal but want to get your opinion as the longer I leave it, the bigger a decision it will be.... Do the pro's of making the blog internal outweigh the cons of doing so ? Pro's Blog benefits from root domain Fresh content on the site that people can interact with Root domain benefits from links the content gains Easier to analyse user activity Con's Loss of Page Rank Effort to 301 all URL's and content CMS altered to allow creation of blog content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
International SEO and server hosting
I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites. Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC) but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others). So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.). This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites. We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh-riley0 -
Fading Text Links Look Like Spammy Hidden Links to a g-bot?
Ah, Hello Mozzers, it's been a while since I was here. Wanted to run something by you... I'm looking to incorporate some fading text using Javascript onto a site homepage using the method described here; http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades/ so, my question is; does anyone think that Google might see this text as a possible dark hat SEO anchor text manipulation (similar to hidden links)? The text will contain various links (4 or 5) that will cycle through one another, fading in and out, but to a bot the text may appear initially invisible, like so; style="display: none;"><a href="">Link Here</a> All links will be internal. My gut instinct is that I'm just being stupid here, but I wanted to stay on the side of caution with this one! Thanks for your time 🙂 http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0