What Are The Page Linking Options?
-
Okay, so I'm working with a site that has pretty good domain authority, but the interior pages are not well linked or optimized. So, it ranks for some terms, but everything goes to the home page.
So, I'd like to increase the authority of the interior pages. The client is not wild about spreading targeted juice via something like a footer. They also don't like a "Popular Searches" style link list. The objection is that it's not attractive. They currently use cute euphemisms as the linking text, so like "cool stuff" instead of "sheepskin seat covers." In that made up example, they'd like to rank for the latter, but insist on using the former.
What about a slide show with alt text/links? Would that increase the authority of those pages in a term-targeted kinda way? Are there other options? Does it matter how prominent those links are, like footers not as good as something higher up the page?
They currently use a pull-down kind of thing that still results in some pages having no authority. Do bots use that equally well? Thanks!
-
Yes, I didn't perceive anyone was talking about text and background the same color. You are right, obviously that would be complete ButterScotch.
-
An alt image tag is there to describe the image if you can't show the image, like if someone was browsing using a screenreader. It is ultimately there to help the user. Text and background the same color is there to serve the search engines one thing while the user sees another thing, which is not OK by any of their guidelines.
-
If a site owner doesn't have the proper budget for marketing online required to go "all the way" with SEO, then I wouldn't try things out that could negatively impact them. I'd focus on other tasks, because there are ALWAYS other tasks.
-
Okay, so let's say your client doesn't have really deep pockets. My fear is that they would see that I got a page to rank lower than previous for the term and "thanks alot!" Would one be better off not touching it or trying to get the page's authority up before on-page optimizing it for the term?
-
Hi Aaron and Keri,
So, what makes an alt image tag okay vs. "hidden text" and bad? I mean, if a picture/link is of sheepskin seat covers and you alt image tag it "sheepskin seat covers," where does the problem come in? When is an alt image tag not "hidden text?"
-
I don't fear Google lower rankings because of home page / interior page swaps. I make my decisions based on what's best for users. If an interior page is more appropriate, that's that I focus the attention on.
If that page doesn't rank as high as the home page previously had, there's more work to be done.
But that's the luxury I have being someone who performs audits on really big sites where clients have the budgets and the long-term perspective to get it done.
-
@SeoStalion That's considered hidden text and not recommended.
[edited for clarity, since threading doesn't occur this deep]
-
Hey Alan,
Interesting answer with lots to chew on there. It's kind of hard to rival the homepage for external links pointing to it. And, equally hard to get interior catalog type pages high quality links.
By focusing the inner pages on specific terms, how do you know you're not swapping a good ranking homepage for a more targeted but lower ranking interior page. It kind of feels like bomb disposal. Are there instances where you don't focus interior pages for fear of Google ranking them lower than the homepage? Thanks...Mike
-
Be careful here. This can look very shady to users! Users first! (I swear I'm not a Google fanboy)
-
Link equity is not equal across a page. The two most important types of links are main site navigation and in-content. Sidebar navigation is close behind. Footer links are not what they once were.
Think about it from a user experience - how many sites do you go to where you primarily navigate through a site by scrolling to the bottom of pages to find the links you want? Even high ranking sites that fill their footers with lots of links also have those higher up on the page and those footer links not only don't help, but with so many of them, it just causes topical relationship confusion.
Couple options:
1. change the main nav links to images and use alt text. Alt text does have as much value when it's images in main site navigation because how else would search engines know the anchor information on those?
2. See if you can get links to some of those internal pages from within the content area of high level pages on the site - within or directly near descriptive text that talks about the focus of those pages you're linking to.
3. Something that hasn't been mentioned so far is also off-site factors. Without inbound links pointing to some of those internal pages, you're not going to get as much ranking value as you probably need and are trying to get from internal linking.
With inbound links you have more free reign to get the anchor text you prefer, though inbound links should be a mix of keywords, brand and generic words like "for more info".
-
I think that it makes a point that the alt tag does in fact hold more weight than was previously thought (many SEO resources stated that the alt tag was only considered for specific searches). The problem is that the alt tag leaves an open window to exploitation and that at the end of the day as far as I am aware content is still king.
-
-
No problem at all, in fact I've been doing some digging around because I am rather interested in seeing if I can rank another page for a keyword through the alt tag. I will keep you informed but if I can't find a relevant answer I'll try to test it on my sites.
-
I guess I always figured in general that higher up meant more important, but okay you don't think so. I really appreciate your weighing-in.
-
Provided you don't have an unnatural number of links on the page there should be no reason, the whole page will be crawled - header to footer.
-
Do you guys think there's any hierarchy of link ideas, such as footers not as good as a "popular searches" cloud further up the page?
-
P.S. I like the button idea, trying to think about how I might be able to implement them into one of my projects.
-
I think that the image alt text will 'work' just that it would not be as strong indicator of content as the text. From my personal experience the alt tag alone might not be authoritative enough to encourage the search engines to list that page for the alt terms. I think that as it stands an alt tag may help reinforce a link but am not sure it is enough on its own.
-
Good point! Wonder if they'll go for that.
-
Yes, it is something of a question about the image alt text working as well as text for a link. In desperation, I was thinking about making the nav buttons into images with alt text, but leave them reading the way they are "cool stuff" and "outdoor fun" etc.
