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
-
Blog issue broken link
Taking Great Photographs Underwater May 25, 2015 By sdwellers@aol.com No comments yet florida keys, key largo diving Excuse my ignorance, I suspect this is an easy issue...but at the the top of each of my blog posts have what you see above....the "No Comments yet" tab is showing as a broken link 404 error...?Why? And how to fix?Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | sdwellers0 -
Overnight Drop In Rankings
Over the last size eight weeks we have been doing all of our own SEO with the help of reading this forum and asking questions, prior to this we had an SEO company from India who were only doing articles and promoting them. We have been using various keywords by writing them into our own blogs, to check how we have been doing I have monitored two main keywords, when we started, our choice keyword was on page three, on Monday it had moved up to number one on page two, today it is now back on page three, have we been hit by the Penquin update, if so would I have received a warning in WMT, a lot of my other keywords across the site have moved down although some have moved up, we are retailers not SEO experts so it is a big blow to move down when everyone has worked hard, looking at some pages I do have some pages that look as though they have been keyword stuffed, I have altered some of them to see if anything changes, I have also look at some of the links but how do I know if I am doing the right thing?
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Canoncial tag for homepage?
I have a site that gets most of it's traffic from one keyword combination, but I've noticed lately that instead of sending people to the homepage, it's sending people to an internal page. This isn't a problem, except for the fact that all the best link juice and domain authority has been directed at the homepage. There's not a lot of content on the homepage, so is it worth setting up a canonical tag on the homepage for this internal page to ensure that the page authority/link juice helps to boost this page that is already being indexed for the keyword?
On-Page Optimization | | Bigheadigital0 -
When should I dofollow a link?
I know I should have all my affiliate links as nofollow but when should I dofollow a link? When will it HELP me to have a dofollow link? Right now - all my links are nofollow because I haven't figured out how to have nofollow and dofollow in the same blog post. Any info appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Too Many On-Page Links error
Hello, I am new to this. The crawl of y website reveals that "Too Many On-Page Links" were found on many pages of the website. However, when I check those pages, not more than 5 links are found- I have not included links outside of the post (sidebar/comments/related posts - are these counted in the crawl report ?). I do use SEO SmartLinks Plugin where in some keywords point to Wordpress Categories but am not sure whether that could be the problem at all. Can someone guide what the issue could be and how to debug ?
On-Page Optimization | | sradhey0 -
Search form another country
I am searching from india. what is the way so that i can search as if i am searching from US ? OR UK ?
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
How do I avoid cannibalization and point search engines to the correct page?
Currently this page ranks for the phrase "keep calm and carry on" http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/item/Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On-Bandages/3307.010/413160.html This page is just one product of many in the Keep Calm category. I'd rather this page be the result: http://www.paper-source.com/cgi-bin/paper/gifts/keep-calm-and-carry-on.html seomoz states: "To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text." So obviously I should remove the link from the product detail page, but what other things can I do to get the category page to rank higher than the one product page? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | leighw0
