Site Wide Link Situation
-
Hi-
We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!
-
Hi! Thanks! I completely understand. We would never want to prevent URLs on the client's domain from being crawled. That could clearly put our client's online presence at risk. However, we're more concerned with Google noticing the shopping cart's domain is pointing to every page of the client's website which could appear unnatural & potentially, put the client's site at risk. What we're hoping to achieve is preventing from Google crawling the third party URL on every page to avoid any penalization.
-
Rez you gotta consider a few things.
When looked at the site structure and AI of your site you have to think about the Juice flow as a funnel. More Juice to the top distributed less juice to the bottom. So for shopping cart pages or product pages ( depending on how deep they are ), i usually incorporate Long tail , targeted keywords ( ie: Mimi Juie baby sippy cups ) where the volume is not much but its targeted enough that even with a limited juice flow you can rank.
My initial suggestion to you was to contact the person or company that built the shopping cart in order to remove the link. ( THAT IS MY FIRST OPTION ). I would not do a no follow to the product page. ( dont do anything crazy like that ) Specially if you have Share bar options for your products and reviews etc. ( you will lose all that ) .
LAST OPTION for you should be to do a robot.txt to ONLY that link, NOT the page.
Again please understand you should not DEVALUE your page like that .
Hope this helps.
Let me know how it turns out
Hampig M
BizDetox
-
Hi-
Thanks for the feedback! So the robots.txt is the best way?
The shopping cart's URL does not have much authority so it's not important for us to get the link juice from the separate domain which is why we're debating how to implement a no follow. Do you see any harm in doing so?
Thanks,
Rez
-
Rez.
You should be able to remove that sitewide link from your shopping cart. I had a similar situation with a joomla site i did that had a sitewide link situation on the product page of JoomShopping and you can purchase to remove it. Unfortunately thats the way it is. Take a look at the help files or forums of the shopping cart site. What shopping cart is it?
If you cannot remove it, then robots.txt is the best way i would NOT do a no follow to that page. Unless you dont care about the data or care about getting ranked for those pages. But you are saying its site wide.
So i am a little confused on that.
Hope it helps.
Best Wishes,
Hampig M
BizDetox
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's the best way of crawling my entire site to get a list of NoFollow links?
Hi all, hope somebody can help. I want to crawl my site to export an audit showing: All nofollow links (what links, from which pages) All external links broken down by follow/nofollow. I had thought Moz would do it, but that's not in Crawl info. So I thought Screaming Frog would do it, but unless I'm not looking in the right place, that only seems to provide this information if you manually click down each link and view "Inlinks" details. Surely this must be easy?! Hope someone can nudge me in the right direction... Thanks....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rl_uk0 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
What's the best internal linking strategy for articles and on-site resources?
We recently added an education center to our site with articles and information about our products and industry. What is the best way to link to and from that content? There are two options I'm considering: Link to articles from category and subcategory pages under a section called "related articles" and link back to these category and subcategory pages from the articles: category page <<--------->> education center article education center article <<---------->> subcategory page Only link from the articles to the category and subcategory pages: education center article ---------->> category page education center article ---------->> subcategory page Would #1 dilute the SEO value of the category and subcategory pages? I want to offer shoppers links to more information if they need it, but this may also take them away from the products. Has anyone tested this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Multiple sites - ownership & link structure
Hi All I am in the process of creating a number of sites within the garden products sector; each site will have unique, original content and there will be no cross over. So for example I will have one on lawn mowers, one on greenhouses, another on garden furniture etc. My original thinking was to create a single limited company that would own each of the domains, therefore all the registrant details will be identical. Is this a sensible thing to do? (I want to be totally white hat) And what, if any, are the linking opportunities between each of the sites? (16 in total). Not to increase ranking, more from an authoritative perspective. And finally, how should I link between each site? Should I no follow the links? Should I use keyword contextual links? Any advice ideas would be appreciated 🙂 Please note: It has been suggested that I just create one BIG site. I've decided against this as I want to use the keyword for each website in the domain name as I believe this still has value. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry0 -
Site structure question
Hello Everyone, I have a question regarding site structure and I would like to mastermind it with everyone. So I am optimizing a website for a Ford Dealership in Boston, MA. The way the site architecture is set up is as follows: Home >>>> New Inventory >>> Inventory Page (with search refinement choices) After you refine your search (lets say we choose a Ford F150 in white) it shows a page with images, price information and specs. (Nothing the bots or users can sink their teeth into) My thoughts are to create category pages for each Ford model with awesome written content and THEN link to the inventory pages. So it would look like this: Home >>> New Inventory >>> Ford 150 Awesome Category Page>>>>Ford F150 Inventory Page I would work hard at getting these category pages to rank for the vehicle for our GEO targeted locations. Here is my questions: Would you be annoyed to first land on a category page with lots of written text, reviews images and videos first and then link off to the inventory page. Or would you prefer to go right from the new inventory page to the actual inventory page and start looking for vehicles? Thanks you so much, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Site #2 beats site #1 in every aspect?
Hey guys, loving SEOMoz so far and will definitely continue my subscription after the free trial. I have a question however, which I am really confused about. When researching my primary keyword, I have found that the second ranked site beats the top site in every single aspect, apart from domain age, which is almost 6 years for the top one and 6 months for the second. When I say every single aspect, I mean everything. More authority for the page and domain, more links, more anchor text links, more authoritive links, more social signals, more relevant links, better domain (although second ranked site is a .net), better MozRank, better MozTrust etc.... I have noticed though, that in the UK SERPs, those sites are switched, so #2 is actually #1. Could it be that the US SERPs just haven't updated yet, or am I missing something completely different.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darrenspeed1 -
How would you fix this site?
We're currently in the IA and design phase of rolling out a complete overhaul of our main site. In the meantime I've been doing some SEO triage, but I wanted to start making a longer term plan for SEO during and after the new site goes up. We have a pretty decent domain authority, and some quality backlinks, but we're just getting creamed in the SERPs. And so on to my question: How would you fix this site? What SEO strategy would you employ? http://www.adoptionhelp.org Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdoptionHelp0