SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
-
-
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links?
-
Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be?
thank yoyu
-
-
Agreed. Thanks Cody.
-
If it had a good reason to be there, and you had a decent link profile, then you are probably safe. Even so, I'd say try to limit them to relevant pages.
The real question, though, is how much traffic is driving? If it is driving a lot of good traffic that converts, then you pretty much have to leave it there.
-
Cody, I would like to hear your opinion, but in Kristian's case, I would not think removing these site wide links would be a good idea, unless the links are spammy. Especially if the website has a good reason to be there (ex: it is a good resource, it is a sponsor, it si the parent company, etc.). As long as not all of the links in Kristian's backlink profile are site wide, I wouldn't link the website is at risk of a penalty. Also, I would not think removing a site wide link on an .edu site would be a good idea, just becuase all of the referral traffic potential.
Like I said, the site wide penalty seemed more geared to a web designer or hosting company that only have site wide links in their profile.
Cody, what do you think?
-
Even prior to reading that I would agree with your analysis. 2 links from separate domains are better than 2 links from the same root domain.
-
This article talks about a website that received the Penguin penalty, and was able to start recovering by reducing the amount of site wide links: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2180722/Google-Penguin-1.1-Pushed-Out-As-Some-Sites-Report-Recovery
"A) Remove all of the crap sitewide links, weird anchors first, B) continue building good links and C) take advantage of press by pinging Danny Sullivan to try and get it featured on SEL to get in front of Google. Obviously A) was not going to be completely possible so I was going for "remove most of your crappy links."
So, I do believe that site wide links are bad, and that it would be better to limit the number of links. Also, here is a reference about the diminishing returns on several links from one domain: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-link-based-spam-analysis-techniques
"The first link from a domain carries the first vote and getting additional links from one particular domain will continue to increase the total value from a domain, but only to a point. Eventually inbound links from the same domain will continue to experience diminishing returns. Going from 1 link to 3 links from a domain will have more of an effect than 101 links to 103 links."
-
Kristian,
There is not really a downside to having a link on multiple page's of a website. You just can't expect all of these links to be counted a independent,and equal to a website with a link profile that has a wide variety of linking root domains.
I would not recommend removing any links on these website. I would just focus your time on getting links from other of root domains.
-
Here is a recent article in published in Search Engine Journal about subdomains and subpages, as they relate to SEO:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-or-subfolders-which-are-better-for-seo/6849/
It looks like Cody is right, Google does recognize them has seperate, but a recent tweak in Google's algorithim, now cause them to be recognized as being associated with each other.
I would think that this means a link from a subdoamin and a root domain would not be equal to two links from two different root domains.
Cody, thanks for you insight, and I would love to hear what you think?
-
- it sounds like you think there could be downside in having this many links. Again, it is from a main tab on their homepage, and since the main tabs follow on all pages, so does my website link. I understand if the site linked to my site from different locations (main tab, in article, footer etc etc) that looks odd. But since it is from a main tab that creates thousands of links I can't understand why that could be a negative.
-
-
To answer your first question, it does count all the links. However, there is a massive diminishing return for anything over 2 links on one site. So, having 1,000 links from one site would not be beneficial. Instead, have them change it so you get one link on their top two pages, and none anywhere else. You can use Opensiteexplorer.org and the top landing pages tab to find which two pages to request a link from.
-
A sub-domain is a separate site, and would therefor have its own ranking ecosystem. Even a www.abc.edu is a sub-domain of abc.edu. So, getting a link from a sub-domain would be as beneficial, everything else being equal, as getting it from the root domain. Just make sure it's just a link or two, and not site wide like you suggested you currently have.
-
-
thank you. This does make sense and I appreciate the insight. I am still curious if anyone may have even more specific insight on the matter. It would be interesting to know how much the SEO value gets reduced in both cases
-
These links do not count as 1,000 links from 1,000 seperate website, since Google does recognize linking root domains.
The most important link to your website would be from the page with the highest page authority, which is almost always the home page.
I am not 100% sure, but I remember reading about a recent Google algorithm update that targets multiple links from one domain. Web design firms were affected, since they typcally sign the footer, which creates a link on every page of the website.
The subdomain, works similar to a subpage. Google will notice the root dominan, which is abc.edu.
I do not think you are at risk of a penalty or anything like that, but if you want to continue to increase your rankings, once you get a link from a domain, I would focus my efforts on getting another link from a separate root domain, instead of a link from a subpage or subdomain from the same root domain.
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
-
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
Can I Use Multiple rel="alternate" Tags on Multiple Domains With the Same Language?
Hoping someone can answer this for me, as I have spent a ton of time researching with no luck... Is there anything misleading/wrong with using multiple rel="alternate" tags on a single webpage to reference multiple alternate versions? We currently use this tag to specify a mobile-equivalent page (mobile site served on an m. domain), but would like to expand so that we can cover another domain for desktop (possibly mobile in the future). In essence: MAIN DOMAIN would get The "Other Domain" would then use Canonical to point back to the main site. To clarify, this implementation idea is for an e-commerce site that maintains the same product line across 2 domains. One is homogeneous with furniture & home decor, which is a sub-set of products on our "main" domain that includes lighting, furniture & home decor. Any feedback or guidance is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LampsPlus0 -
SEO Consult?
Is there anyone here that I can pay to give me a deep analysis of my website and my competitors with recommendation on what to do? I am a small business and I cannot afford expensive monthly SEO fees. I can probably afford a one time consult fee, then I can do the work myself. Or maybe I can pay a-la cart for some of the fixes. I understand this may not be something SEOs want to do since they make their money off doing the work and may not want to share trade secrets. I just thought I would throw that question out there. I've been working on trying to SEO my site for a year now... I was improving and happy with my progress until October and lost 30 positions over my tracked keywords. I have no idea why. I'm kind of at my wits end! 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
International SEO Domain Structure
Hi Guys, I am wondering if anybody can point me to a recent trusted report or study on international domain name structure and SEO considerations. I am looking to read up on the SEO considerations and recommendations for the different domain structures in particular using sub-directories i.e. domain.com/uk, domain.com/fr. Kind regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeAreContinuum
Cian1 -
I have a question regarding parking good value domain.
I have a question regarding parking good value domain. A client has a great website 'A' with page rank of 5 and a lot of traffic. They want to change the URL and redesign the site. So they have parked the domain 'A' and will later redirect it to the new domain, this will be in a month time. My questions is, by parking the old domain 'A' would they have lost its SEO value or will it be given to the new URL once they place a 301 redirect on it. Also, would it not have been better not to park domain 'A', keep it live and just redirect it once new domain goes live, notifying Google in Webmaster tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrangeGuys0 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0 -
What is the best practice when a client is setting up multiple sites/domains
I have a client that is creating separate websites to be used for different purposes. What is the best practice here with regards to not looking spammy. i.e. do the domains need to registered with different companies? hosted on different servers, etc? Thanks in advance for your response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-1718030