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.
Dead end pages are really an issue?
-
Hi all,
We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages?
Thanks
-
Thanks for the response. Actually we serve our pages differently to Google bots and Users. Users can see related pages but we can't see while browsing as bot. So, ultimately there are no other links on most of the pages for Google. With your brief, its clear that we definitely can have different links. But as I said, these pages are user guides about every feature we provide. So can we link back this page to same page of feature it's been linked from? And we think about what other links we can employ on these pages.
-
Hi vtmoz,
Are you saying that you don't have a header/footer on these pages? No main navigation? No breadcrumbs?
To me, that sounds like a terrible user experience. What is a user supposed to do when they get to these pages? Click the back button in the browser or manually edit the URL in the address bar?
If you do have a header/footer with navigation links, then it's not a dead end page
Cheers,
David
-
Yes, Dead-end pages are harmful to websites.
Solution 1: It should be optimized to include links to the homepage or some important links to the site.
Solution 2: Use sidebar, footer or banner.
Thanks
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
-
JSON-LD product page markup for multiple currencies?
I haven't found a working example of a single product page with one "Offer" in multiple "priceCurrency" and "price" We have product pages with a single product URL which will offer different prices in different currencies based on the user's IP. Some of the language of the page will be translated based on the IP (this will have href lang tag) but the URL will not change. (We're aware TLD is considered best practice, however, this is not an option at this time.) Is the best option to update the markup based on what the corresponding "country"? I'm uncertain how this may be handled by crawlers. Eg, For the product page https://www.example.com/product1 displaying USD "offers": {
Web Design | | sb1030
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "7.99"} For the product pagehttps://www.example.com/product1 displaying EUR "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "EUR",
"price": "7.50"} Thanks for any input.0 -
Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?
Hi I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google. Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!! Thanks
Web Design | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Is having a site map page necessary?
Hello all! So I know having a sitemap XML file is important to include in your robots.txt file. I also know it is important to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing. However, I am wondering if it is beneficial for your site's SEO value to have a sitemap page displayed on your website? Or is this just a redundant action if you have already done the above two actions with your XML sitemap? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Myles920 -
WordPress Category page title h1 or h2
Hi friends, I know this is a minor technical change, but we are in an extremely competitive market and I don't want to have any points against us. On our WordPress Category pages i.e. http://www.domain.com/category/�tegory-title%/ I looked at the code behind the the Title of the category page, which is "Browsing: %Category Title%" The code is an h2. I look at the posts in the category archive below, and those are also h2's. The theme preview is here and you can click on Entertainment - Reviews to see exactly what I'm referring to - http://themeforest.net/item/smartmag-responsive-retina-wordpress-magazine/full_screen_preview/6652608 I changed the code for the "Browsing: %Category Title%" to h1, which I believe is more consistent and standard formatting. 1. Is this a correct technical on-page optimization? 2. Would it be beneficial to remove "Browsing"?
Web Design | | JustinMurray0 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?
I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking. Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images. It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A. My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A. Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google. My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked. Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?
Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices1 -
Best Practice issue: Modx vs Wordpress
Lately I've been working a lot with Modx to create a new site for our own firm as well for other projects. But so far I haven't seen the advantages for SEO purposes other then the fact that with ModX you can manage almost everything yourself including snippets etc without to much effort. Wordpress is a known factor for blogging and since the last 2 years or so for websites. My question is: Which platform is better suited for SEO purposes? Which should I invest my time in? ModX or Wordpress? Hope to hear your thought on the matter
Web Design | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0