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
-
How to deal with parameter URLs as primary internal links and not canonicals? Weird situation inside...
So I have a weird situation, and I was hoping someone could help. This is for an ecommerce site. 1. Parameters are used to tie Product Detail Pages (PDP) to individual categories. This is represented in the breadcrumbs for the page and the use of a categoryid. One product can thus be included in multiple categories. 2. All of these PDPs have a canonical that does not include the parameter / categoryid. 3. With very few exceptions, the canonical URL for the PDPs are not linked to. Instead, the parameter URL is to tie it to a specific category. This is done primarily for the sake of breadcrumbs it seems. One of the big issues we've been having is the canonical URLs not being indexed for a lot of the products. In some instances, the canonicals _are _indexed alongside parameters, or just parameter URLs are indexed. It's all very...mixed up, I suppose. My theory is that the majority of canonical URLs not being linked to anywhere on the site is forcing Google to put preference on the internal link instead. My problem? **I have no idea what to recommend to the client (who will not change the parameter setup). ** One of our Technical SEOs recommended we "Use cookies instead of parameters to assign breadcrumbs based on how the PDP is accessed." I have no experience this. So....yeah. Any thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
Does Navigation Bar have an effect on the link juice and the number of internal links?
Hi Moz community, I am getting the "Avoid Too Many Internal Links" error from Moz for most of my pages and Google declared the max number as 100 internal links. However, most of my pages can't have internal links less than 100, since it is a commercial website and there are many categories that I have to show to my visitors by using the drop down navigation bar. Without counting the links in the navigation bar, the number of internal links is below 100. I am wondering if the navigation bar links affect the link juice and counted as internal links by Google. The Same question also applies to the links in the footer. Additionally, how about the products? I have hundreds of products in the category pages and even though I use pagination I still have many links in the category pages (probably more than 100 without even counting the navigation bar links). Does Google count the product links as internal links and how about the effect on the link juice? Here is the website if you want to take a look: http://www.goldstore.com.tr Thank you for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onurcan-ikiz0 -
Realtor site with external links in navigation
I have a client with a realtor site that uses IDX for the listings feed. We have several external links going over to the IDX site for various live custom searches (ie: luxury listings, waterfront listings, etc...). We are getting a Moz spam ranking of 2/7 for both "Large Number of External Links" and "External Links in Navigation". Chances are, these are related. My question is this: (1) Being the score is only 2/7, should I bother with fixing this? (2) If I add a rel="nofollow" to all the site-wide links (in header, footer & menu) will this help? I couldn't find anything definitive in the Q&A search. Looking forward to any insights!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcallander1 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Severe health issues are found on your site. - Check site health (GWT)
Hi, We run a Magento website - When i log in to Google Webmaster Tools, I am getting this message: Severe health issues are found on your site. - <a class="GNHMM2RBFH">Check site health
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
</a>Is robots.txt blocking important pages? Some important page is blocked by robots.txt. Now, this is the weird part - the page being blocked is the admin page of magento - under
www.domain.com/index.php/admin/etc..... Now, this message just wont go away - its been there for days now - so why does Google think this is an "important page"? It doesnt normally complain if you block other parts of the site ?? Any ideas? THanks0 -
Will Google penalize a site that had many links pointing to it with utm codes?
I want to track conversions using utm parameters from guest blog posts on sites other than my own site. Will Google penalize my site for having a bunch of external articles pointing to one page with unique anchor text but utm code? e.g. mysite.com/seo-text?utm_campaign=guest-blogs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wepayinc0 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0 -
Site Wide Internal Navigation links
Hello all, All our category pages www.pitchcare.com/shop are linked to from every product page via the sidebar navigation. Which results in every category page having over 1700 links with the same anchor text. I have noticed that the category pages dont appear to be ranked when they most definately should be. For example http://www.pitchcare.com/shop/moss-control/index.html is not ranked for the term "moss control" instead another of our deeper pages is ranked on page 1. Reading a previous SEO MOZ article · Excessive Internal Anchor Text Linking / Manipulation Can Trip An Automated Penalty on Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | toddyC
I recently had my second run-in with a penalty at Google that appears to punish sites for excessive internal linking with "optimized" (or "keyword stuffed anchor text") links. When the links were removed (in both cases, they were found in the footer of the website sitewide), the rankings were restored immediately following Google's next crawl, indicating a fully automated filter (rather than a manual penalty requiring a re-consideration request). Do you think we may have triggered a penalty? If so what would be the best way to tackle this? Could we add no follows on the product pages? Cheers Todd0