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.
Removed Site-wide links
-
Hi there,
I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords?
Thanks
-
Hi Geoff.
1. These are not websites I own, I had asked the webmaster to remove these site-wide links which they did.
2. They are not hosted on the same server.
3. The anchor text was keyword specific.
4. As a preventative measure, however it looks like this has back-fired.
5. Not to my knowledge, check PR and all is still the same.
6. Yes, they do have other links pointing to it, however in terms of percentage very little, as these were site-wide which was going into the thousands.
Some keywords have disappeared that were not in the site-wide links, which is a concern, maybe there is something else going on?
Shall I get the webmaster to re-instate these site-wide links?
-
Hi Anthony,
As a preventative measure, however it looks like it's backfired. The site-wide links were not on spammy websites, there were high PR, lots of social interaction etc.
Would you ask to get these back on site-wide?
-
There are so many questions here really before it's clear what the cause could be, some of these include:-
- Are these from other sites you own? One would presume so if you access to remove the links?
- If so, are these sites hosted on the same server as the domain they were pointing to?
- Did the sitewide links contain keywords as the anchor text or were they branded?
- Why did you choose to remove the sitewide links in the first place?
- Did any of the other websites containing these sitewide links suffer recently as a result of algorithm updates or decline in rankings.
- The page(s) that the sitewide links were pointing to, does this have other existing links still pointing to it? What % were they were reduced by after the removal of the sitewide links? And of those existing, are they a mix of nofollow/dofollow?
Often, the removal of mass of backlinks will cause a drop as you've experienced. Normally because it's a major shift in the link profile and doesn't look 'natural', providing there was legitimate reasons and there are no other issues that can be raised against the domain in question, often, ranking positions are pretty much reinstated again.
Incidentally, how we often get round this scenario is to keep the sitewide link in place but write a script to only make the link on the homepage followed - and all the others add the nofollow link relationship.
-
Are you doing this as a preventative measure or had you already seen a significant drop in rankings before making this decision?
I would only remove them if they are on spammy sites. Then, focus on getting some more good, branded links to even out your backlink profile.
-
Hi Geoff,
I am removing site-wide links externally.
-
Are you removing sitewide links on other domains pointing to your website or are you referring to sitewide internal linkage within your own site?
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Link Building Ideas for a health site
Hi, I am trying to rank a health related website. This is the url: www.ridpiles.com Domain age is 1 year 6 months. Done Directory submissions Blog Comments + Forum posts Done Social Bookmarks Article submissions (Not much) I have done competitor analysis. All of my competitors are just had links from directories and some link exchanges. They got links from quality sites like Yahoo dir. I know my site is far better than my competitors and has 100% unique content. I have submitted to yahoo directory inclusion, but still no luck i hadn't accepted into it. I am planning to go for a sponsered review but dont know, weather the link will be valuable for that much of money. I was left with Guest Blogging. I see this is the only option for me to build links. But i have a very tough competiton, i must compete with most reputed sites like webmd.com etc, i need to get more good links. But i cant get what other ways to get authoritative links. If Guest blogging is the only option for me, how many posts do i need to do daily? And can someone suggest me good Guest blogging sites? Anyhelp would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess0 -
Max # of Products / Links per Page on E-Commerce Site
We are getting ready to re-launch our e-commerce site and are trying to decide how many products to list per category page. Some of of our category pages have upwards of 100 products. While I'd love to list ALL the products on the root category page (to reduce hassle for customer, to index more products on a higher PR page), I'm a little worried about having it be too long, and containing too many on-page links. Would love some guidance on: Maximum number of internal links on a page If Google frowns on really long category pages Anything else I should be considering when making this decision Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY2 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0