Old massive site, should I nofollow all out going links?
-
The company I work for is in the process of rebuilding our entire website profile.
Our biggest site, FrenchQuarter.com ranks pretty well for our main term "French Quarter Hotels" And we use that to drive business directly to our hotel businesses. The site is very old and one I inherited, rebuilding it won't be a priority for another 9 months or so. This site act's as a bit of a directory for the city. There are links everywhere and it's probably passing link juice to a lot of businesses scott free.
In the mean time would it benefit or hurt us if I went through and no-followed most of the links? Would nofollowing links help frenchquarter.com to rank any better than it does? And could I then direct some of that link juice directly at our hotel websites to boost those as well?
My goal is to get our hotel websites to rank 1st page, we get exposure in the locations pack, for 2 of our 5 hotels, but placing below that is impossible with all the competition from the OTA's (expecia, bookit.com, etc) Seems near impossible no matter what my backlink profile looks like.
Thanks for any feedback,
Cyril
-
Awesome - Good Luck!
-
Vizergy,
Thanks for your input. I am definitely aware of the way our on page SEO sucks at the moment. Like I said in opening I inherited this beast about 6 months ago. Our rankings didn't suffer at all through panda and penguin, so I've left it alone, we actually got a boost from it.
This site is a total cluster f**k at the moment, and like I said we are scheduled to over haul it in about 9 months. It's built on a make-shift cms that's integrated with travelocity in some twisted way. It generates some affiliate revenue for us, but the focus is on our brick and mortar businesses. With the summer being a slow time for our industry in this area. I was contemplating a few ways to boost our physical businesses by leveraging this site.
I'm going to take your advice and do a bit of on-page clean up for our hotels section.
Thanks
-
Hi Cyril,
As an SEO that specializes in hotels, and has for years, I thought I would share a bit of experience with you. I can not stress the importance of On Page SEO in our industry. Links are, of course, important, but On Page can not be ignored. I hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of quickly going through your site and I have some suggestions that I believe will help you to achieve the rankings you are looking for. Each page of your website should have a clear and definite focus i.e. the focus for the hotels page should obviously be French Quarter Hotels etc... the page's focus needs to be reflected in each page's Title, Description, alt text, H1 and all through out the content. No pages should have the same title or description (they all appear to be the same right now). Unless you are using the keyword tags for internal reporting (we do) you should drop them. If you do use them clean them up (right now the terms in them are far too broad and there are far to many). Internal linking should be structured to flow for the user etc... just basic stuff. With your current link profile and the age of your site a good on page clean up should be all you need.
Good Luck!
-
Hey Chenzo thanks for the reply as well,
In the grand scheme of things I would just like to leverage what we already have from sites we own. If I can squeeze out a bit more link juice by no following competitors, I think that makes sense.
-
I think the keyword here is variation.
If the ONLY links you have that are followed to sites you are trying to help benefit and nofollow everything else.
No bueno.
I have started to see - if it doesn't make sense, it probably won't rank.
-
They are being weasels.
They are willing to link to you but they don't want to help power your site.
-
Majority of large name brands have nofollow on their sites mainly because its not manageable. Think about all these pages and posts they would have to filter and remove and say ok this should follow and this should nofollow.
They don't benefit from it, so they just nofollow all of it. However, I thin TP has a blog or top ten list sometimes, which then they would have a follow link.
This is the majority for most large sites/companies.
-
Thanks for the response EGOL,
I notice our hotels get a lot of backlinks from tripadvisor, of course they are all no follow links. Is tripadvisor communicating that to google as well? A major brand with healthy PA telling google, "we know these guys are who they say they are, but we don't trust them with our brand name"?
-
The last public statement on how pagerank works on nofollowed links from Matt Cutts is....
"Pagerank on a nofollowed link does not pass to the target site, instead it simply evaporates. So, if you nofollow the link, your site will gain nothing and the target site will gain nothing." What you really communicate is.... "they paid us!".... or ... "we don't trust them".
Of course google could change their mind about how they do this and they could have changed it already and not told anybody.
-
Theoretically it should benefit you if you nofollow those links based on the fact that you are giving them juice.
Putting follow links to your own hotels will indeed help the rankings because it is a more authoritative link rather than a nofollow link.
Also, because Bookit and Expedia rank better, it doesn't mean you can't have a more captivating title and description. If you are ranking near the others, you can easily just put more attractive titles to get the user's attention.
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
-
Moving from no follow to follow links on our eCommerce site
Hi everyone, I recently taken on an SEO eCommerce account and found that all the footer links have a no follow attribute. I've requested that the no follow tags be removed as the pages are quite valuable (about us, finance, recycling, help centre etc). I've been asked what the risks are and all I can think of is a slightly increased number of pages for Google to Crawl. Are there any other risks you can think of? Does anyone have experience around making this type of change? For benefits, I believe that it will make our content look more trustworthy to Google and help with traffic through to those pages in the SERPs. Any other pros you can think of will be a great help.
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Do you still loose 15% of value of inbound links when you redirect your site from http to https (so all inbound links to http are being redirected to https version)?
I know when you redesign your on website, you loose about 15% internally due to the 301 redirects (see moz article: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/accidental-seo-tests-how-301-redirects-are-likely-impacting-your-brand), but I'm wondering if that also applies to value of inbound links when you redirect your http://www.sitename.com to https://www.sitename.com. I appreciate your help!
Technical SEO | | JBMediaGroup0 -
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
Site Blacklisted
Good morning. Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware. It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted. I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again. I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc. I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords. I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take? Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing? Thanks
Technical SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
Site rebuild without HTML extension = broken links?
I have a client and his site is pure HTML. He made huge amount of link building with some hundreds of links point to example.com/target.HTML Now we decided to use WordPress with the same site structure. If we use the exact same URLs but without the HTML ending will it cause broken links? Is there any best practice for this kind of change? Many thanks for any idea!
Technical SEO | | seozoltan0 -
Site links show spam
Hi folks, I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al. I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware. I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Should I ask third pages to erase their links pointing at my site?
Good Morning Seomoz Fans, let me explain what is going on: A surfing site has included a link to my Site in their Footer. apparently, this could be good for my site, but as It has nothing to do with my site, I ask myself if I should tell them to erase it. Site A (Surfing Site) is pointing at Site B (Marketing Site) on their Footer. So Site B is receiving backlinks from every single page on Site A. But Site B has nothing to do with Site A: Different Markets. Should I ask them to erase the link on their footer as Surfing people will not find my Marketing Site interesting? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Best cross linking strategy for micro sites?
Hi Guys. I created a micro site (A design showcase gallery) away from the main website to attract a lot of links in my space from competitors. It works so well it has become a valuable resource in my industry and I believe I will keep it running and adding content to it. Is the best SEO strategy for the main site simply to link from each page to the main site? Or should I be looking at something else? Thanks, Alan
Technical SEO | | spoiltchild0