How can I reduce my warnings for excesive links on our site?
-
Our campaign overview shows well over 100 warnings that could be hurting our google ranking based on excessive links on pages. Each page listed, however, is simply due to listing the brands we carry, and linking to the products.
Is there a way to do this without hurting our ranking? A better way than linking, perhaps?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks much, everyone. Relatively new to learning SEO, I saw the warnings that came up for it and immediately grew concerned. I believe that for now, I'm going to leave them as is, and worry about the stronger warnings and errors first, then perhaps visit this subject again with a web designer who might have some options on how to cut down the links but still make this a useful page.
Again, thanks!
-
I'd tend to agree with Troy (and I'm thumbing up his replies). This isn't your home-page or sitewide navigation - having too many links on just this one page probably isn't worth worrying about too much. You could nofollow the tag links - they are redundant. Realistically, though, since they link to the same URLs, Google probably already ignores those links (even though we count them twice).
You could argue that maybe the page isn't that helpful for users and prune it down somehow, but purely from an SEO standpoint, it's not a big deal. The main issue with too many links is one of dilution. I wrote about it more here:
-
As an alternative to Derek's suggestion.. Use the same link for the logo and the text. Currently you are wrapping the img tag in one anchor and then the brand name in another. Try putting them both inside the same anchor with the
in between them.This eliminates 1 of the links from each brand. Then perhaps remove that tag cloud as Troy suggested. Honestly I didn't even see the tag cloud there until Troy mentioned it in his answer.
-
Excessive links don't necessarily hurt your ranking if they are pointing to relevant, unique pages and enhance the user experience.
But if you want to cut down the number of links on the page, you can remove the anchor text link below each logo. Both the image link and text link are pointing to the same page. You will be able to slice the number of links on page in half.
-
My pleasure. To be honest, I'm still fairly new to it myself, so I'd be curious if anyone else had a different opinion. I just know that in the past, I've just ignored some pages that don't have anything on them that will necessarily bring home the bacon. Sometimes, a page that will be useful for a user will just look like a list of brands to a search engine, so...add it to the list of disallow'd pages in our robots.txt and let it go, imo.
-
Thanks,
That's very possible. Managing SEO like this is new to us, so I just figured I'd try and fix everything. If those particular warnings aren't too critical, then that's good to know, and we can move on.
Thanks again!
-
My initial thought is that having both the logos AND the tag cloud might be overkill and part of the problem. It's basically the same information twice.
The other thing is...maybe you don't worry about this page ranking? I mean...sure, you'll see warnings about this page, but maybe set this page to "no-index" and tune the rest of your site. This page isn't going to be the one to pull in organic search results, so I would think it can just be ignored. Focus on pages that will actually return results.
-
Yes, the page is this one: http://www.dvestore.com/brands/
We do have the brands somewhat broken out over the main site, but as most people do in our field, we have one page where you can look at all brands, each picture linking to the products we carry by them.
-
Do you mean that you have pages that list all the brands in one spot? Could you break those links into larger categories? That might help them to be more organized, more easily scanned and that would also be a better user experience, I imagine.
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
-
What do you use for test rendering your dev site?
I'm redesigning our company ecommerce site and need to test render an infinite scroller to ensure that it is as SEO friendly as possible. My problem is that I cannot view it in Webmaster Tools since I am blocking the site from crawlers using robots.txt. I know I could simply unblock Google temporarily but I really would rather not make my dev site available to search engine crawlers.
Web Design | | bearpaw0 -
Can anyone recommend a tool that will identify unused and duplicate CSS across an entire site?
Hi all, So far I have found this one: http://unused-css.com/ It looks like it identifies unused, but perhaps not duplicates? It also has a 5,000 page limit and our site is 8,000+ pages....so we really need something that can handle a site larger than their limit. I do have Screaming Frog. Is there a way to use Screaming Frog to locate unused and duplicate CSS? Any recommendations and/or tips would be great. I am also aware of the Firefix extensions, but to my knowledge they will only do one page at a time? Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Could our drop in organic rankings have been caused by improper mobile site set-up?
