Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
-
Hi There
We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn
The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu?
Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages?
Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
-
Hi OrioleOriole and effectdigital, apologies for the delay, but thank you for your help, we preserved the links in the end.
I've marked your responses as good answers and liked them, thanks again
-
I think you Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page
-
Personally I think it would be wise to preserve those links. A secondary top-of-page menu (maybe hover to expand) would preserve the authority in a similar way, footer links don't really do much in modern SEO
It depends what you want. Maybe it's worth sacrificing some small amount of authority from those pages, to have killer new UX that converts 10x better. Do the math
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Does subdomain hurt SEO on main site
This client sells event management software and puts all their clients on different subdomains of their main domain. Looking in SEO tools like OSE, when I run a backlink analysis, it pulls up all the backlinks to the subdomains as well as those for the main domain. In webmaster tools when I look at queries, impressions and clicks, they get at least 30 times more traffic and impressions on keywords found in their subdomains and very few on their own. In other words, all these tools are providing a collective analysis of main domain and all subdomains. All the backlinks and keywords recorded for those subdomains are not at all relevent to the keywords they want to rank for. For example, their software supports Boy Scouts, so keywords they rank for according to WT include merit badge, scout camp, etc., but of course, that's on the subdomain. As a result, if you were to take a snapshot of their online presence as these tools do, you would think they were a boy scout website and not a software developer if you include the subdomain, along with its PR, backlinks, keywords, etc. So the question I have is, does Google connect all these subdomains with the main domain and then water down the main site with irrelevant keywords, content and backlinks? Or does Google see all those subdomains as completely separate and we don't need to worry or move their clients off their subdomain? I'm worried about Google assigning a "boy scout" relevancy to them. Am I wrong? What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Linking from a corporate site to a brand site.
Is there an SEO impact to a large corporation linking from a corporate and/or a divisional site to a specific brand site with it's own top level domain? We would like to keep the traffic coming, but not if it will be seen as a black hat tactic. My guess is that Google will be smart enough to see that the corporation owns the brand and at least not penalize us, but I am wondering if anyone else has this experience? Google Analytics is calling it self-referral.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrbobland0 -
How can I track traffic source for each user?
We received an enquiry on one of our landing pages and I am trying to track down where that user come from? Whether he came from social networks or search engines and if it is from search engine which keywords he used etc.. Does anyone know if there is any way I could see that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Broken Links from Open Site Explorer
I am trying to find broken internal links within my site. I found a page that was non-existent but had a bunch of internal links pointing to that page, so I ran an Open Site Explorer report for that URL, but it's limited to 25 URLs. Is there a way to get a report of all of my internal pages that link to this invalid URL? I tried using the link: search modifier in Google, but that shows no responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
How can we improve the seo on our site?
Hello everyone. I have been reading through this site for a while and tried to put everything together that I have learned so far. Would any of you mind looking at our site and providing any pointers or areas we can still improve on or areas I completely missed. I appreciate any feedback you can give! Our site is faithology.com Thanks again! Brandon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Google giving me only partial site links?
Hi Guys, My site is #1 ranked for the term "waiting till marriage," but Google only gives me partial site links. See "Forums - Articles - Questions - Videos" links in attached screenshot. How do I get the full, page-dominating, mini-description-having site links? Any suggestions? Note: I've got a ton of content and decent traffic, but I haven't put much time into developing back links yet. I'm a php developer, but I'm new to professional-level SEO. Any help would be hugely appreciated. Also, sorry about the inflammatory nature of the site. It's not a preachy site; it's just a support group. Hope it doesn't offend. partial-sitelinks.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeAM270 -
Advanced Question on Synonym Variation Pages!
