Unusual "internal links" causing SEO issues?

[nick4501]

Hi all,

I'm working on an ecommerce site which has been around for almost 20 years.  Over the years it has started to suffer in Google's search results and the decision was recently made to completely overhaul the site.  We're now very happy with the website's design, and care was taken to maintain page rank via 301s, etc.  However, the site has just fallen off the bottom of Google's first search result page (for the first time in years) for our main keyword.  I signed up here in the hope of using Moz's SEO tools to help us return to our former glory, but I'm seeing some confusing results:

I've run a crawl test on our site, as well as on our two biggest competitors. One thing that really stood out was that we have over 1000 "internal links" to our homepage, whereas our competitors both have around 20-30 (both of which appear at the top of the first SR page).  Since the rest of the "on-page SEO" looks OK, I suspect that this could be causing our problems, but I don't understand where this "internal links" number is coming from. Links to our competitor's homepage appear in the navigation bar on every single one of their product pages (which they have about 500 of), yet your report only claims that they have 30 links.  The only link to the homepage appears in the site's main navigation bar (which obviously appears on every product page - exactly as it does on our competitors' sites).  Additionally, almost every other page on our site apparently has 0 "internal links" and 0 page authority.  Is this a problem with Moz's crawl test tool, or is our site actually at fault?

The above has been asked directly to Moz staff, but I haven't had a reply.  I'd hugely appreciate any words of wisdom from the community.

Many thanks in advance.

Nick

[Moz.HelpTeam]

Hello again!
There are a few layers of things going on here, so I'll try to break it down as completely as I can.

The number of links reported in the 'Internal Links' column is coming directly from our index rather than the live crawl performed by the Crawl Test. So, any pages that we haven't indexed would display 0 internal links and a Page Authority of 1.

For the pages that we have indexed, we tabulate internal links from all pages on your site that we view, but those pages are not necessarily indexed. This means that the large difference that you're seeing between your site and your competitors' internal link count could be simply coming from the fact that we've seen (and potentially indexed) more pages from your site than your competitors. This could happen more readily if we indexed inbound links that pointed to a wider variety of pages on your site, and also the overall size of your site.

Also, it is always worth noting that this is just a snapshot based on your highly-authoritative backlinks, so it is not necessarily able to serve as a complete indicator of your (or your competitors') total link counts; these are just what we've observed during our particular indexing process.

As far as the SEO implications of these counts, while I'm certainly no expert, I don't believe that large numbers of internal links like this would have any sort of direct negative affect on your rankings. I hope this helps to explain!

[JordanRailsback]

Howdy Nick!
This certainly looks peculiar, but I'm not totally sure what could be befouling the Crawl Test results in this way. I'm looking at it with a couple other folks on my team, and we'll follow up in your support request just as soon as we have something more concrete figured out

[nick4501]

Yes - I was sure to update any blog links to point to the appropriate new location on the new site.  Webmaster Tools seems to be happy enough with this.

Thanks for the links on URL parameters.  I've just added this information to WMT...although I suspect it won't make a huge difference, as I hear that the Google bot is now quite good at detecting the use of these sorts of parameters automatically.

The Moz results remain a mystery...

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

When you migrated the old blog over, did you run through your backlinks for those to either update them to the new URL, or remove & disavow toxic/spammy/irrelevant links?

For your homepage, that's where you links are coming from, as to why Moz is giving odd numbers like that, I couldn't say at the moment, I will look more.

Also, check out Google's resources on Pagination and Parameters to help search engines crawl your site better.

Hope this helps a bit! Good luck!

[nick4501]

Hi Patrick.

I hadn't thought about the links from the breadcrumb, BUT again - our competitors are doing exactly the same, yet seem to only have a fraction of our "internal links" figure (according to Moz's Crawl Test tool).

I completely agree with the Domain and Page Authority points (I feel that a domain as old as ours deserves a much higher value for both), but wasn't sure how best to go about raising it (aside from good old fashioned quality link building).

The titles, headers and content are what we're focusing on currently, so that should be resolved soon enough.

Our blog posts have been directly ported over from the old site (hence the ridiculously long names!), but appear to be some of the few pages that ARE actually ranking well in Google results, so I'm slightly reluctant to mess with them at the moment!

Our products do change occasionally, but the ecommerce platform should keep the sitemap up to date whenever this happens, so that shouldn't be a problem (although do you think it's a problem for the update frequency of every page in the sitemap to be "weekly"?).

These issues aside, can you see any other reason for the huge number of reported internal links to the home page?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Checking ScreamingFrog, you definitely have a lot of internal links to your homepage via your logo at the top of the page and your breadcrumbs. This isn't unusual.

According to Open Site Explorer, your site is not that bad off, but I would definitely seek opportunities through your Domain and Page Authority. I would also take a look at your on-site SEO, specifically around your titles, headers, and content to make sure you are trying to capture what users are searching for.

For instance, your titles like on the Heart wedding theme page is pretty nondescript - how can you add "Wedding Themes" in there or make it more descriptive to capture a user's search and attention?

Your blog URLs and titles are extremely long as well. I would give your on-site another run through and see what you can do to enhance it. It seems like you have some opportunities to capitalize on.

Also, if you change products a lot, look into a sitemap generator for your sitemap so you don't have to manually update if a product gets removed or added. This will alleviate a lot of manual labor. Make sure it is also properly uploaded to both Google and Bing.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[nick4501]

Hi guys.  Thanks for the responses.

The site is www.ukweddingfavours.co.uk.

Duplicate content shouldn't be an issue, since I've already included canonical links and 301 redirected anything from non-www to www, etc.  Granted, some products are very similar, but they aren't flagged as duplicate content.  The site was only added to Moz Analytics a few weeks ago (but has obviously been tracked in GA for years).

I've already used Screaming Frog (mainly to locate dead links).  The only other issue that it highlighted is lengthy title and meta description tags (which we're currently working on).

A lot of the ecommerce platform has been customised specifically for our site, so we have the flexibility to change pretty much any part of it, if necessary.  Our site has been around much longer than our main competitors, and I'm keen to do anything necessary to bring it back to where I feel it belongs.

Please feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Nick,

I don't actually use any MOZ tools, so can't really comment on their findings directly. However, I would suggest downloading Screaming Frog Spider as this can give you a bit more raw data to work with.

What I find many times with e-commerce systems is that they can often create lots of pages of 'noise', often without the site owners even being aware.

Without digging around on the site, it is quite difficult to know what else could be doing this.

-Andy

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Nicholas

This could potentially be duplicate content issues or links inside blog or other site content. Is this the case?

I would check and see if you have multiple variations of pages on your site: www vs non www, http and https versions, parameter URLs, etc. - make sure you utilize the canonical tag properly as well.

Are you able to provide a URL to your site so the Mozzers here can look into it more? It's hard to gauge without looking at the site. Also, how recently did you put your site into Moz Analytics?

Hope this helps! Good luck!