Help needed interpreting inbound link analysis please
-
Hi
I am trying to determine how effective our store blog is and am trying to analyse the inbound links it provides to our store domain but am confused with the results, can anyone help please?
For information the blog is on a subdomain of the store site, has plenty of relevant original content, and has been regularly updated over several years in line with basic Yoast SEO best practice.
When I look at analysis of inbound links and linking domains for the store site in Moz Pro, the blog subdomain does not show as providing any inbound links.
Google Search Console shows similar results, with no inbound links to the store domain showing from the blog subdomain in either 'search traffic > links to your site', or 'search traffic > inbound links'.
Open Site Explorer for the store domain also shows no inbound links from the blog subdomain to the store with 'link source > only external' selected.
But if I change to 'link source > only internal' then all of the inbound links from the blog subdomain to the main store that I would expect to see appear.
Should I be concerned by the fact I can only find these inbound links under this one specific search and not in any of the others?
Does this suggest a problem in the passing of any current and future SEO benefit from subdomain blog to main domain?
Or should I not worry about it too much?
I am looking to begin a full overhaul of all SEO for the store and blog from the ground up and want to be sure the connections between the blog subdomain and store are functioning properly before I start.
Any help in unpicking this would be really appreciated
Thanks very much
-
Hi Rob
That's a big sway in favour of shifting to the subfolder, and will absolutely take you up on your offer via PM, thanks very much
-
A lack of blog functionality can be an issue, but only if you are counting on your blog content to generate interest in your products/services. If you are only using your blog as a ranking mechanism for your store, and don't need your visitors to go there in order to influence them into a buying situation, I wouldn't be terribly worried about how UX-friendly your blog is. In this case, the pros definitely outweigh the cons in terms of switching over.
However, if your blog is very interactive and your products require review videos or "how-to's" to help potential customers make a purchase decision, then it is probably a better idea to retain a UX-friendly blog platform and forego the ranking benefits.
Rebuilding the site is likely the best option in light of the information you have provided, although if resources are tight this may not be an option. If you would like, I can take a closer look at your site - feel free to shoot me a PM and we can take a look at steps you might take to improve your SEO as cost-efficiently as possible.
Cheers,
Rob
-
Hi Rob, thanks for the in-depth answer and resources, very helpful
I would love to shift our blog to a subfolder, but this may cause problems too. This is because our main store site is built with BigCommerce, meaning the only option to get the blog into a subfolder there is using BigCommerce's built-in blog functionality.
Good news: we have all of our blog content in a subfolder
Bad news: SEO functionality of the BigCommerce blog is average at best. Layout, navigation and UX is poor
Do you think the pros outweigh the cons?
The other alternative is to rebuild the store from the ground up for ecommerce and blogging and bring everything under one domain that way in a site optimised for both.
This is likely beyond our budget right now however. I don't see this being realistically possible for another 12 months. In the meantime I am searching for the best way to maximise the assets we have (blog, main site, etc) for max SEO benefit and growth over the next year.
All thoughts and advice greatly appreciated!
-
Hello!
Great question and one many SEO's still struggle with.
Here's a great article I read recently on just this topic - it covers a lot, but the first thing it tackles is the use of subfolders vs. subdomains when creating blogs for ranking primary domains (your situation).
http://seopressor.com/blog/subdomain-vs-subfolder/
Personally I think there are benefits and problems with creating a subdomain for SEO purposes to boost rankings of a primary site. What you are describing in terms of what your analytics is showing makes sense - the subdomain still acts as part of your primary domain when it comes to passing on links, but it ranks on its own as subdomains do. Therefore, the SEO of your site is not going to be improved as much by a blog on a subdomain as it might as part of a subfolder.
(i.e. example.com/blog is a better way to go than blog.example.com when it comes to pure link juice and SEO)
In fact, the way you currently have it set up, you may be shooting yourself in the foot since the link juice that is passed from your subdomain will be reduced, and only your blog will rank organically, meaning people might not even make it to your store (as you have created a barrier from a UX perspective, requiring them to browse through a middle point to get there).
You might look at migrating everything to a subfolder instead of using a subdomain, although I would be cautious of this approach if you have a ton of content on your subdomain currently. Here's a post from a while back where Rand spoke to this procedure:
While some things have changed, this is still pretty solid advice. As a general rule, I try to show my clients the value of subfolder blogs for primary domain ranking purposes, and will only move forward with a blog on a subdomain if there is an extremely good reason.
Hope this helps and feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further.
Cheers,
Rob
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
-
I found 200 links to my site! But ..
hello I found 200 links Linking Domains to my site! But in moz, the number of my Linking Domains is 0 . How can I send these 200 links to moz to analyze them?
Link Explorer | | pic980 -
Link Explorer Export
Does anyone know how to export more than 50 keywords at a time from Link Explorer? I'm trying to extract the keywords from a competitor domain to do some analysis/big data queries. I'm using the link Explorer but I can't see any way to export more than 50 keywords at a time! The total I can export seems to be around 100k but it's going to take a very long time if I've got to do 50 at a ago!
Link Explorer | | seoman100 -
What do these link terms mean?
I'm not sure what all of the different link terms mean: -External, followed links -Internal, nofollowed links -External, nofollowed links -Internal, no followed links -Total linking domains -Followed linking domains What are the differences? Which metric will indicate the total # of other sites that are linking to my site? Thank you!
Link Explorer | | sgarrels0 -
Campaign shows website links from Https. My site is not https but http:// HELP
When looking at my web campaign, I have inbound links pointing from every page located on my menu from https:// I do not have an https. website in any way. The weird part is that when I click on the link, it is a replica of my homepage, although in text only format. I have attached a picture for reference. Why and how could my top links be coming from this? I do not have any inbound links non https:// from my website Thank you! BNHHc5u
Link Explorer | | Morg56850 -
Just Discovered links - How long before they are counted toward the PA scores
I have a new website I put up in the last 90 days. I have been watching the DA, PA and Keyword rankings. Once I set up the campaign I got a report back a week later and some data showing some keyword rankings and some DA & PA scores and links showing from 2 domains. Since this time OSE has Just Discovered 16 more backlinking domains - however the DA and PA scores have not changed ? How long after the new Just Discovered backlinks before they affect the scores I am seeing for my DA & PA ? Thank you in advance for any insight on this matter, Happy Holidays - Joe
Link Explorer | | jlane90 -
Does Moz have anything similar to ahrefs batch analysis tool?
I am wanting to do analysis of a whole bunch of URLs at once - i know ahrefs already has a very good tool for this - but I don't really want to have to pay the $79 a month if moz has something similar? I know it has the OSE. Can I do batch analysis in this? Thanks
Link Explorer | | SWD.Advertising1 -
How can I use Open Site Explorer to Identify why my own URL's are appearing as inbound links
I'm a new member of Moz, and am trying to understand why I am seeing my sites URL's in my Inbound Link results in Open Site Explorer. There are quite a few, and they are all product category URL's that are generated by my stores database. This is not happening with .html URL's. Any thoughts?
Link Explorer | | Artfx0 -
How to check what websites your website is linking to
We recently transitioned away from a third party website using a different domain. A lot of our blog posts still link to this domain. Is there a tool offered by Moz that crawls your website and provides a report of all websites that your website is linking to?
Link Explorer | | farmiloe0