Link masking in WordPress
-
in Wordpress, I want to block Google from crawling my site using the primary navigation. I want to use anchor text links in the body and custom menus in the sidebar to make maximum benefit of the "first link counts" rule.
In short, I want to obfuscate all of the links in my primary navigation without using the dreaded nofollow. I do not want to block other links to the pages - body text, custom menus, etc. . This would be site wide. I'd rather not use Ajax or any type of programming unless it's part of a plugin.
Can anyone make a simple, Google-friendly suggestion?
-
I've seen people recreate their primary landing pages at new URLs, link to them from a custom sidebar menu, and then rel=canonical the original landing pages, linked to from their primary navigation, to those new URLs. I wouldn't do it, though.
-
First, don't get too lost in the "first link counts" concept in this scenario. Your site's primary navigation should always be recognized as the most important links across the site, so while you may have custom alternate navigation such as in a sidebar, without sitewide navigation being identified as sitewide navigation, that will confuse search engine algorithms in regard to the most important top level pages on the site.
Next, you can try all sorts of tricks and techniques to obfuscate links, however Google does read JavaScript, CSS, and AJAX so attempting to hide links in those methods would be dangerous at best, and even more problematic at worst. This is because 1) their system may wonder "why is this site owner trying to bury links across the entire site" and 2) they are far from perfect in how they interpret what they do find in those methods. That can then cause even more flawed interpretations.
Bottom line - you are gambling with the efficiency of the crawl process and setting the site up for failed identification of proper relationships vital to SEO.
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
-
Disavow links established in 2009??
Sorry for the length, but I believe this is an interesting situation, so hopefully you'll enjoy thinking this one over a little. Thanks for taking the time! Historical Information We’ve owned and operated printglobe.com since 2002. In late 2009, we acquired absorbentprinting.com and operated both sites until Mar, 2015, when absorbentprinting.com was redirected to printglobe.com. The reason we chose to redirect absorbentprinting.com to printglobe.com is that they were same industry, same pricing, and had a lot of product overlap, although they did have unique product and category descriptions. We saw a long and steady decline in organic traffic to absorbentprinting.com in the last couple of years leading up to the decision to redirect. By the way, while I understand the basics of SEO, neither I nor anyone else at our company could be considered an SEO practitioner. Recent Information An SEO firm we used to be engaged with us reached back out to us and noted: “I started looking through your backlink and it looks like there has been a sharp increase of referring domains.” They included a graph that does show a dramatic increase, starting around November, 2015. It’s quite dramatic and appears anything but natural. The contact from the SEO firm went on to say: “After doing a cursory review, it looks like a handful of these new links are the type we would recommend disavowing or removing.” We do little in the way of “link building” and we’re in a relatively boring industry, so we don’t naturally garner a lot of links. Our first thought was that we were the victim of a negative SEO attack. However, upon spot checking a lot of the recent domains linking to us, I discovered that a large % of the links that had first shown up in AHREFS since November are links that were left as comments on forums, mostly in 2009/2010. Since absorbentprinting.com was redirected to printglobe.com in Mar, 2015, I have no idea why they are just now beginning to show up as links to printglobe.com. By the numbers, according to a recent download from AHREFS: Total # of backlinks to printglobe.com through mid-Feb, 2016: 8,679 of backlinks “first seen” November, 2015 or later: 5,433 Note that there were hundreds of links “first seen” in the months from Mar, 2015 to Oct, 2015, but the # “first seen” from November, 2015 to now has been 1,500 or greater each full month. Total # of linking domains through mid-Feb, 2016: 1,182 of linking domains first seen November, 2015 or later: 850 Also note that the links contain good anchor text distribution Finally, there was a backlink analysis done on absorbentprinting.com in April, 2013 by the same firm who pointed out the sharp increase in links. At that time, it was determined that the backlink profile of absorbentprinting.com was normal, and did not require any actions to disavow links or otherwise clean up the backlinks. My Questions: If you’ve gotten through all that, how important does it seem to disavow links now? How urgent? I’ve heard that disavowing links should be a rare undertaking. If this is so, what would you think of the idea of us disavowing everything or almost everything “first seen” Nov, 2015 and later? Is there a way to disavow at the linking domain level, rather than link-by-link to reduce the number of entries, or does it have to be done for each individual link? If we disavow around 5.5k links since Nov, 2015, what is the potential for doing more harm than good? If we’re seeing declining organic traffic in the past year on printglobe.com pretty much for the first time in the site’s history, can we attribute that to the links? Anything else you’d advise a guy who’s never disavowed a link before on this situation? Thanks for any insights! Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrintGlobeSEO0 -
Is WordPress a Blog in the eyes of Google?
Hi, My online Shop is based on WordPress with the WooCommerce plugin. Now, I have met a SEO guy who told me that's bad in the eyes of Google: Because Google apparently sees my website as a blog and not as a E-Commerce site. Wow, this statement really confused my, since I am working so hard on content and good rankings. Any opinions on this would be appreciated. Best, Robin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
How to detect a bad link and remove ?
As per google penguin, all the low quality back links are going to affect the website SERPS hugely. So, we need to find all the bad back links and then remove them one by one. What I would like to know is, what tool do you use to find all the bad back links ? And how do we know which is a bad back link or bad website, where our link should not be there ? Then what service what do you suggest for back links removal. I contacted LinkDelete.com and they quoted me 97$ for a month to remove all links in less than 3 weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monali123
Let me know, what you suggest.0 -
Webmaster Tools Internal Links
Hi all, I have around 400 links in the navigation menu (site-wide) and when I use webmaster tools to check for internal links to each page; some have as many as 250K and some as little as 200. Shouldn't the number of internal links for pages found in the navigation menu be relatively the same? Or is Google registering more internal links for pages linked closer to the top of the code Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Advice on forum links
Hi guys, Looking for some good advice on forum links and there potential negative impact. I am analysing the links of a URL and around 60% of the links are coming from a forum (on a different domain). The forum is very relevant - about the same product he is selling and also has a decent user base. This 60% of links account for roughly 6,500 links. All with different varying keyword anchor text's, and some with excessive usage of a particular keyword anchor text. They are also all do-follow. They are in a mixture of signature links and in post links. The site they link to has been hit by penguin which also has an EMD. MY question is even though these links are relevant and on a good site with good traffic, do you think they have likely been picked up in the penguin algorithm? My initial thought was yes only because they are all do follow and mostly keyword based. But id love to hear thoughts on this as well as possible recovery options, i.e should he remove the forum links, reduce drastically or make them all no follow so traffic can still pass through? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ROIcomau0 -
Sitewide blog link and Article links
Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Wordpress Titles
My question is about long url titles, my client is using wordpress and the rankings are going well apart from two, which for some reason just wont move. After using some of the tools available on SEO moz which i have found very helpful I have spotted a re-occuring warning throughout the site, the titles, in word press you have this setting (below) page title : %page_title% | %blog_title% My question is my client has quite good brand online but I done want to impact this. The problem I have is that I have a Keyword in the title then the clients company name which is three words and takes up a lot of space. I am thinking about removing this but in two minds so i was kinda hoping for a bit of advice as this looks like a standard in wordpress. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820