It reminds me of Starbucks using italian names for small, medium and large... like small, medium and large aren't good enough.
-
Now that I think about that a slideshow or gallery could work, just make sure you have "Sheepskin Seat Covers" under your sheepskin seat cover pic with both the pic and text linked to the same page.
-
Just as a shot in the dark, perhaps use the footer but add the links in the same colour so they are not visible?
-
Thanks for the message. They're really nutty about cute euphemisms that they feel gives a better user experience than simple actual names. That's why I was first thinking about footers, but even that was too much for them. So, then I was thinking about slideshows or a gallery of pictures, where the alt text is the simple name. Are there other ideas?
-
The issue here is a combination of things.
Firstly, if you would like to rank the other pages you could try linking to more internal pages and using a combination of keywords you would like to rank for as well as some long tail keywords to help mix it up a little.
To address the linking issue, there are a few little techniques to 'hide' the links however it is more important to link with the right keywords to address the specific pages you would like to rank for those keywords. An example of this might be that if you were a financial adviser; your home page might rank for mortgage, loans and investments however if someone was to search for 'mortgage products' you might like your specific 'mortgages' page to rank above your homepage. The search engines will look at your links as well as the keywords that are linking them so for example if your home page has a link called 'mortgage services' that links to your page called 'mortgages', the search engines will determine that while your homepage relates to mortgages, the authority for the search term 'mortgage services' is actually another page on your site and so will rank that page above your homepage (in theory).
I personally am not sure how well the search engines rank picture links via alt tags. Personally I would try to sneak some links in there to confirm the structure of your website. Just a tip, for a site I once helped to optimise; we changed the css to declare a class of link were there was no underline and no obvious colour indicator as to the fact that it was a link.
-
Can you find a happy medium with the anchor text like "cool sheepskin seat covers"?
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
-
Linking to a Resource from a multi-language Page
I have a multi-language page where the content is available in several versions (translated). I want to link to a resource that is only available in one English. Is it a good idea to link to this resource from all language versions or should I better include the link only in the English version of my page? In the first scenario for example a Spanisch and a German language version would link to a page in English. Is this ok or could it be considered spam?
Technical SEO | | ConverterApp0 -
Can I redirect a link even if the link is still on the site
Hi Folks, I've got a client who has a duplicate content because they actually create duplicate content and store the same piece of content in 2 different places. When they generate this duplicate content, it creates a 2nd link on the site going to the duplicate content. Now they want the 2nd link to always redirect to the first link, but for architecture reasons, they can't remove the 2nd link from the site navigation. We can't use rel-canonical because they don't want visitors going to that 2nd page. Here is my question: Are there any adverse SEO implications to maintaining a link on a site that always redirects to a different page? I've already gone down the road of "don't deliberately create duplicate content" with the client. They've heard me, but won't change. So, what are your thoughts? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rock330 -
50,000 pages or a page with parameters
I have a site with about 12k pages on a topic... each of these pages could use another several pages to go into deeper detail about the topic. So, I am wondering, for SEO purposes would it be better to have something like 50,000 new pages for each sub topic or have one page that I would pass parameters to and the page would be built on the fly in code behind. The drawback to the one page with parameters is that the URL would be static but the effort to implement would be minimal. I am also not sure how google would index a single page with parameters. The drawback to the 50k pages model is the dev effort and possibly committed some faux pas by unleashing so many links to my internal pages. I might also have to mix aspx with html because my project can't be that large. Anyone here ever have this sort of choice to make? Is there a third way I am not considering?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
No inbound links. Should I link-build or create new content?
I have a PR4 site with good traffic but the blog is not very popular--the posts do not generate any backlinks and hardly get any traffic. Yet, I continue to kick out a new post every week. Site: http://www.stadriemblems.com/
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
Blog: http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/ I keep posting content so that Google keeps crawling the site and viewing it as fresh (and yes, I'm posting for my human visitors' benefit too!), but I'm wondering if eventually this will hurt more than help if Google detects all these new pages are not being linked to, and therefore starts viewing the site as low quality and devalues it. So should I: Keep posting Stop posting and build links to the posts Try to promote my blog to get more traffic and hope people link to it Something else or some combination of the above0 -
Why does this page show it has 166 links in the crawll?
http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=213 This is a page that shows up as having over a 100 links in the crawl, however I don't understand where those links are coming from?
Technical SEO | | ENSO0 -
Can I reduce link count by no following links?
Hi, A large number of my pages contain over 100 links. This is due to a large drop down navigation which is on every page. To reduce my link count could I just no follow these navigation links or would I have to remove the navigation completely?
Technical SEO | | moesian0 -
Optimum Number of Links on Any Given Page
One of the guidelines you provide stipulates: "You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page. When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page. This means that each of the pages being linked to from a given page are also affected by the number of links on the linking page. For these reasons, we recommend you include less than 100 links per page to ensure that they are all crawled, though if your pages have a high page authority, search engines will usually follow more links." As far as these 100 links are concerned, is this in reference to ALL links including outbound, internal, etc? Or is this referring to only outbound links to other sites?
Technical SEO | | johncmmc0