Too many on page links
-
Hi All,
As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number).
Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two?
Thanks for your replies guys.
Rich
-
First off, it's more of a balancing act than a hard/fast rule. I wrote a post about the 100 links "limit" last year, just for reference:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
Generally, though Expand Online is right - tests seem to show that Google ignores the 2nd, 3rd, etc. link to any Page B from Page A. While we still count those individual links, it shouldn't pose major problems for internal link-juice flow. Google consolidates them, for the most part. It may not be 100%, but it's close enough that you're probably ok in most cases.
It can be very situational, though. In practice, I find the additional links are sometimes unnecessary or even confusing for visitors, so pruning them down is always worth reviewing. I wouldn't create one mega-link, though - it can behave funny cross-browser, and it'll create odd-looking anchor text. If it's a choice of that or leaving things alone, I'd leave things alone.
-
@Expand Online: You are absolutely right when you say more links don't pass the double amount of link juice, but I hear stories that a second link does pass a bit of link juice and takes away some of the advantage. Just wondering if it helps to make sure you just have one link for each product without thing away the usability for the visitor.
@João Vargas: It's not about cheating a search engine, it's just trying to make sure we are not wasting any unnecessary search engine resources. I'm not to sure what you mean with the second paragraph in your message though.
-
This probably would not work well. We should avoid as much trying to cheat search engines.
I do not know if I understand perfectly, but have you thought about remove the links in the categories and let them only when it enters the product. As I understand it, there are many links in the following categories on products area, is it?
-
Since creating more than one link to some URL from one page does not increase the linkjuice that is passed to that URL, I recon that Crawlers understand that these are identical links. This isn't easy to verify though...
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
-
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Hi There! (i am beginner in seo) I have dynamic and static pages on our site. I created a static page for a specific keyword. Fully optimized it, (h1, alt, metas, etc.....maybe too optimized). My problem is that this page is alive for weeks, checked it in GWT and it is in robots.txt, google sees it, and indexed it. BUT whenewer i do a search for that keyword, we still appear with the dynamically created link in the google listings. How could i "redirect" google, if sy make a search for that keyword than shows our optimized page? Is there a tool for that? I cant delete the dynamic page... Any ideas? Thx Andrew
Technical SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Solutions for too many on-page links?
We have just begun using SEO Moz a few months ago and have been busy cleaning up some of our warnings and errors. One of the errors that has been an issue is ... too many on-page links. I am trying to correct this issue and I am wondering how seo moz counts these links. For instance... we have links to many of our product categories in a drop down from our main menu, those same links are listed in our footer. Does this get counted as two or only one link. If two, should we make one of the link no follow or how would you best suggest correcting this. Our website is www.unikeyhealth.com Since the menu and the footer appear on virtually every page on our site correcting this issue will quickly sort out this problem. Thanks for any advice.
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
Limit number of links in a page, how to build the menu?
Hi, One of the first SEOMoz tool recommand to me, is to avoid multiple links on the same page. This is fully true, i've more than 600 internal links placed in a menu on the header.
Technical SEO | | vdgvince
This means that each page contains these 600 links at least. User-experience wise, i need to keep this multi-level menu accessible. What would you suggest me ? => No-follow on the links would be useful and not penalizing (if i still have other do-follow links to these pages) => Javascript menu, so that i can't be crawled by google => Any other suggestion? Thank you in advance!0 -
Settle an argument re first links from a page? Anyone?
If we accept "the first link from a page to another is the one that transfers anchor text and PR" - does that then apply just the same for internal linking as it does with linking from domain to domain?
Technical SEO | | AidanMcCarthy0 -
How do I get rid of irrelevant back links pointing to missing pages on my site
Hi all, My site was hacked about a year ago and as a result I now have a ton of back links from irrelevant sites pointing to pages on my site that no longer exist. The followed back links section on the Competitive domain analysis tool shows about 3 pages worth of these horrible links. I have 2 questions: how bad is this for my site's SEO (which isn't good anyway, Page Rank 0) and how do I get rid of them? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Andy WkXz0
Technical SEO | | getzen560 -
External Links on a Front Page
Does anyone have any links to information about external links on a front page ? I am advising a client that this is not the best idea and that they could be put in a different place but can't find any proof of this.
Technical SEO | | marcelo-2753980 -
How is link juice passed to links that appear more than once on a given page?
For the sake of simplicity, let's say Page X has 100 links on it, and it has 100 points of link juice. Each page being linked to would essentially get 1 point of link juice. Right? Now let's say Page X links to Page Y 3 times and Page Z 5 times, and every other link only once. Does this mean that Page Y would get 3 "link juice points" and Page Z would get 5? Note: I know that the situation is much more complex than this, such as the devaluation of footer links, etc, etc, etc. However, I am interested to hear peoples take on the above scenario, assuming all else is equal.
Technical SEO | | bheard0