Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sitewide Footer Links & Sister Sites
-
Hi
We have a number of sister sites across Europe - the sites are under a different domain name, but have a very similar layout & product offering.
When looking at duplicate content, they are flagged as being a moderate risk with similar content - we don't duplicate product content, however it's similar.
We also link to them in the footer in a drop down - not anchor text links - however this is still seen by Google.
I don't think I'll be able to remove links to our sister companies, but should I implement the Href lang if the sites are slightly different? Or find another way to link to them?
Here's an example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key & https://www.manutan.fr/fr/maf
-
Hi Thomas,
This is interesting and great advice thank you. I think the hard sell may be internal, but it's something I'll look at proposing to the company.
I'll do my research and put a case together.
Thank you
-
Daniel is 100% right about that. Rather not it's hreflang or simply stopping a bunch of links into every page on your website.
It kills your crawl budget.
See; https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/webinars/top-5-tips-successful-seo-audit/
Daniels advice is excellent I have a client who received 20 as much traffic after approximately seven months of removing links that were on every single page. This led to googlebot indexing much deeper and being able to index things that it was ignoring before.
-
Hi Dan
Yeh I have looked at that one thank you. It's something I'll need to get buy in from, but worth looking at doing
-
Hi Becky,
Even if the links are within a drop down, it's not to say that Google can't crawl them.
Here's a video from Matt Cutts where advises against using cross-domain links in the footer and suggests using a country locator page as per my example from Apple's website - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FJNbVU2ihU0
Dan
-
Hi
Yes they're in the footer, does Google still class the fact that it's a drop down as a concern with links if they're in the footer?
I thought as they weren't anchor text links that it wouldn;t be as much of an issue?
-
Hi Becky,
The main reason I think it would be flagged up would be because the links to each sister site are located in the footer and therefore appear on every page of the websites! Perhaps you have thousands of links in total from each site to the other.
I recently had this same issue come up with one of my clients and we chose to build a separate page, linked to when users can select their country. Check out http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/ to see what I mean. That way there is just one link to each sister site rather than hundreds or thousands.
That should be a relatively simple, quick fix to implement.
Hope that helps
Daniel
-
they are almost identical normally you want to utilize the same domain name see
https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
I would look at the back link profiles as well as let me know if they are like for like when it comes to text?
sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone0 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0 -
Best possible linking on site with 100K indexed pages
Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richardo24hr0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
News sites & Duplicate content
Hi SEOMoz I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world? Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific. Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place. News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc. All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 360eight-SEO
Chris Captivate0
