Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can external links in a menu attract a penalty?
-
We have some instances of external links (i.e. pointing to another domain) in site menus.
Although there are legitimate reasons (e.g. linking to a news archive kept on a separate domain) I understand this can be considered bad from a usability perspective.
This begs the question - is this bad for SEO? With the recent panda changes we've seen certain issues which were previously "only" about usability attract SEO penalties, but I can't find any references to this example.
Anyone have thoughts / experience?
-
Yes, this can cause a problem as the links will be classed as unnatural. The best way to get round this is to make sure those links have the rel="nofollow" tag.
The penalty you should be worried about is Penguin, as this will hit pages with overoptimised anchor text links, and a menu link to an external site could generate hundreds, if not thousands of backlinks to another site, so the site you are linking to in that menu could have problems.
There are many instances being posted here of people being hit by penguin because they got featured sidebar links on other sites, resulting in 1000's of backlinks appearing in opensiteexplorer, all with the same optimized anchor text. I liken the menu links to be similar in result.
But like I said, just ensure that the mass menu links to the other site are nofollowed and you should be ok.
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
-
Using Button Links vs Sidebar Menu
I have a services page with a lot of rich text and a slideshow of images. Currently, I am using a column of buttons to various services, and am wondering if a sidebar menu would be more effective for Google to crawl and rank?
Web Design | | cinchmedia0 -
Side bar menu, good or bad idea.
Hi everyone, I have a little problem. Not that long ago I launched my new site. Everything seems ok, but I'm not sure if it was clever idea to have additional side bar menu option. I wanted relevant content to be accessible very easy without dropdown in main menu. It looks ok on desktop, but we have a problem with mobile devices. Even main menu is a bit confusing and sidebar at the moment is at the bottom of each page. When I placed it on top of the page, we had problem with tablet users as it is showing side menu with blank page and content is almost below the fold. I have a tool installed called usability tools and it shows how visitors are using my site. The hard bit is that nobody on mobile devices are using sidebar and that means people visit one page and leave without exploring any additional resources. Me and my developer are discussing that maybe we should have two main menu bars instead of sidebar, but I have no idea how this looks in real life. What is the best practises for sidebar menus these days? Maybe we have a designer here who can help me with this and do some work? My site is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/ Thank you for all help in input in advance. Regards, Armands
Web Design | | A_Fotografy0 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Footer Links Good or bad?
Hi Can anyone answer this question confidently, I know Google is moving away from lots of links within the footer. However we specialise in websites for the travel industry and having a link to all the areas at the footer can be quite handy. Our websites complete this automatically. Here is an example where due to design of the site the links don't quite fit well, so we need to change anyway. But before completing the work I wondered if there was a better way to do this. http://www.dreamvillasitaly.com/ Many thanks Andy
Web Design | | iprosoftware0 -
Google penalty for links opening in new tab?
Our web services provided suggested that Google doesn't like in-text links that open the link in a new tab. Can anyone verify this? We often link to outside credible resources for our audience, though it seems smarter to open in a new tab rather than risk that the person will not navigate back to our site after finding us. Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | jhamlin0 -
Link Juice Passing Through Headers
I understand the concept of linking your pages internally to help pass juice to one another but it seems to me that the navigation bar with links to your main pages that appear on every page kind of eliminate the linking strategy. For Example: At the top of every page is a Home, About, Services, Contact, etc. Do the bots count these as links from each page? There must be something I'm missing here! Help me out guys!
Web Design | | bcarp880 -
I have a button that repeats it self many times on same page, what can i do so button name does not affect my SEO?
I have a shopping car button named "Add to car" but it repeats on many pages on my website, is this affecting my seo? If yes.. What should i do so it does not affect? Should button appear on hover? Thanks
Web Design | | SeMeAntoja0 -
How is link juice split between navigation?
Hey All, I am trying to understand link juice as it relates to duplicate navigation Take for example a site that has a main navigation contained in dropdowns containing 50 links (fully crawl-able and indexable), then in the footer of said page that navigation is repeated so you have a total of 100 links with the same anchor text and url. For simplicity sake will the link juice be divided among those 100 and passed to the corresponding page or does the "1st link rule" still apply and thus only half of the link juice will be passed? What I am getting at is if there was only one navigation menu and the page was passing 50 link juice units then each of the subpages would get passed 1link juice unit right? but if the menu is duplicated than the possible link juice is divided by 100 so only .5 units are being passed through each link. However because there are two links pointing to the same page is there a net of 1 unit? We have several sites that do this for UX reasons but I am trying to figure out how badly this could be hurting us in page sculpting and passing juice to our subpages. Thanks for your help! Cheers.
Web Design | | prima-2535090