Hi, This is quite an advanced question, so I'll go through in detail - please bare with me! I launched the new version of our website exactly a week ago - and all the key metrics are in the right direction: Pages / Visit +5% , Time on Site +25%, Bounce rate down 1 %. I work in an industry were our primary keyword has 4 synonyms and our long tail keywords are location related. So as an example I have primary synonyms like: Holiday, Vacation, Break, Trip (Not actually these but they are good enough as an example). Pluralised versions and you have 8 in total. So my longtail keywords are like: Las Vegas Vacation / Las Vegas Vacations
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
Las Vegas Holiday / Las Vegas Holidays
Las Vegas Trip / Las Vegas Trips
Las Vegas Breaks / Las vegas Breaks All these synonyms effectively mean the same thing, so my thinking on my new website was to specifically target each of these synonyms with their own unique page and optimise the meta and page titles, to those exact words. To make these pages truely unique, I therefore got a bunch of copywriters to write about 600 words unique for every long tail synonym (well over 750,000 words in total!). So now at this point I have my page "Las Vegas Holidays" with 600 unique words of content, and "Las Vegas Vactions" with 600 words of unique content etc etc etc. The problem is, when the user is searching for these words, there primary goal is not to read 600 words of content on "Las Vegas Holidays" - their primary goal is to get a list of last vegas holidays that they can search, view purchase (they may want to read 600 words of content, but is not their primary goal). So this puts me in a dilema - I need to display the nuts and bolt (IE the actual holidays in las vegas) to the customer on any page they land on off my synonyms as the primary content. But to make sure these pages are unique I need to also have this unique content on that page. So here's what I did: On every synonym version of the page I display the exact same information. However, on each page I have a "Information" link. and on click this pop's up a layer which contains my unique content for that page. To further optimise using perfect anchors in this content pop-up, I have cross linked the synonym pages (totally naturally) - IE on my "Las Vegas Holidays" page, in the content I may have the words "Las Vegas Breaks" - this would be linked the the "Las Vegas Breaks" synonym page. In theory I don't think there is anything wrong with what I am doing in the eyes of the customer - but I have a big concern that this may well look "fishy" to SE's. IE the pages are almost identical to the user except for this information pop-up layer of unique content, titles and meta. We know that Google at least can get can tell exactly what the user see's when they land on that page ( from their "Preview") and can distinguise between user visible and hidden text. Therefore, even though from a user experience, I think we are making a page that is perfect for them (they get the list of vactions etc as the primary content, and can read infomation if they want by clicking a button), I am concerned that SE's are going to say - hold on a minute there are load of pages here that are identical except for a chuck of text that is not visible to the user (Even though this is visible to the user if they click the "Information" button), and this content cross links to a load of almost identical pages with the same thing. Today I checked our rankings, and we have taken a fair whack from google - I'm not overly concerned at the moment as I expected big fluctuations from ranking for the first few weeks - but I'd be a lot more confident if they were fluctuating in the right direction!! So what do I do?
As far as I can see my options break down as follows: Content Display:
1/. Keep it as it is, and hope the SE's don't see it as spammy. Even though I think what we are doing is the best for customer experience, I'm concerned SE's won't. 2/. On every synonym page, below all the list of products, packages etc that the customer wants to see, display the unique content as a block of subtext text which is visble by default. This however could make the page a bit ugly. 3/. Display a visible snippet of the unique content, below all the packages, and have a more button which expands the rest of the content - IE have a part visible layer. This is slightly better for display, but again I'm only displaying a portion of visible content and the rest will still be flagged as "hidden" by default to the SE's. Cross Linking within the content:
1/. Keep it as it is where synonym keywords link to the synonym version of the page. 2/. Alter it so that every sysnonym keyword links to the "primary" synonym version of the page - EG if I now "Las Vegas Holidays" is my main keyword, then "Las Vegas Vactions" keyword, would not link to my "Las Vegas Vactions" page as current, but would link to my "Las Vegas Holidays" page. I apologise for the indepth questions, but it requires a lot of explanation to get it across clearly. I would be grateful on any of your thoughts. Many thanks in advance.0