Hi guys, I have a question about linking to a product page for linkbuilding. Does that count adversely vs. linking to a homepage?
-
Hi - so until now we have been building links via blog posts and articles and linking them to the homepage. It seems the ranking of some of my top keywords has fallen so had a few questions/concerns:
-
Does it affect the rankings adversely if I link to the product page vs the homepage?
-
What is rule of thumb for increasing rankings of inside pages/keywords and building links to them?
Thanks
-
-
For internal linking you should try to be as precise as possible. You can also freely control the anchor text of the links so if you're talking about a specific product, link to that specific product. Google has enough data to know when you link to a page and the content it should be finding is not there (as may be the case with some of your home page links). I would clean up any and all internal links that don't point to the best page, either deleting ones that just don't apply or pointing them to very specific products.
With external links it can vary. A lot of times people link to the home page when mentioning the company, while some sites garner a lot of product specific links (eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, etc.) due to the nature of their content. Wikipedia would be another example. Using OSE you can find some great ideas around how the competition has built links, but also some really spammy examples. Avoid the spam and make it a goal that when you do add a link to a page or work with someone interested in linking to your site, that the link is as user helpful as possible. Think of the link or mention from a conversion perspective more than as a way to help your rankings and you'll be much better off. Cheers!
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 is this possible? #2 ranking with NO on-page keywords, no backlinks, no sitemap...
Hi everybody. I have a question ... I'm totally stumped. This question is being asked today (November 16th, 2015) just after Google updated something in their algorithm. Nobody seems to know what they did. and it has something to do with the new "Rank Brain" system they're now using. My niche is Logo Design Software (https://www.thelogocreator.com). I had the keywords "logo creator" on the page roughly 7 times. After Google updated, I lost about 10 spots and as of this writing, I've dropped to #15. So, maybe I over optimized. fine. Noticing that for the keyword "logo creator" ... NONE of the top 14 spots actually have "logo creator" in their page title and NONE of them have more that 2 instances (if any) of the keyword "logo creator" on the actual page. So I removed ALL instances of my keyword "logo creator" from my home page - used the Webmaster's Fetch Tool and moved up a few spots instantly. So what the heck? And the #2 spot for that keyword is www.logomakr.com - they have NO words at all on their pages, no blog, no sitemap and far fewer links than anybody in the top 10. Can anybody reading this shed some light? Marc Marc Sylvester
Algorithm Updates | | Laughingbird
Laughingbird Software0 -
Clean up of Links, What to get rid of?
We have been cleaning up our back office and preparing our .com domain to take all our future traffic and have got into a debate about how far to clean up the old past links. We have not ever had a penalty on the site as far as we know, but did once get the site taken offline by Google as they thought it was a malware site back in March this year. They put it straight back up and running in 5 hours, but was very strange as it is an amazon-webstore retail site. We are not sure why Google thought (edit: typo) this, so just in-case we have been combing through the historical links and now started to disavow any links we cannot get removed manually. So far just a couple of sites that have no relevance to our retail business. However, the debate we have been having is around Directory listings: Should we get rid of these too? Gut reaction is Yes, based on the need for quality relevant links for the end user, but then some are passing proper links to relevant sections of our site albeit in a directory format. Dmoz comes to mind Any thoughts? Bruce.
Algorithm Updates | | BruceA0 -
Question about Google Algo Change on June 26
I have a client who's Google Organic visits dropped significantly on June 26th. I used a chart overlay called ChartIntelligence. It says that there was an SEOF update on 6/26/2013. Does anyone know what this update (or any other updates) would be? Also, where might I find additional info on this update. I did notice that Moz's algo change tracker listed a multi-week update on June 27, but I'm not sure where to find info on what types of things were impacted by this update. Any info would be helpful.
Algorithm Updates | | TopFloor0 -
Difference between Google's link: operator and GWT's links to your sites
I haven't used the Google operator link: for a while, and I noticed that there is a big disparity between the operator "link:" and the GWT's links to your site. I compared these results on a number of websites, my own and competitors, and the difference seem to be the same across the board. Has Google made a recent change with how they display link results via the operator? Could this be an indication that they are clean out backlinks?
Algorithm Updates | | tdawson090 -
How to find which keywords bring traffic to a particular page on my website ?
I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?
Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore0 -
If the homepage is sandboxed for a keyword is the whole site sandboxed for that keyword?
If the homepage of a website has been sandboxed for certain keywords does this mean that the whole site is sandboxed for them keywords or just the homepage? If a new sub-page was created with quality unique content, would it be possible to get that sub-page ranked for the same keywords that have been sandboxed on the homepage? I have asked many other SEO professionals this same question and nobody really knows for sure. Do you?
Algorithm Updates | | Mark A Preston0 -
Does the use of an underscore in filenames adversely affect SEO
We have had a page which until recently was ranked first or second by Google UK and also worldwide for the term "Snowbee". It is now no longer in the top 50. I ran a page optimization report on the url and had a very good score. The only criticism was that I had used an atypical character in the url. The only unusual character was an underscore "_" We use the underscore in most file names without apparent problems with search engines. In fact they are automatically created in html files by our ecommerce software, and other pages do not seem to have been so adversely affected. Should we discontinue this practice? It will be difficult but I'm sure we can overcome this if this is the reason why Google has marked us down. I attach images of the SEO Report pages 8fDPi.jpg AdLIn.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | FFTCOUK0 -
Youtube dofollow link to web site
Is there still a dofollow link back from a youtube channel to your web site? I filled in the site url in the profile, which in my understanding used to be the single dofollow link back to your web site. However, when I view the page source for the youtube channel it shows up as a nofollow link. Also, in OSE the link does not appear. Has this changed or am I just not doing this correctly?
Algorithm Updates | | uwaim20120