Site: 12 year old financial service 'information' site with lead gen business model. Historically has held top 10 positions for top keywords and phrases. Background: The organic traffic from Google has fallen to 50% of what it was over the past 4 months compared to the same months last year. While several potential factors could be responsible/contributing (not limited to my pro-active removal of a dozen old emat links that may be perceived as unnatural despite no warning), this drop coincides with the same period the 'mobile site' was launched. Because I admittedly know the least about this potential cause, I am turning to the forum for assistance. Because the site is ~200 pages and contains many 'custom' pages with financial tables, forms, data pulled from 3rd parties, custom/different layouts we opted for creating a mobile site of only the top 12 most popular pages/topics just to have a mobile presence (instead of re-coding the entire site to make it responsive utilizing a mobile css). -These mobile pages were set up in an "m." subdomain. -We used bi-directional tagging placing a rel=canonical tag on the mobile page, and a rel=alternate tag on the desktop page. This created a loop between the pages, as advised by Google. -Some mobile pages used content from a sub page, not the primary desktop page for a particular topic. This may have broken the bi-directional 'loop', meaning the rel=canonical on the mobile page would point to a subpage, where the rel=alternate would point to the primary desktop page, even though the content did not come from that page, necessarily. The primary desktop page is the one that ranks for related keywords. In these cases, the "loop" would be broken. Is this a cause for concern? Could the authority held by the desktop page not be transferred to the mobile version, or the mobile page 'pull away' or disperse the strength of the desktop page if that 'loop' was not connected? Could not setting up the bi-directional tags correctly cause a drop in the organic rankings? -Our developer verified the site is set up according to Google's guidelines for identifying device screen size and serving appropriate version of page. -Are there any tools or utilities that I can use to identify issues, and/or verify everything is configured correctly? -Are we missing anything important in the set-up/configuration? -Could the use of a brand new subdomain 'm.' in and of itself be causing issues? -Have I identified any negative seo practices or pitfalls? Am I missing or overlooking something? While i would have preferred maintaining a single, responsive, site with mobile css, it was not realistic given the various layouts, and owner's desire to only offer the top pages in mobile format. The mobile site may have nothing to do with the organic drop, but I'd like to rule it out if so, and I have so many questions. If anyone could address my concerns, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Greg
Web Design | | seagreen0 -
How much does on-site duplicated content affect SERPs?
Hi, We've recently gotten into Moz, with our E-commerce websites, and discovered that it's crawler takes note of about 2500 pages which it thinks are the same (duplicated). We've now begun to completely rewrite every description of every product (including Meta Title/Description) so that this number may be reduced. Since this is the biggest issue Moz spots I'm wondering what the effect of fixing it will be on our position in the SERP (mainly Google). Does anybody have some stories or experience about this topic? Thanks in Advance! 🙂 Alexander
Web Design | | WebmasterAlex0 -
Build New Site Without Losing Rankings
Good morning SEOmoz community. I have a question which I am pretty sure I already know the answer to, however i thought I would reach out to my fellow experts to see if anyone had some great advice. I would really like to give my website a makeover. i have two thoughts on this, one is to scrap the site completely and start fresh, the other would be to only change it visually, but keep all the content and on-page optimization. I am terrified of losing my rankings. I am ranked position 1 and 2 for highly competitive terms and have another 15 - 20 keywords on page 1. Any advice would be tremendously appreciated!!!
Web Design | | WebbyNabler0 -
On site SEO opinions
Hi all, I have been testing different configurations for my on-site SEO for a while now and I think I am pretty much there. However it is always nice to know what other SEO's think about my keyword density and usage. My site is http://www.tomlondonmagic.com I am curious as to what you think regarding landing page content, whether you need lots or text or little text? I have just removed links in the text as I feel I want to keep as much juice on my landing page as possible. Thanks all!
Web Design | | TomLondon0 -
Best Way To Have HD Videos On Site That Will Work On Mobile Devices
Hi, I hope someone can help me with this. I am working on a site for a client who works at a video production company. They want to have a fair few HD videos on there site but also for the site and videos to be viewable on mobile devices. I have got a responsive wordpress theme and the site is beginning to take shape. I am wondering however how I can best get the videos to display on mobile devices while maintaining a good load speed. Until now I have been using amazon S3 which stores and feeds the videos and I use Easyvideoplayer to embed the videos. The problem is they do not appear to show up from mobile devices when using wordpress. can anyone suggest the best way for me to still feed the videos from S3 but get them to display on mobile devices. oh, they are private videos so they cannot be placed on youtube.
Web Design | | jensonseo0 -
I have a question about converting a flash site to word press
We're changing one of our site to word press from flash and the old site had no content, so everything is going to be different. Should we try to match the page names and small amount of content and large amount of meta tags for now and slowly change them, or is it alright to change everything right now? The site has good ranking and I don't want to mess it up.
Web Design | | allstatetransmission0