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.
10,000+ links from one site per URL--is this hurting us?
-
We manage content for a partner site, and since much of their content is similar to ours, we canonicalized their content to ours.
As a result, some URLs have anything from 1,000,000 inbound links / URL to 10,000+ links / URL --all from the same domain.
We've noticed a 10% decline in traffic since this showed up in our webmasters account & were wondering if we should nofollow these links?
-
Unfortunately, it is very situational and tough to tell without seeing the sites. I tend to agree with Marcus that it generally makes me a little nervous, but Zachary is right - sitewide links aren't necessarily bad. They just tend to be associated with quality issues, especially on large scale. Still, one site is one site. Worst case, those links are probably just being devalued (in other words, Google is turning down the volume on them).
If you're sharing content across the two sites, you might want to try a cross-domain canonical tag instead. It really depends on the degree of the duplication. Still, a link bank from each piece of content to the original content is generally a good idea.
Any sitewide links, like footer links, on top of that, are probably very low value. Whether I'd remove, nofollow, or leave them alone, though, really depends a lot on the quality and the relationship between the two sites.
-
Is it a link or is it a canonical? If it is a link to the canonical then I would not imagine it is going to help anyway but personally, I would try to have high quality links and not these mass link bombs, it's just asking for trouble and you won't get 100,000 links worth of benefit anyway.
As ever, hard to be precise without seeing the site in question but... I would edge towards no follow here.
-
Hi Marcus,
Yes, so, basically, it is 1 million links to one URL, and other URLs have 10,000+ links. This happened because they use our content, and we canonicalized all of their content to us.
In most cases, the anchor text is the same throughout.
It is a reputable domain that is linking to us.
Should we no-follow these links? It would be quite difficult to remove them all-together.
-
You're essentially asking if sitewide links are OK. Yes, they are.
Marcus makes a good point: if any of the pages are poor in quality, you'll notice a decline in value. Your priority should be ensuring all of the pages are high in quality, or at the least noindexed. The problem with WPMU was that they can't control the quality, so they just took the links out. Sounds like you are in a position to keep the links, but do a bit of cleanup.
-
Hey Michelle
Just to clarify, are you saying that you have some sites with like a million pages and that these sites have a footer or template link to another site?
If so, this might be an interesting read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
I am not 100% clear here so as ever, examples would be useful but I really can't see that one domain putting a 1,000,000 inbound links to a single page on another domain as being anything but a bad, bad thing. Combine that with some dodgy anchor text and you are on the road to ruin.
It's a shot in the dark without an example but I would suggest an nofollow given what we know.
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
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
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 -
Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaraLP1 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Does google credit links from iFrames or created by Javascript, if so, is one more powerful than the other?
Consider this example, because I want to be clear about what I mean. You have two websites. Lets all them www.a.com and www.b.com. On www.a.com/some/page, there is an iframe something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
<iframe src="www.b.com/some/special/path"></iframe>
Then content of this iframe is a bunch of pictures, text and numbers, as well as a group of links, linking each picture to www.b.com for example the links might be:
www.b.com/content/1
www.b.com/content/2
www.b.com/content/3 Questions: When google crawls **www.a.com/some/page, **does it pass link juice to www.b.com/content/*? Does google instead consider these to be internal links within b.com itself. because links to www.b.com/content/ ** are actually from b.com itself, since the domain of the iframe is actually: www.b.com/some/special/path 3) Is there any amount of link juice passed from www.a.com/some/page to* www.b.com/some/special/path **because this is the src= element of an iframe that a.com is hosting? Consider an alternative setup. Where instead of using an iframe the contents of the above described iFrame is actually added the the page dynamically using javascript, and a call to an API endpoint at b.com. Resulting in these links being added directly to the body of a.com without being wrapped in an iframe element. Questions:
4) Do these links that were created after page load still get crawled and credited by google? (i have heard in the past that google was going to start crawling javascript, i just don't know if this is known for a fact yet).
5) Do links created on the client side hold the same weight as a link that was served directly via the backend html generation? If both the links within the iframe and the links within the javascript embed method pass link juice. Is one preferred over the other? is one known to be more effective than the other? Thanks!0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Nofollow Outbound Links on Listings from Travel Sites?
We oversee a variety of regional, county, and town level tourism websites, each with hundreds (or even thousands) of places/businesses represented with individual pages. Each page contains a link back to the place's main web presence if available. My fear is that a large portion of these linked to sites are low quality, and may even be spammy. With our budgets there is no way to sort through them and assign nofollows as needed. There are also a number of broken links that we try to stay on top of but at times some slip through due to the sheer number of pages. I am thinking about adding a nofollow to these outbound links across the board. This would not be all outbound links on the website, just the website links on the listing pages. I would love to know peoples thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Your_Workshop0 -
Do UTM URL parameters hurt SEO backlink value?
Does www.example.com and www.example.com/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=Press+Release&utm_campaign=Google have the same SEO backlink value? I would assume that Google knows the difference.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkhGT0
