Need Professional Help with Site Structure, Page Authority, and Internal Linking
-
We are a 10 year + small (1000 pages) niche ecommerce site (Magento) that has recently lost rankings to a competitor. We out perform them in every metric so I do not understand them leap frogging us to the top spot. This has forced me to look at my site structure, page authority (rank), and internal linking. After reviewing a moz crawl issues report, here are some of my observations:
-
Root domain has a PA of 40
-
Top 3 $ Category pages have a PA of 22, 18, 18
-
Multiple meaningless blog posts and other category/product pages have PA’s of 30+
Here is a screenshot of the crawl report with internal links, links, etc showing. I need some help - thoughts, suggestions, next steps in analysis?
-
-
Hi Sam Wilhoit,
Sorry to hear you have lost out rankings to a competitor. It is difficult to say with absolute certainty why they would outrank you all of the sudden without knowing who the competitor is and on what keywords this is occurring. Feel free to message me and I can take a quick look for you.
In the mean time, did you change anything on your website recently, or even in the past 3 months? Sometimes a change, no matter how small, might have an adverse impact on your website and rankings.
Has your competitor changed anything in at all on their site that you can tell in the last 1-3 months? Have you been tracking them with any tool in order to determine this?
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
-
Do I need to worry about these 404s after changing permalinks structure?
Not long ago I wanted to change the permalink structure on a blog where the full date was included in the post urls to one where it was just /category/blog-post-title. The site is on a managed host and they setup the redirects for me and then I changed the permalink structure in the WP settings. Everything worked fine after and all old posts now redirect to the new structure. However in Google search console I can see that my 404s report has jumped from a few hundred to several thousands but it seems to be counting the urls paths to elements such as images within the old posts permalink structure eg /2012/6/some-post/some-image-in-post all the old posts themselves and their content redirects fine though. Do I need to worry about these 404s? It annoys me to see so many in my reports like that even if they aren't hurting my site 😞
On-Page Optimization | | linklander0 -
Simple question: I wonder if I'm over internally linking?
Hi, What's you guys' policy on how much to internally link. I do it a lot - whenever it makes sense, but hold off if I just linked to the same page in the last paragraph, for instance. Would like to know your thoughts to see if I'm overdoing it. This is for Ecommerce blog posts, category descriptions, and product descriptions if that matters. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Site Wide Links
Howdy Moz! So our agency has been around for long enough to have a few sites we've built that have our credit in their footer resulting in a site wide link. Mostly just our name. We've heard that Google does not particularly like site wide links, should we go through and remove some of these old links?
On-Page Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. So, my SEO team has worked very hard to finally resolve RogerBot/GoogleBot specific Crawl Errors either manually or programmatically can be fixed for our Budget Blinds USA Pro Campaign. We've done a good job even if a lot of it came from Robots.txt file entries as this was the most efficient way our client chose to do it. Good news is most of it is CMS configuration and not bad site architecture. That being said our next big volume of Crawl Errors is "Too Many On-Page Links". Our Moz DomainRank is 61. Our client, on this new version of the website, added a large nav-based footer which has duplicate links from the Header Main Navigation. I believe our solution is to put in No-Follow Metatags at the Footer Link Level, so we don't zap Page Authority by over-dividing as you recommend. Is this the best way to resolve this? Is there any risk in this? Or is a 61 DomainRank high enough for RogerBot and GoogleBot to crawl these anyway? Please advise,
On-Page Optimization | | Aviatech0 -
Need help regarding On page issue for dating site?
I'm having problem with on page of dating website datetolove.com. If you go to the location link in the website you will see the profile of same persons are showcasing in Country,state & city which will lead to duplication.if i use canonical tag in the country page then I think google will crawl only country page & will leave state & city pages.But I need that google should crawl all the 3 pages without any duplication's.Please help me out with this problem please check the link below.There are many other problems also in this website. http://www.datetolove.com/en/locations
On-Page Optimization | | varun18000 -
Best practice for Meta-Robots tag in categories and author pages?
For some of our site we use Wordpress, which we really like working with. The question I have is for the categories and authors pages (and similiar pages), i.e. the one looking: http://www.domain.com/authors/. Should you or should you not use follow, noindex for meta-robots? We have a lot of categories/tags/authors which generates a lot of pages. I'm a bit worried that google won't like this and leaning towards adding the follow, noindex. But the more I read about it, the more I see people disagree. What does the community of Seomoz think?
On-Page Optimization | | Lobtec0 -
If I have too many on-page links can I reduce it with nofollow tags or do the links have to be removed?
On my site I have a top nav drop down menu but once visitors go to one particularly large subsection, that menu is repeated on the left for easier viewing. As a result, I shoot over 100 links on page. Can I put nofollow or noindex tags on the left side links and reduce my "official" on-page links count or do I have to actually eliminate some of the links? Thanks, Oak
On-Page Optimization | | CSA-2316710