On-Site Directory - Delete or Keep?
-
We have 2 ecommerce sites. Both have been hit by Penguin (no warnings in WMT) and we're in the process of cleaning up backlinks.
We have link directories on both sites. They've got links that are relevant to the sites but also links that aren't relevant. And they're big directories - we're talking thousands of links to other sites.
What's the best approach here? Do we leave it alone, delete the whole thing, or manually review and keep highly relevant links but get rid of the rest?
-
Were you requiring reciprocal links for a link in your directory? If so, I'd burn the whole thing to the ground and ask for removal of links where possible. If you really think it helps users, you could add nofollow to the links instead. Without knowing more about the directory, how it was run, and your link profile, it's hard to give solid advice.
-
If you want to go through the 1000's of links you have and identify the ones that are bad, or from bad neighborhoods, make sure to spend the 50$ on a report from Link Detox (http://www.linkdetox.com/). This will help you identify things quickly and allow you to make some quick decisions on link profile management. If it's a big project, take a 1 month subscription to the software, and make sure use it fully to identify the entire problem. Don't forget to use the link disavow tool if needed (if you are looking to keep any valuable links) or try to isolate them to contact later and help fix the issue.
If you plan on getting rid of them all - just dump the entire thing and start from scratch, but it'll be a long road back with best practice work.
Hope it helps! It's worth the $$$ and investment when you run into problems like Penguin or Panda
-
Without knowing more than what you've written, I'd first ask if those directories have any back links going to them and before you'd be able to answer, I say just delete the darn things--they're not helping you. 1. If they've got back links going to them, those back links are likely to be of low quality and by deleting the directories, you negate those links 2. Even if they don't have a pile of low quality back links, it sounds like they're poorly curated, they're not doing anyone any good. 3. You've got a Google penalty on both sites, you've got a directory on both sites, you've got to clean house--just get rid of them.
If the sites in the directory are are industry specific but you can't vouch for most of them and your sites aren't about being a resource for people trying to find those industry-specific sites, just get rid the darn things.
-
if you want to pass of google should not care if relevant but.
You say.
"We have link directories on both sites. They've got links that are relevant to the sites but also links that aren't relevant. And they're big directories - we're talking thousands of links to other sites."
Big directories will hurt you unless they help the end user lose them.
I agree that we need to know more about what kind of sites they are to tell you as Moz.com has a directories like recommend seo's, but its relevant to Moz so it will not hurt and helps the end user ask your self if I went here to would this help me?
Hope this helps,
Thomas
-
Firstly I would ask what the purpose of your link directories were in the first place? How do people submit to your directories and what value do they add to your site apart from possibly having too many links on some of your sites pages? Do you have a lot of spammy sites submitted? I personally would look at cutting this facility as Penguin has hit a lot of link directories and as you say there are a lot of irrelevant sites in your directory! Are your directory pages indexed on a "site:" search in Google?
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
-
Competition site with Duplicate Name
I have a client who is in real estate and one of his competition used the same Name and Domain and added the word Toronto in front. The competition is putting similar content on the website. The competition also hijacked the Google listing since they both work in the same building. Is this going to affect the ranking our website? What negative effect will it put on our website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranX0 -
Why does our main keyword keep dropping?
Hey Guys, We've seen an alarming drop in our main keyword for our website. Our biggest driver of traffic has always been the search term 'gifts for men' which we commanded the top spot for a while, but have always been in the top 4 for. Recently (in the last 3-4 months) we dropped to 6 and as of last night we dropped down to 9th. We still rank number 2 for 'gift ideas for men'. Both search terms point to this page: GIfts For Men Nothing onsite or technically has changed, and there is consistently new content in the form of products being added almost daily. We hit a manual action back in October of last year and I'm concerned that the toxic links (that we didn't create mind you) we disavowed may have been unnaturally boosting this page and now we're dropping significantly because they're gone. Any ideas on how we can curb this concerning trend? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGreatestGoat0 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
What this site is doing? Does it look like cloaking to you?
Hi here, I was studying our competitors SEO strategies, and I have noticed that one of our major competitors has setup something pretty weird from a SEO stand point for which I would like to know your thoughts about because I can't find a clear explanation for it. Here is the deal: the site is musicnotes.com, and their product pages are located inside the /sheetmusic/ directory, so if you want to see all their product pages indexed on Google, you can just type in Google: site:musicnotes.com inurl:/sheetmusic/ Then you will get about 290,000 indexed pages. No, here is the tricky part: try to click on one of those links, then you will get a 302 redirect to a page that includes a meta "noindex, nofollow" directive. Isn't that pretty weird? Why would they want to "nonidex, nofollow" a page from a 302 redirect? And how in the heck the redirecting page is still in the index?!! And how Google can allow that?! All this sounds weird to me and remind me spammy techniques of the 90s called "cloaking"... what do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Acquisition of a new site in the same field.
Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs, i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | j0a0vargas0 -
Advice on Getting this site ranking?
Hi there I'm looking to optimise this site for SEO -> Gets about 3,000 visits per day but all from branded searches. Gets virtually no 'keyword searches' It's just a landing page at the moment. Would you recommend I integrate a blog with it, so we can start targeting more long tail keywords (free football game etc) Any thoughts/advice appreciated 🙂 Thanks Howard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HowardK0 -
I run an (unusual) clothing company. And I'm about to set up a version of our existing site for kids. Should I use a different domain? Or keep the current root domain?
Hello. I have a burning question which I have been trying to answer for a while. I keep getting conflicting answers and I could really do with your help. I currently run an animal fancy dress (onesie) company in the UK called Kigu through the domain www.kigu.co.uk. We're the exclusive distributor for a supplier of Japanese animal costumes and we've been selling directly through this domain for about 3 years. We rank well across most of our key words and get about 2000 hits each day. We're about to start selling a Kids range - miniature versions of the same costumes. We're planning on doing this through a different domain which is currently live - www.kigu-kids.co.uk. It' been live for about 3-4 weeks. The idea behind keeping them on separate domains is that it is a different target market and we could promote the Kids site separately without having to bring people through the adult site. We want to keep the adult site (or at least the homepage) relatively free from anything kiddy as we promote fancy dress events in nightclubs and at festivals for over 18s (don't worry, nothing kinky) and we wouldn't want to confuse that message. I've since been advised by an expert in the field that that we should set up a redirect from www.kigu-kids.co.uk and house the kids website under www.kigu.co.uk/kids as this will be better from an SEO perspective and if we don't we'll only be competing with ourselves. Are we making a big mistake by not using the same root domain for both thus getting the most of the link juice for the kids site? And if we do decide to switch to have the domain as www.kigu.co.uk/kids, is it a mistake to still promote the www.kigu-kids.co.uk (redirecting) as our domain online? Would these be wasted links? Or would we still see the benefit? Is it better to combine or is two websites better than one? Any help and advice would be much appreciated. Tom.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KIGUCREW0 -
Were small sites hit by Panda?
It seems that primarily large sites were hit by Panda, but does any one know of / own a small site that was hit by Panda?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0