Will adding a mini directory to our blog with lots of outgoing no follow links harm our authority and context
-
We are an adventure travel tour company, who run hiking, kayaking, biking adventures in several countries. We have a travel tour operator website with a blog in a sub folder of the site. We want to add a section/category in the blog itself with a hiking club mini directory, that lists all hiking clubs in 1 or 2 specific countries.
The reason we want to do this is because the people searching online for these clubs are our target market and potential clients. We hope to rank for some of these searches, and encourage interest in our blog/website in the process. We also want the potential to build relationships with these clubs.
The question I want to ask is: if we add say 100 to 200 listings, and make all outgoing links no follow, will this harm our page authority, reputation with SE's or pose any other risk for our site. The other question is, do you think that this will dilute the context of our content - as its slightly different in context to the rest of our site content.
Are we better to set up a separate site for this purpose.
-
Ok thanks alot. I know its important to maintain good rich, rather than thin content on posts (listings). I was intending on using categories and tag them with regions - so the content is more like an actual post rather than like a telephone book.
Cheers
-
This will not hurt your site if done correctly. We have done something similar on our website. Instead of locations like you are trying to do, our page is sorted by category.
http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/seo-resources
We have left most of them to "follow", as I don't think it hurts you as much as people may say.
What you don't want to do is just have a huge link directory page, that looks like it doesn't have a purpose.
-
Thank you for the great ideas you have suggested here, would be great to incorporate these.
-
Just saying what I would do.. and I would not have any problem adding something like this to one of my sites.
I would write an article about hiking clubs and the benefits of finding and being involved with one. People who want to go on your adventures might benefit from these clubs by learning about hiking, finding several local people of similar interest and ability to hike with, get in shape so that they will be ready for your adventure, learn about fun hikes in their local areas, hiking is an activity that is more fun with some friends.
So, on my site this article would be in the left column of the page and the list of hiking clubs arranged by geographic area would be in the right column. Some photos and quotes from happy hiking club people would be used to balance out the column lengths.
This article and the list of hiking clubs is a great service to your potential clients. The article gives greater value to the list of clubs. You don't have to link to them. You can simply publish their URL if you want.
-
Great question. I'm actually interesting in doing something similar with my site. I'm just waiting for the experts to chime in.
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
-
Will Google Recrawl an Indexed URL Which is No Longer Internally Linked?
We accidentally introduced Google to our incomplete site. The end result: thousands of pages indexed which return nothing but a "Sorry, no results" page. I know there are many ways to go about this, but the sheer number of pages makes it frustrating. Ideally, in the interim, I'd love to 404 the offending pages and allow Google to recrawl them, realize they're dead, and begin removing them from the index. Unfortunately, we've removed the initial internal links that lead to this premature indexation from our site. So my question is, will Google revisit these pages based on their own records (as in, this page is indexed, let's go check it out again!), or will they only revisit them by following along a current site structure? We are signed up with WMT if that helps.
Technical SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Anyone See This Before? Google Following Links that are Not Hyperlinks
Today I was going through my Google Webmaster URL Errors (404s) info. I came across two links in my URL Errors report that are NOT actually hyperlinks on the source page. Both of these links are from two different forum-type websites. In both cases, the post references a URL on my website (incorrectly, hence the 404 error) in the text of the post but did NOT actually link to my site. I looked at the source code...no href. Both forum posts simply had a tag or tag around the incorrect URL text referencing my site. I have never seen this before or heard that Google will follow a URL that is not actually a hyperlink. Anyone else?
Technical SEO | | cajohnson0 -
Link building question
ok so we paid the top firm in seo to help us build an seo strategy and i think we have a good one. We are changing our link building tactics and making more Pr related links and creating awesome content on blogs or our own site to generate traffic and links to our site. We have data from our engineer which should be interesting and we are going to sponsor events, do some link baiting with some of our articles, get a pr firm to get us some good articles on major sites and go to events around phily where we will have unique content and a unique perspective such as car shows ect. The problem is even though all the content will be linked to our site how do we link them. We got hit by penguin but in these articles or blogs should we use the anchor text for the word we are using. The company says dont do it right now bc we got hit with penguin and should only use the brand. I have no idea how only using the brand and not the keywords will magically make us rank for certain keywords. Anyone have an opinion. Thank you and we do pretty well with seo but we did get little bit of a hit with penguin that we are eliminating links and making a new way of thinking when it comes to link building. We also just hired a designer so we are going to build 100s of pages on the site to increase seo with unique content and that is also a goal of ours for the year. We have two marketers on staff and 4 programmers so we are able to do anything. Our urls are terrible but the rest of the site is pretty good
Technical SEO | | goldjake17880 -
Rel=author Verification
I am working to add rel=author markup to my companies website. We have about a dozen editors each posting under their own byline. Because my team does not have full access to the website's code and our lack of "author" pages, we are using the Email Verification Method. We have set up Google Plus Fan pages for each of the editors. Can I use these pages as the verification source - or does it need to be a personal profile. Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | SuperMikeLewis0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?
Hi All, I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product. Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a> <a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice? Thanks</a>0 -
Too many footer links?
Hi. We're working on http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ at the moment, and I was wondering what's everyone's opinion on footer links. There's quite a lot on the page, and I was wondering if there might be a few too many. If so, what would be the best plan of action? Remove them altogether, stick them in an iframe or in a bit of JS so they can't be crawled? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | neooptic0 -
What should be noindexed on a Wordpress blog?
I know this can be a "it depends" answer so I'll try to explain. Qualifications on your answers would be great. I use the Wordpress architecture for myself and clients on sites and blogs. Almost every business site we create has a blog and I'm always working to improve results on them. My strategy has been the following: Categories: General, main content types, general keywords. Index, follow Tags: Very specific, post specific, may only be used once for one post. My categories have descriptions that are displayed on the category pages with excerpts. Tags rarely have a description but are displayed with excerpts on the page. My idea has been to index the categories to crawl the content and they have unique content by showing the category description. Tags shouldn't be archived because they may be all over the place and may have only 1 post with no tag description. I'm trying to reduce duplicate content but I don't want to limit results for my clients and myself. Should I set tags to noindex, follow or should I have them indexed? The only thing I'm thinking with having the tags indexed is that I may be able to get additional traffic through the more specific tags (i.e. tag = meta tags, category = SEO).
Technical SEO | | JaredDetroit0