Has anyone ever attempted (successfully or not) to consciously reduce their amount of homepage links in order to improve their search engine rankings?
-
I work for a retail company that is highly segmented. We have a lot of categories to cover the types of merchandise we offer on our home page, and way more than the recommended # of links on our homepage because of it. Has anyone ever attempted (successfully or not) to consciously reduce their amount of links (and categories) in order to improve their search engine rankings? If so, can you walk through your process and your advice on whether or not reducing links on a site like mine is a good idea?
-
Hey Wayne, thank you for the timely and detailed answer to my question! We have pondered the actual effects of reducing homepage links and this clears a lot up! Also, thanks for the link, it has a ton of relevant information. I will bring this up at my next team meeting!
-
Found it - http://seogadget.co.uk/choosing-your-home-page-links-homepage-seo/ (hope its OK dropping a link in a comment).
-
I don't know how helpful this will be but we have recently been quite successful with a similar approach for one of our clients.
When their site was launched it was enjoying good rankings for their core categories and great conversions. Over time a ton of content was added all over the place and the homepage looked like a Xmas tree with the links, baubles and buttons on it. After about a year they started to slip and revenue on the core categories was dropping like a lead canary.
We got called in, asked them to be brutally honest about the importance of each category and created a hierarchy for them to sign off on. Once we had that we removed the non-critical links from both the homepage and the main nav, relegating them to sub-menus. We also cleaned up a whole bunch of other stuff that really should have been caught earlier.
The end result was an average 35% increase in conversions on the core categories within a month. Interestingly the "secondary" categories I thought we were possible sacrificing didn't suffer at all - most also saw modest increases.
Check Richard Baxter's posts - he is brilliant at this sort of thing and I'm sure he had something recently on choosing your homepage links in one of his presentations. You might be better off stepping back and following his approach from scratch to see what really needs to be there.
Hope this is of some help.
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
-
Google rankings
I have encountered a serious problem with google rankings and the sequence of events goes like this for a high volume phrase. I make changes to the page which gets a score of 98 in Moz and equally good scores in other tools. I resubmit the page to Google for searching via crawl in google webmasters. After about 1/2 to 1 day, the page will be ranked between 30 and 50. Within another 1/2 to 1 day, the ranking goes completely away. This page has much higher scores than pages that are ranked. Other phrases continue to rank OK.
On-Page Optimization | | tiedyedshop0 -
Google Page Rank has no any rankings as of now. what to do?
my domain and page authority is working well right now but my Google Page Rank has no any rankings as we speak. What to do now? can some of you give me advice on this? Thank you very much in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Panoramictrip0 -
Disavowed links, updated website etc - still no ranking improvements
Hi, Could anyone take a look at www.artificialgrass4u.co.uk - a few years ago it used to rank highly for 'artificial grass' ... then when Google rolled out its algorithms punishing websites with poor links it lost all it's rankings. We've disavowed almost all of the bad links, and have been adding new optimised content etc over the past few months but rankings still haven't improved. Is there anything I'm missing? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | icansee0 -
Competitor rank
Hi We have been doing SEO on one of our properties for 4 years now. We had a new competitor jump in and is now ranking above us within 6 months. I verified various parameters including link backs/etc. but cannot see as to why Google would rank them above our page despite us following all ethical SEO practices/updating content etc. Do you guys have an experience/thoughts on this? P
On-Page Optimization | | Parvesh0 -
Footer-links (navigation)
I want to put navigation links in my footer. I watched the (distilled) whiteboard friday video saying it can be a penalty. How are links in the footer different from links in the navigation. Why don't you get "hit" for putting the word "Real Estate Listings" in the navigation menu? It appears on every one of the 30k pages. I don't get why the links in the footer would have a negative effect if the links in the navigation don't. My example is a real estate website. When people are browsing properties (30k), it is convenient that at the end of the page there is a navigation of areas. I could put the navigation on the sidebar but that would be in essence, the same thing. A wordpress site would dynamically include that sidebar on every page.
On-Page Optimization | | JML11790 -
No Content on home page + rankings
If a home page has no content will it hurt the sites ability to rank? The interior pages will have content but not the home page. (See attached image) My client does not want content on the home page as he feels it will take away from the look and feel he wants to achieve. This website is actually 10 sites or locations in one as we intend to market each location (a total of 10) separately. In reality the home page is a doorway page to each separate location. I'd like feedback if possible as to the necessity or not, of content on the Home Page of this or any website. Will the lack of content hurt on the Homer Page hurt with SEO? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | fun52dig
Gary Downey bobby-vans.jpg0 -
Homepage ranking before optimized page
We finally managed to obtain a spot in the first 10 positions of the serps for our main keyword. Since a week, our homepage started ranking in the top 15 as well, so we we're pretty excited about that. On our way to dominate the top 10! Since 2 days we started to rank with our homepage before our optimized page, which sucks because the metadescription (made up by Google) isn't helping our CTR. Is there a way that we can show Google that the other page is more relevant than the homepage? Or do we have to wait until we have build up enough PA to switch places with the homepage (seems unlikely to me).
On-Page Optimization | | duoweb0 -
Ranking Issues Recently Popping Up
We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff. Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor. The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause. I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion. Domain: bonitaj.com My Thoughts On Possible Issues... 1. Text Content & Panda Update I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content. I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content. Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy. THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text. Do you think this is hurting us? THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages. 2. Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured. I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages. Do you think this is hurting us? I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic. In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages? 3. Lack of a sitemap? We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore. We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools. I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank? IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0