Sudden increase in on-page links
-
Within one week, the site crawl shows my on-page links going from ~10 to ~100+
Does anyone know of a rational reason for this? Sucuri shows my site is clean, so I don't think it's a hack. 10 seems too low to begin with anyway. Any ideas?
Thanks
-
After a bit of time and investigation I think it was definitely just the first crawl not getting through all the pages. Thanks so much for all your help and extra suggestions
-
Most welcome, Erin. If you're concerned about cloaked links, the other thing you can do is use Google and Bing Webmaster tools' "Fetch as Google/Bingbot. This lets you see exactly what the search engines see. I.e. the user-agent for the request is the Google crawler.
Often the way spam links are cloaked is that they are only shown to the search crawlers and not the regular user. You can also try searching for a term on your website and clicking through form the search results. Often spam is only shown to visitors coming from search as well. Just an additional couple of checks if you're concerned.
Paul
-
That does help, thanks! I bet the initial count was off because there were a ton of other errors or something like that. I'm just a little paranoid because my site was hacked last year and the spam links were hidden from view, I couldn't even see them in the source code. Google Webmaster Tools caught the hack, though, and this time they say everything is OK.
Thanks for taking the time to respond! I'll check out the extension...didn't know about that either
-
You could always just check the source of the page and count the hrefs to know how many links you actually have, Erin
Easier way would be to use the SEOMoz extension for Chrome or Firefox. It has a button for Analyze Page (looks like a magnifying glass) which has a tab for Page Attributes. That will show you the total count of internal and external links on a page. (It just does the manual counting for you, essentially)
You could also use a standalone page like http://linkcounter.submitexpress.com/ but the SEOMoz plugin/extension is so useful for many things that it's worth installing anyway.
Sounds to me like your first crawl didn't get through the pages thoroughly, but you're right to be careful. Especially in view of possible spam links, as you mentioned.
Hope that helps?
Paul
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
-
Source page showsI have 2 h1 tags on my page. I can only find one.
When I grade my page it says I have more than one h1 tag. I view the source page and it shows there are two h1 headings with the same wording. If I delete the one h1 heading I can find, the page source shows I have deleted both of them. I don't know how to get to the other heading to delete it. And I'm off page one of google! Can anybody help? Clay Stephens
Moz Pro | | Coot0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Nov
Moz is showing all many of URL's as duplicate URLs. I put canonical for all the pages but still it showing all as duplicate page. These are URL's https://www.crystalizeonline.com/brands/ravenscroft-crystal/material/non-lead/page/2.html https://www.crystalizeonline.com/brands/ravenscroft-crystal/material/non-lead/page/2/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc.html https://www.crystalizeonline.com/brands/ravenscroft-crystal/material/non-lead/page/2/sort-by/price/sort-direction/asc.html Their is a lot of pages like this. How can I get rid from all this issues.
Moz Pro | | crystalize0 -
Why would someone go to same 404 page over and over?
Good morning, I've been using the redirection plugin on my wordpress site and noticed i have multiple IP addresses going to the same folder on my site - like "mydomain.com/folder-name/". The "folder-name" is obviously not anything remotely like any folder or file name I have on my domain - so it's obviously spammy in nature. And, there are multiple IP addresses going to this same URL address every 3 hours on the dot, so it's appears automated. Is this something to be concerned about? Should I "do" anything? Thanks in advance for reading and replying!
Moz Pro | | mlm120 -
Forums and soical network pages - link analysis
Hi, I am working on reputation management project and i reach the point when i found that forums pages and social pages are hard to analyse their links and page rank. for example if you search these kind of pages on http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ , it wont show any result And if you try to find the page rank on Moz toolbar it will show 1 pagerank How would you do guys when u are in this situation, Do you consider these kind of pages different than normal pages? Thanks
Moz Pro | | MohammadSabbagh0 -
I need an interlinking report for my site, is there a report in Moz or another application that tell me how all of my pages are linked to other pages on my site?
I am in the process of doing a redesign for one of my sites. IÂ need an interlinking report for my site. Is there a report in Moz or another application that tell me how all of my pages are linked to other pages on my site?
Moz Pro | | seoflorida0 -
Does the page authority data also considers the on page factors like the presence of keyword in the title,meta text, and keyword frequency ??
The moz difficulty score considers four factors for the top websites. are the on page factors included in the page authority data ?
Moz Pro | | iQuanti0 -
Old Incoming Links Redirected to new pages are not Being Factored on the Open Site Explorer
Hi, My website has been online since 1994. Â We have old links pointing to pages that no longer exist so what we have done is to create redirects to the specific page where the content is being displayed now. However, when we use the Open Site Explorer, the linking root domains do not show those sites that contain old links pointing to our domain. Â One good example of this one is: Â dmoz.org. Am I improperly handling the redirects? Â Or, what do I have to do so that old links that are being redirected to the new pages where the information is are accounted when calculating domain authority and trust? Thanks, Alex
Moz Pro | | costarica.com0 -
Link Count Per Page Including JavaScript Links - Should We Worry About Them?
With large ecommerce sites, we usually have more than 100 links per page and many times have more than 200 links on each page due to links and images in the header, footer, guided navigation and then the body product grid and content. When I use most on-page link counting tools like SEO x-ray and the SEO Moz Pro crawl report, I notice that every visible link on the page gets counted. This includes and javascript based links that expand the product grid to 30, 60 or view all, javascript sorting links, javascript links to view customer reviews for each product. etc. There was a QA post here http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-nofollow-the-main-navigation-on-certain-pages about nofollowing and page rank sculpting and it seems pretty unanimous that most don't think that page rank sculpting is very valuable. So my question is, are the javascript links on pages that don't link to another page viewed differently by search engines? If so, shouldn't there be a way to see on-page link count minus javascript call links that don't actually link to another page? To expand a bit on my question, we also use nofollow attributes on the text links in the left navigation that are meant for refining products just as the javascript links in the product grid are meant to refine the products, sort them, allow for product comparison, allow for viewing customer reviews, etc. So should it be ok to have 300 links on a page if the unimportant ones that you don't want crawled like the left navigation refinements and product grid javascript links all have rel="nofollow" applied to them? I know that would basicly be PageRank sculting, but it seems like the best options for shopping sites that have a lot of navigation links.
Moz Pro | | abernhardt0