Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
-
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way.
Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority.
Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines.
The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage So, not good.</topic></state>
We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective.
- Is this as simple as that - just removing these page?
- How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic>
- I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO?
Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something.
Thoughts?
-
"a significant rankings boost"
Here is how I see it.....
If a page of mine moved from #5 to #4, I would call that a significant rankings boost. If it moved from #50 to #40, I would call that trivial. If I am on the first page and get any movement up I would call it awesome.
About domain authority... I almost never look at it and can't tell you the DA of my websites. It has just slightly more than "entertainment value" to me. But, plenty of people worship those numbers.
-
Thank you - this is very helpful. I did some basic investigation around this.
The number of these vendor pages that have had at least one hit in the last year is 590. Across these pages I have had a total of 2249 hits. One of the pages (for some reason) accounts for 410 hits, but the vast majority (> 570 of these pages) have less than 20 hits for the entire year. Collectively, these pages have resulted in < 0.5% of our total page hits for the year.
So, they are meaningless in terms of volume of traffic but form a large percentage of our page count.
I am not really sure about the impact of a panda hit (or how to verify) but it does seem that the data above just points to deleting them. Since I think I can 301 redirect with a regular expression to the appropriate "topic page" that seems like the most appropriate approach at this stage.
By the way, I not sure how easy this is to answer, but how would I best assess "a significant rankings boost". Would that manifest itself in remaining pages being ranked better or is this as simple as looking at the domain authority after these pages are removed?
Thanks again.
-
we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage
First, I would look at analytics to see if these pages pull in any meaningful traffic. If they do then you have learned something -- that the keywords that these "types of pages" are optimized for might be valuable. If they are bringing in good traffic, I might make massive improvements to them. If you keep them or make new ones on the same URLs be sure that they are useful for the visitor. If no traffic is coming in through these pages I would redirect them to a relevant page or simply to a related category page or my homepage.
How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs?
This depends on how much traffic enters the site through these pages and also the overall value of this website. If no traffic enters you can simply delete them and allow them to 404. If there is a little traffic or if other sites link to them then I would redirect.
What expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO?
If your site has taken a panda hit then removing these pages could result in a significant rankings boost when (if) recovery occurs. If the site has not taken a panda hit then removing the pages should make your site "lighter" and any authority and power that it has will be increased in these pages.
I would be optimistic - especially if this site has a lot of value on the pages that will remain.
-
Thank you for the prompt response. These pages are there specifically to show lists of vendors (links to their web sites). We do identify the relevant topic from the URL and, from the vendor list page, link to relevant content elsewhere on our site, in a sidebar. A typical page like this would link to 5-10 articles elsewhere on our site.
But the primary content is the list of vendors.
Thanks again.
-
My gut reaction to your question of whether to get rid of links which google may see as a link farm - is "Delete, Delete, Delete...."
In terms of whether it's worth putting in the time to do anything with these pages such as to 301 - the question would be, what is on the pages other than links to low authority websites?
If they contain very little content other than the link, I can't see any potential negative coming from cleaning up your website like this.
In terms of potential benefits, if you're right in your belief that this is considered a link farm by Google, then yes I would expect good things to come from removing this. In reality though, you just never know, but if you have thousands of pages of garbage with links, then there surely can't be any harm done by removing these pages - in my humble opinion.
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
-
How would you build links to this page?
Hi i have ecommerce store and currently we are looking to build links to category pages like: http://www.theiconic.com.au/womens-clothing-dresses-party-dresses/ What are some natural ways to build links to a page like this? Our SEO agency has done guest posting and forums but these are not natural link building methods and against Google policy. Any suggestions on how to build natural links to these pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak651 -
Link Building Question
Hi, I have a 2 month old blog with me, i have submitted a few press releases for the start, later in these 2 months, i got about 40 guest posts, which i've written and submitted at myblogguest site. My niche is in health. Currently my serps are at 16th page which is not a good position. I want to do more link building, but at myblogguest, no one are interested in my niche and don't want to publish content related to my niche, so it becoming hard for me to find guest blogs related to my niche. But i want to get more links in order for my blog to rank well. Is it ok if i write guest posts in other niches as well like technology and put a link in author's resource box? Does it become useful? please help as i find no other sources for my link building task, i tried researching for guest blogs in google also, but i don't find any related to my niche. Seems like, i cannot go further with my link building. Please help me. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitt
Dheer0 -
Toxic Links; Their Existence and Their Impact..
We are constantly being asked about the existence of “toxic Links” and that they are damaging the sites of our clients. Apparently, this definition is being pushed down the throats of clients by other “Seo experts” trying to hijack our business. At this point in time, clients can easily be swayed as a reflex reaction to a drop in rankings. These so called “Seo experts” are clearly scaremongering for their own gain but I would be grateful for your opinion about whether automated, spun content from Seolinkvine and the like, where the English may not be perfect (I assume this is what is meant by “toxic Links”) can actually damage a client’s site. Is it not more constructive to concentrate resources on dilution of keywords from the anchor text rather than waste time on links that may no longer be as powerful, or do they actually have a negative effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dexter-2455780 -
What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to build URL links too dilute link profile???
One of my sites has a very spamy link profile, top 20 anchors are money keywords. What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to help dilute the link profile by building links with URLs, Click Here, more Info, etc. I have been building URL links already, but due to the site age(over 12 years) the amount of exact match anchor text links is just very large and would take forever to get diluted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Best tools for exploring links?
and not just every single link, but ones you know that Google is actually indexing. I find seomoz to be super easy, but there is no way to distinguish links that are actually counting "juice", or am i missing something. What about majesticseo - any other similar tools you use when trying to find linking sites that pass juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Should I link my similar sites together?
Hi I currently have two sites within exactly the same market. I've just purchased a third website from someone. Should I link these sites together? (i.e. in the page header should I cross link them or point two of them to the third?) If I do this will it harm them if they are on the same C-Class IP blocks? Is using private domains and different hosting companies considered dodgey in any way? Basically I'm a big wimp and don't want to do anything potentially that might potentially hurt my rankings;)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish0 -
How to remove an entire subdomain from the Google index with URL removal tool?
Does anyone have clear instructions for how to do this? Do we need to set up a separate GWT account for each subdomain? I've tried using the URL removal tool, but it will only allow me to remove URLs indexed under my domain (i.e. domain.com not subdomain.domain.com) Any help would be much appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How to ping the links
When i do link building for my website, how can i let the search engines know about that. is there any way of pinging?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0