Site wide links from another domain - could these cause a problem?
-
Hi
I manage the SEO in house for the site http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/
A new add on to our services has been launched in the form of an online store allowing us to sell, for example, expedition clothing that is relevant to the trips we offer. The store is managed elsewhere and sits on a subdomain of the company who are providing this service for us.
There are sitewide links throughout this site back to our homepage: http://naturalworld.newheadings.com/index.php
I'm just a bit concerned about these links from an SEO perspective and was wondering if we should request these are set up as no follow. Would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Thanks!
-
I hope you found the answer you were looking for Kate, Good luck!
Any chance any of you reading this would take a look and give some advice on my very similar situation?
http://moz.com/community/q/site-wide-footer-links-exception-any-advice
-
Hi Kate,
Good call
The nofollow tag will eliminate any unnatural linking issue and in your case the potential to bring qualified traffic to your site by far outweighs any value the links would ever bring in terms of visibility.
Sha
-
Thanks everyone. I thought that was the case but it's always good to get a second opinion!
-
yes agree - set as no-follow.
-
Hi,
In short yes.
No-follow links should always be used on any form of advertising across the web. Especially when they are sitewide.
Google have a page set-up specifically for this question
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
You will want to implement this as soon as possible to prevent any negative impact on your website.
Good luck.
-
You're correct the best practice is to no-follow site wide links this was you can still be found but without any trouble. You can always request to leave the homepage link as follow so you still maintain the best link juice. even if we ignore the penalty aspect it really just dilutes the links you have which isn't helping you either.
Good luck.
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
-
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog.
We switched the domain from www.blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This was done with the purpose of gaining backlinks to our main website as well along with to our blog. This set us very low in organic traffic and not to mention, lost the backlinks. For anything, they are being redirected to 301 code. Kindly suggest changes to bring back all the traffic.
Technical SEO | | arun.negi0 -
Another company's website indexing for my site
Hi, I am looking at all the pages which Google are indexing for my website and have come across pages of another company's website. I have contacted them through their online form and Facebook page asking for them to remove their listings for us, but to no avail so far. Is there a way I can do this myself?
Technical SEO | | British-Car-Registrations0 -
Huge increase in links to your site when moving to SSL
Hi My client has 2 websites that after moving them to SSL the number of links to your site in the search console increased in 10s of thousands. What can be the reasons?
Technical SEO | | digital19740 -
Nofollow links on our site menu
Hi Our site's front page has almost 900 internal links on it (it's an ecommerce site with about 25,000 products). A lot of these are on a pretty involved dropdown menu, which is on every page. I can't really do anything to get this figure down (its outside my remit), but one thing the developers have done is make all the menu links nofollow on the mobile version of the menu (site is responsive) - otherwise there would be even more links! My question is as to whether doing this for the mobile menu is a good idea, in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | abisti21 -
Redirecting a single page on a separate domain to a new site?
My client started a subdivision of their company, along with a new website. There was already an individual page about the new product/topic on the main site, but recognizing a growth area they wanted to devote an entire site to the product/topic. Can we/should we redirect that page on the old corporate/main site to the new domain, or just place a link or two? Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Site Map Problems or Are They?
According to webmaster tools my Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt Our site map is generically generated and encompasses all web pages, whether I have excluded them using the robots.txt file As far as I am aware this has never been an issue until recently. Is this hurting my rankings and how do I fix it? Secondly, webmaster tools says there is over 5,000 error/warnings on my site map. But site map is only 1,400 or so pages submitted. How do I see what is going on?
Technical SEO | | Professor0 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0 -
Internal Linking: Site-wide VS Content Links
I just watched this video in which Matt Cutts talks about the ancient 100 links per page limit. I often encounter websites which have massive navigation (elaborate main menu, side bar, footer, superfooter...etc) in addition to content area based links. My question is do you think Google passes votes (PageRank and anchor text) differently from template links such as navigation to the ones in the content area, if so have you done any testing to confirm?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0