Site Interlinking - footer and menu - whether to nofollow/remove
-
Hello,
We've got a bunch of interlinking going on between the following sites:
nlpca(dot)com
thewealthymind(dot)com
shop.nlpca(dot)com
dynamicspinrelease(dot)com
These are all owned and operated by the same people. Some linking is in the footer and some is in the menu or header.
Could you take a look and tell me which interlinks you'd recommend nofollowing and which you'd recommend deleting entirely? We can always place a home page single link to replace those sitewides we delete or nofollow.
I'm thinking we should delete everything in the footers and nofollow those in the menu or headers, placing a single dofollow link on the home page when deleting/nofollowing a sitewide link.
-
That's an excellent idea. I will take a look and talk to the owners. What tool(s) do you recommend. Will OSE do it?
-
Maybe Google sees them as suspicious because they are international sites and also use keyword rich anchor text across hundreds of pages. They stand out more to me than your internal links. It may be worth it to contact them and get the links changed to your brand name.
-
Those are valid sites in our same niche, they're just international.
Could links like those be causing problems because of anchor text?
-
Your internal linking doesn't seem very spammy to me, but I am seeing a lot of external sitewide links from foreign language sites that do use anchor text rich links:
-
We have dropped off the chart for our main keyword "NLP".
I'm wondering if any of this interlinking has anything to do with that. Other terms, like "NLP Training" are performing OK.
-
It also might be a good idea for you to place these links in context in the footer.
"This site is in association with...."
Also, if the sites are on the same IP address or C block then Google will probably figure out that there is a real relationship between the sites and the people who run them.
Also, put those links in your Google+ profile. That's another good way to give Google the signal that there is a relationship. If you're not trying to manipulate or deceive anyone or Googlebot you shouldn't have much to worry about.
-
The links in the footer that use exact keyword anchor text could be potentially problematic. Have you seen a drop in ranking for those keywords? If you haven't, I would recommend leaving it alone as it doesn't look particularly spammy. I would also advise against nofollowing links to your sites. If they're good sites and you trust them, then leave them be (again, unless you've been penalized or are receiving notices in GWT).
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
-
Beta Site Removal best practices
Hi everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
We are doing a CMS migration and site redesign with some structural changes. Our temporarily Beta site (one of the staging environments and the only one that is not behind firewall) started appearing in search. Site got indexed before we added robots.txt due to dev error (at that time all pages were index,follow due to nature of beta site, it is a final stage that mirrors live site) As an remedy, we implemented robots.txt for beta version as : User-Agent: *
Disallow: / Removed beta form search for 90 days. Also, changed all pages to no index/no follow . Those blockers will be changed once code for beta get pushed into production. However, We already have all links redirected (301) from old site to new one. this will go in effect once migration starts (we will go live with completely redesigned site that is now in beta, in few days). After that, beta will be deleted completely and become 404 or 410. So the question is, should we delete beta site and simple make 404/410 without any redirects (site as is existed for only few days ). What is best thing to do, we don't want to hurt our SEO equity. Please let me know if you need more clarification. Thank you!0 -
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is my site being penalized?
I've gone through all the points on https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 but the site only ranks for its brand name after months. The website is not ranking in the top 100 for any main keywords (2,3,4 word phrases), only for a handful of very long phrases (4+). All of the content is unique, all pages are indexed, the website is fast and doesn't contain any crawl errors and there are a couple of links pointing to it. There is a sitewide follow link in the footer pointing to another domain, its parent company and vice-versa. This is not done for any SEO reasons but the companies are related and also the products are supplementary of each other. Could this be an issue? Or is my site being penalized by something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbern0 -
Impact of simplifying website and removing 80% of site's content
We're thinking of simplifying our website which has grown to a very large size by removing all the content which hardly ever gets visited. The plan is to remove this content / make changes over time in small chunks so that we can monitor the impact on SEO. My gut feeling is that this is okay if we make sure to redirect old pages and make sure that the pages we remove aren't getting any traffic. From my research online it seems that more content is not necessarily a good thing if that content is ineffective and that simplifying a site can improve conversions and usability. Could I get people's thoughts on this please? Are there are risks that we should look out for or any alternatives to this approach? At the moment I'm struggling to combine the needs of SEO with making the website more effective.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Splash/Warning Pages at front of site
We are looking at working on a site that needs a warning for users visiting - This splash/warning page is the only just google sees this not performing well in search engine - The sites are Wordpress sites - Would we use script to force a full screen pop up? This would be needed on a visit but if the user leaves and returns to the site the warning would need to reappear. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
My site still out of rank
Hello, I am working on a site for past 3 months, here are the problems with this site, 1. It had a forum full of spam becuase initially captcha was not included, 10000 spam backlinks 2. Affiliate page was also hit by spam about 4000 spam backlinks which were either not existing or porn etc.... 3. Too many internal links which were indexed, these additional links were generated due to tags, ids, filters etc. Existing SEO team decided to remove the forum and after 30 days they blocked it in robots. But within 30 days the site moved from 3rd page to no where. Now after few days lator internal links are also cleaned by putting following in the robots, Dissallow: / *? Dissallow: / *id Dissallow: / *tag Links are now cleaning up, all the spam and bad links are now put into disavow file and sent to google via disavow tool. On daily bases good quality links are been produced such as through content, article submission, profile linking, Bookmarks etc. The site is still not any where on top 50 results. The impressions are decreasing, traffic also do not rise as much. How do you see all this situation. What do you suggest and how long do you think it will take to return to top 10 when good linking is being done and all preventive measures are being taken. I would appreciate any feedback on it. Thank you. Site URL: http://www.creativethemes.net keywords: magento themes, magento templates
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Does a Single Instance of rel="nofollow" cause all instances on a page to be nofollowed?
I attended the Bruce Clay training at SMX Advanced Seattle, and he mentioned link pruning/sculpting (here's an SEOMoz article about it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow) Now during his presentation he mentioned that if you have one page with multiple links leading to another page, and one of those links is nofollowed, it could cause all links to be nofollowed. Example: Page A has 4 links to Page B: 1:followed, 2:followed, 3:nofollowed, 4:followed The presence of a single nofollow tag would override the 3 followed links and none of them would pass link juice. Has anyone else encountered this problem, and Is there any evidence to support this? I'm thinking this would make a great experiment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brycebertola0