Will changing website subject affect the value of excisting links?
-
What will happen with the value of links when a website subject is changing? Will all value be lost or will it keep certain value?
There will be a new subject, new pages, new structure...
-
Thanks Tom for your answer. I understand that it will have a negative affect. I just look for real-life cases from people who did a similar change of topic/subject.
We used to have a website on a topic that is not in our field of interest anymore. The name can be the same (not much branded traffic) so we thought it might give a new website a bit of a start with some links.
-
that will definitely have a negative effect, possibly more than just a minor one. you won't lose all linkjuice though.
do I take it you have caught a domain? is there no way you can keep it on-topic?
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 treat a website with several different types of subject matter
I know it’s hekpful, when attempting to rank for a various cluster of keywords, to have a site that is primarily about that subject matter. For instance, it would be very difficult to rank for keywords pertaining to window treatments, roof repair, lawn mowing, interior decorating, and vegan recipes. I have a client who owns a multi specialty center that does plastic surgery, dermatology, welllness, ophthalmology, skin and laser treatments, and more. I feel like the solution would be to make each verticals a subdomain, and treat each as its own website, for all intents and purposes, using WordPress multisite to manage it. So, plastic-surgery.website.com, dermatology.website.com, etc., and have website.com act as the landing page for the center, linking out to the various practice areas. what are your thoughts? Thanks so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | minyona0 -
Link conundrum - losing nav/footer links in mobile view
Hi Moz folks! I'm currently moving a site from being hosted on www. and m. separately to a responsive single URL. The problem is, the desktop version currently has links to important landing pages in the footer (about 60) and that's not something we want to replicate on mobile (mainly because it will look pretty awful.) There is no navigation menu because the key to the homepage is to convert users to subscription so any distraction reduces conversion rate. The footer links will continue to exist on the desktop view but, since Google's mobile-first index, presumably we lose these important homepage links to our most important pages. So, my questions: Do you think there is any SEO value in the desktop footer links? Do you have any suggestions about how best to include these 60-odd links in a way that works for mobile? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | d_foley0 -
Should I change my product infomation (PDF attatchments) into additional webpages with links ?
Hello All, On our eCommerce site some products have additional information which we currently show via a PDF link next to the product. I am thinking, is it more beneficial from an SEO point of view , If I was to put this additional pdf information to a webpage and have a link going from the product to this . From what I read, google cannot read contents of pdfs so if I was to have this as webpage via a link , then the product page would get more keywords and strength around it which would help improve it's seo etc. Just wondered if this is the best way forward or not ? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How do I find the links on my site that link to another one of my pages?
I ran IIS Seo toolkit and it found about 40 pages that I have no idea how they exist. What tool can I use to find out what internal link is linking to them so I can fix them or get rid of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
CMS generating thousands of links, will it hurt my SEO?
I've shifted my static (HTML) eCommerce website to Magento. I am facing serious problem, my website has total 20 products (each product has canonical URL) , I was surprised to see thousands of links indexed in Google as well as in my webmaster Crawler stats, later on I removed all from webmaster tool and marked as fixed, also blocked crawlers to crawl on those specific directories through robots.txt file. Now my question is will these urls still effect my website's SEO? As they still exist and accessible but blocked for crawlers. And is there any better way to block them other than robots.txt.Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarybusinessmachines0 -
Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0