112 exact match anchor text internal links in the sidebar
-
Hello,
My website has 112 internal exact match sidebar links for my targeted keyword. I rank nr.5 for this keyword in Google and i was wondering if i should remove those links or not?
I know that footer link are no no but i am not sure about sidebar links. Any ideas?
Regards,
InigoOÜ
-
Hi,
If I understand right these are internal links on your own site? If that is the case then it is not a huge deal (although you should be careful to not go overboard on keyword stuffing your internal links). Sitewide footer and sidebar links on EXTERNAL sites are often done with an eye on boosting search engine rankings and as such have been de-valued by google and sites using this tactic a lot have in some cases been penalized. This is not so relevant for your own site where it is perfectly normal to expect to see footer and sidebar links highlighting main pages/categories of the site. Just be careful to not keyword stuff too much and try to link in a way that helps user experience and feels natural and you should be ok.
Hope that helps!
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
-
What Are Internal Linking Best Practices For Blogs?
We have a blog for our e-commerce site. We are posting about 4-5 blog posts a month, most of them 1500+ words. Within the content, we have around 10-20 links pointing out to other blog posts or products/categories on our site. Except for the products/categories, the links use non-optimized generic anchor text (i.e guide, sizing tips, planning resource). Are there any issues or problems as far as SEO with this practice? Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
What do do when sidebar is causing "Too Many On-Page Links" error
I have been going through all the errors, warnings from my weekly SEO Moz scans. One thing I'm see a bit of is "Too Many On-Page Links". I've only seen a few, but as in the case of this one: http://blog.mexpro.com/5-kid-friendly-cancun-mexico-resorts there is only 2 links on the page (the image and the read more). So I think the sidebar links are causing the error. I feel my tags are important to help readers find information they may be looking for. Is there a better method to present tags than the wordpress tag cloud? Should I exclude the tags, with the risk of making things more difficult for my users? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Anchor Text Usage
Hi, I have used anchor text more heavily. I built over 80 links so far, all are quality links like press releases & social bookmarks. I used to be ranking on #7 page for my keywords, then all of sudden i am not even on 50th page. Is this is because of Anchor text usage? Now should i remove those links or dilute my anchor texts by getting more links with different anchor texts. This is because the keyword i am targetting is pretty tough. So i think 80 links is not good enough. Let me know your thoughts. Here is the screenshot of the links i got so far which i think valuable. And the rest are social bookmarks. http://screencast.com/t/TJiDOanxnfZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Excessive navigation links
I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created). Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5 <nav>element: <nav id="access" role="navigation"> Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the <nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav> </nav> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress1 -
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link? Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute? I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880 -
Anchor text
What will I need to make amormensagens.com.br is in position 1 in Google to the word "mensagens"? Only anchor text will?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tibtos0