Tens of thousands of links to less than 10 pages from 1 domain
-
I was looking at 'Links to your site' in Google Search Console and noticed our website has around 60 thousand followed links to 8 pages from a single domain. This is happening because we run an ad on the referring domain (a blog) and the ad is in the sidebar along with other ecommerce stores in the same niche. As a result, our ad, and most of our competitor's ads, have links showing up across this blog's entire site.
Are this many links, and the type of links, a problem for SEO?
I'm wondering if it would be wise to discontinue this advertising. While we get a very modest amount of traffic as a result of the ad, it doesn't convert very well, and I'm wondering if there might be any SEO benefit to not having all of these inbound links from a single domain coming in.
Thanks!
J
-
Hi Dmytro,
That's precisely my concern. I got in touch with the owner of the website linking to us and asked him to nofollow our link. I'll monitor and see if there are any noticeable changes.
Cheers
J -
Hi,
This is strange that sponsored ads have follow links, they should be nofollow, as ads should not directly affect you organic search. In your case they actually might, therefore, I would suggest to review the ad website and maybe consider moving somewhere else (as you said, it doesn't convert well).
Also, if we think about it, Google actually may consider your ads as buying links or as unnatural link building.
-
Thanks for the input, Eric.
We already have some editorial followed links from this domain, outside of the sidebar, so if we discontinued the sponsored links we'd still have some backlinks from their website. Their DA is 45 and ours is 41. We're only getting about 1% of our traffic and 0.25% of our sales from the sponsored link, low enough that I would be OK with killing if it's hurting us at all.
With the links being followed and so many, do you think it's hurting us?
-
Depending on the Domain Authority of the domain(s) that are linking to you, it would or would not be helping or hurting you. When evaluating links that are sponsored like this, we typically recommend looking at the traffic the site is sending. If you can clearly see traffic from the site and those clicks are converting for you, then you should probably keep those links.
If they are sponsored links, though, and they're in the sidebar, they should be labeled as such--and they should be nofollow links.
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
-
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
Hello all! I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd." These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street". Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them? Thanks for any input. Ken
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?
Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland1 -
Preserving link equity from old pages
Hi Moz Community, We have a lot of old pages built with Dreamweaver a long time ago (2003-2010) which sit outside our current content management system. As you'd expect they are causing a lot of trouble with SEO (Non-responsive, duplicate titles and various other issues). However, some of these older pages have very good backlinks. We were wondering what is the best way to get rid of the old pages without losing link equity? In an ideal world we would want to bring over all these old pages to our CMS, but this isn't possible due to the amount of pages (~20,000 pages) and cost involved. One option is obviously to bulk 301 redirect all these old pages to our homepage, but from what we understand that may not lead to the link equity being passed down optimally by Google (or none being passed at all). Another option we can think of would be to bring over the old articles with the highest value links onto the current CMS and 301 redirect the rest to the homepage. Any advice/thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thumbs up! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3gcouk0 -
Why is my Crawl Report Showing Thousands of Pages that Do Not Exist?
Hi, I just downloaded a Crawl Summary Report for a client's website. I am seeing THOUSANDS of duplicate page content errors. The overwhelming majority of them look something like this: ERROR: http://www.earlyinterventionsupport.com/resources/parentingtips/development/parentingtips/development/development/development/development/development/development/parentingtips/specialneeds/default.aspx This page doesn't exist and results in a 404 page. Why are these pages showing up? How do I get rid of them? Are they endangering the health of my site as a whole? Thank you, Jenna <colgroup><col width="1051"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JennaCMag
| |0 -
Do inbound links pass onto new domain if redirected?
If I set up a website on a new domain and have the old domain 301 redirected to the new domain, do the links pointing to the old site impact the new site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | priceseo0 -
How do I find the links on my site that link to another one of my pages?
I ran IIS Seo toolkit and it found about 40 pages that I have no idea how they exist. What tool can I use to find out what internal link is linking to them so I can fix them or get rid of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Are links to on-page content crawled / have any effect on page rank?
Lets say I have a really long article that begins with links to <a name="something">anchors on the same page.</a> <a name="something"></a> <a name="something">E.g.,</a> Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, allowing the user to scroll down to different content. There are also other links on this page that link to other pages. A few questions: Googlebot arrives on the page. Does it crawl links that point to anchors on the same page? When link juice is divided among all the links on the page, do these links count and page rank is then lost? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
Link anchor text: only useful for pages linked to directly or distributed across site?
As a SEO I understand that link anchor text for the focus keyword on the page linked to is very important, but I have a question which I can not find the answer to in any books or blogs, namely: does inbound anchor text 'carry over' to other pages in your site, like linkjuice? For instance, if I have a homepage focusing on keyword X and a subpage (with internal links to it) focusing on keyword Y. Does is then help to link to the homepage with keyword Y anchor texts? Will this keyword thematically 'flow through' the internal link structure and help the subpage's ranking? In a broader sense: will a diverse link anchor text profile to your homepage help all other pages in your domain rank thematically? Or is link anchor text just useful for the direct page that is linked to? All views and experiences are welcome! Kind regards, Joost van Vught
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoostvanVught0