Links to category pages unnatural?
-
If people are linking to your site, it would seem natural that the vast majority of those links would point to the homepage, product page, or a article/content page.
Let's say you have 100 links pointing to your site, and 40 of them are pointing to category pages. Would this seem unnatural?
Does Google or other search engines have a way of determining this as a factor in ascertaining whether the links are natural or not?
Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to the pages that are linked to on your site?
-
From 100 links, 40 pointing categories looks ok for me.
Google is against link building practices and follows such practice ( PENGUIN ), so if you want to do link building and not get caught, you need to build a very natural link profile:
- Anchors: Do not use the exacly keyword you want to rank as anchor, instead use long sentences including your kw.
- Variety: Do not get just "keyword" links, links with url, branch are also important.
- Nofollow: It´s very important to include nofollow links in your link profile.
- **Footer/sidebar: **Avoid links from footer/sidebar, specially if they are nofollow.
- **Variety of domains: **Get your links from different domains.
- Avoid links fromk penalized websites: It´s also very important to analyze the domains your site is going to be linked are healthy enough.Fore more complete information, checkout this article: http://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building
-
It doesn't really matter which pages of your site have links going to them, including category pages. There's a few things to watch out for regarding unnatural inbound links and they're listed below in order of priority, however any of the below points will cause you issues if you abuse them.
- The main one to watch out for is an over optimized anchor text profile.
- The second thing to watch is the type of inbound links you have. Are they all the same type of links such as directory links or blog comments etc.
- The third thing to watch out for is your inbound link velocity. Is that category page getting new inbound links at 5 x the velocity of everyone else's sites in your niche.
If all your links are from diverse and (reasonably) reputable sources, and your inbound anchor text profile isn't over optimized, then you could have hundreds of links pointing to your category pages without an issue. If a big brand suddenly released a whole new range of merchandise then their category page/s would acquire 1000's of links without an issue.
Feel free to build links to any page you want to rank, just make sure they're good links. I also hope that your category page has it's onsite Seo is up to scratch. Having all of your meta data, heading tags, and content up to scratch will go a long way and it'll help you to get the most power out of your inbound links too. Hope this helps a little.
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
-
Too many "nofollow" outgoing links are Okay?
Hi all, Our forum have so many discussions and topics where our users leave their websites and oter URLs which will be marked "nofollow" by default. Beside spammy websites, is that Okay to have so many "nofollow" outgoing links? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google Adding / Manipulating Page Meta Titles?
We have a client who is experiencing some heavy google modification to the title tags being displayed on the search engine. It is adding "- 0 Reviews" to an ecommerce site. Obviously a bad start. There were no instances of these keywords anywhere on any of these pages, header tag or otherwise (on only a handful of the affected pages there was a single commented out image with an alt tag 0 reviews - but it was commented out and since removed) We have attempted to rewrite the title multiple times and it will modify the title but still include the non-relevant addition. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this?
Algorithm Updates | | Spindle0 -
Duplicate pages in language versions, noindex in sitemap and canonical URLs in sitemap?
Hi SEO experts! We are currently in the midst of reducing our amount of duplicate titles in order to optimize our SEO efforts. A lot of the "duplicate titles" come from having several language versions of our site. Therefore, I am wondering: 1. If we start using "" to make Google (and others) aware of alternative language versions of a given site/URL, how big a problem will "duplicate titles" then be across our domains/site versions? 2. Is it a problem that we in our sitemap include (many) URL's to pages that are marked with noindex? 3. Are there any problems with having a sitemap that includes pages that includes canonical URL's to other pages? Thanks in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | TradingFloor.com0 -
How do I control the "link-tree" part of the SERP results?
Hey Mozanarians 🙂 Is there a way to change the pages that are shown on the "link tree"? (e.g. see bellow picture)
Algorithm Updates | | DanielBernhardt
Lets say that I dont want the "career" page to show on the "link tree" can I do that? Thanks and lots of love!
Daniel Bernhardt BLo9KSr.jpg0 -
Why do we have so many pages scanned by bots (over 250,000) and our biggest competitors have about 70,000? Seems like something is very wrong.
We are trying to figure out why last year we had a huge (80%) and sudden (within two days) drop in our google searches. The only "outlier" in our site that we can find is a huge number of pages reported in MOZ as scanned by search engines. Is this a problem? How did we get so many pages reported? What can we do to bring the number of searched pages back to a "normal" level? BT
Algorithm Updates | | achituv0 -
When did Google include display results per page into their ranking algorithm?
It looks like the change took place approx. 1-2 weeks ago. Example: A search for "business credit cards" with search settings at "never show instant results" and "50 results per page", the SERP has a total of 5 different domains in the top 10 (4 domains have multiple results). With the slider set at "10 results per page", there are 9 different domains with only 1 having multiple results. I haven't seen any mention of this change, did I just miss it? Are they becoming that blatant about forcing as many page views as possible for the sake of serving more ads?
Algorithm Updates | | BrianCC0 -
Google Page Rank?
We have had a quality website for 12 years now, and it seems no matter how many more links we get and how much new content we add daily, we have stayed at PR3 for the past 10 years or so. Our SEOMoz domain authority is 52. We have over 950,000 pages linking to us from 829 unique root domains. Is this in line with PR3 or should we be approaching PR4 soon? We do daily blog posts with all unique, fresh quality content that has not been published elsewhere. We try to do everything with 'white hat' methods, and we are constantly trying to provide genuine content and high quality products, and customer service. How can we improve our PR and how important is PR today?
Algorithm Updates | | applesofgold0 -
Using ™ and ® in page titles
Is it bad to use registered trademark symbols in page titles? Does this somehow hurt in search rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | mlentner0