Link juice distributed to too many pages. Will noindex,follow fix this?
-
We have an e-commerce store with around 4000 product pages. Although our domain authority is not very high (we launched our site in February and now have around 30 RD's) we did rank on lots of long tail terms, and generated around 8000 organic visits / month.
Two weeks ago we added another 2000 products to our existing catalogue of 2000 products, and since then our organic traffic dropped significantly (more than 50%).
My guess is that link juice has been distributed to too many pages, causing rankings to drop on overall. I'm thinking about noindexing 50% of the product pages (the ones not receiving any organic traffic). However, I am not sure if this will lead to more link juice for the remaining 50% of the product pages, or not.
So my question is: if I noindex,follow page A, will 100% of the linkjuice go to page B INSTEAD of page A, or will just a part of the link juice flow to page B (after flowing through page A first)?
Hope my question is clear
P.s. We have a Dutch store, so the traffic drop is not a Panda issue
-
Has the number of pages indexed changed? Specifically, do you have a sitemap and have you looked at what GWT is reporting for number of pages indexed? Maybe some of your pages dropped out of the index and that's why you're not getting as much traffic?
Also, do a quick look at your pages and make sure something silly didn't happen when the products were added, like a rel canonical setting everything to the home page, or 5000 items suddenly getting a noindex, or your analytics program suddenly being stripped from some of your pages and that's why you're missing visits.
-
it will follow the link and pass juice, however it just won't be indexed and therefore not show in the SERPs.
Page A will therefore pass juice (using its follow) to any pages linking off it.So if Page A links to Page Z, juice from X will page through A to Z (being diluted by A)
-
Hi Richard,
I didn't mean nofollow, but noindex,follow. Imagine this situation:
Page A has noindex,follow
Page B has index,follow
Page X has 1 internal link to page A and 1 internal link to page B
Will the linkjuice from page X divide between page A and page B? Or will page B get all the juice (since page A is not indexed?).
Thanks,
Stefan
-
If you have 10 links and 5 are no-follow, only the remaining 5 will pass juice.
-
Great tips regarding deeplinking and link distribution, thanks for that. However, I am still wondering what happens with link juice that is sent to a page with noindex,follow. Will all juice go to an indexed page instead, or will part of the juice go to the noindexed page (and get lost)?
-
Yes, rankings have dropped sitewide (according to SEOmoz web app). Unfortunately I don't have CTR data.
-
Do you have a history of;
1. Rankings
2. Impressions and CTR (Google Webmaster Tools)
-
Directories allows you to target deeper pages, so I would start with some strong sites there. If you run a clothing store, then target some deep links into Shoes, Mens Clothing, Outdoor, etc.
-
a) to EGOL's point, I would get more juice by obtaining more links from high quality sites. I like getting Facebook LIKE icons on each product as well as ShareThis so that you, as well as others, can share the products socially. (share through the ShareThis and using the LIKE button on the page shows others who are visiting that people are interacting with the product and encourages them to do so also).
a1) When building links, try to get good link into the product category pages and not all to the home page. If the deeper you go, the juice gets diluted, build strong inbound links to deeper pages.
b) I would evaluate how your juice is distributed on the site. perhaps you are diluting your juice too much by the time it reaches the products.
-
Thanks. We are of course working on more link juice, but it will take time unfortunately
Here's some data (all organic):
Traffic
May 1-15: 2.900
June 1-15: 1.600Landingpages
May 1-15: 750
June 1-15: 530Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 2.000
June 1-15: 1.300And i've broken it further down into short vs long tail (1-2 word phrases and 3+ word phrases):
SHORT TAIL
Traffic
May 1-15: 1.400
June 1-15: 1.000Landingpages
May 1-15: 550
June 1-15: 400Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1.000
June 1-15: 700LONG TAIL
Traffic
May 1-15: 1.500
June 1-15: 600Landingpages
May 1-15: 200
June 1-15: 130Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1000
June 1-15: 600As you can see, both the number of traffic sending keywords and landing pages have dropped significantly for both short and long tail terms. These really seems like a sitewide trend and followed shortly after we doubled the number of product pages. According to Google Trends and our supplier there's no noticable drop in search volumes or orders (this is a product that's been sold throughout the year).
How would you act upon this?
-
I agree with Dan. Let this go for a while to see what happens.
... more important.... before I went to tearing up the site I would go get more linkjuice.
-
Hi!
I would be very careful about guessing what caused the drop in traffic to begin with, before you go adding noindexes everywhere.
Try to find a correlation to the drop in traffic. Did rankings drop? CTR? Amount of brand searches? What type of organic traffic dropped, long-tail or head terms? Also, you may want to compare the amount of unique visitors compared to the past and check the amount of new visits compared to the past.
I'd investigate a little more before taking action.
-Dan
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
-
Does "google selected canonical" pass link juice the same as "user selected canonical"?
We are in a bit of a tricky situation since a key top-level page with lots of external links has been selected as a duplicate by Google. We do not have any canonical tag in place. Now this is fine if Google passes the link juice towards the page they have selected as canonical (an identical top-level page)- does anyone know the answer to this question? Due to various reasons, we can't put a canonical tag ourselves at this moment in time. So my question is, does a Google selected canonical work the same way and pass link juice as a user selected canonical? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Lewald10 -
How to fix Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’
Hi I recently discovered Google has stopped crawling/indexing my post.
Technical SEO | | Favplug
So i had to check my Search console then i saw this Coverage issues saying “Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’”. And anytime I tried Requesting Indexing For the affected pages, Its tells me “Indexing request rejected”. Here is my site URL: http://bit.ly/2kfqTEv Here is one of the affected pages http://bit.ly/39aMenJ0 -
Too Many Page Links
I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement. So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content. Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase. Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites. Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows. This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Campaign shows 5,000 warnings from shared database feed, made pages no-follow and no-index, are we OK now?
One of our campaigns shows 5,000 warnings for dup content, meta descriptions, and urls. This is from a xml database feed that is shared throughout the industry. We made the pages no-follow and no-index, but on Moz crawl still get the warnings. No warnings on Webmaster tools. Should we ignore these warnings and are we OK now, or is there more work to do?
Technical SEO | | geilt0 -
Why would a link shown on OSE appear differently than the page containing the link?
I recently traded links with a site that I will call www.example.com When I used open site explorer to check the link it came back with a different page authority as www.example.com/index.htm yet the link does appear on the www.example.com page. Why would this be?
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Linking from other language websites passes juice or not?
If i get links from websites with different language than english - has the same sort of field (business type) ... will that pass juice or not? Is it worth linking or not?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0 -
Which version of pages should I build links to?
I'm working on the site www.qualityauditor.co.uk which is built in Moonfruit. Moonfruit renders pages in Flash. Not ideal, I know, but it also automatically produces an HTML version of every page for those without Flash, Javascript and search engines. This HTML version is fairly well optimised for search engines, but sits on different URLs. For example, the page you're likely to see if browsing the site is at http://www.qualityauditor.co.uk/#/iso-9001-lead-auditor-course/4528742734 However, if you turn Javascript off you can see the HTML version of the page here <cite>http://www.qualityauditor.co.uk/page/4528742734</cite> Mostly, it's the last version of the URL which appears in the Google search results for a relevant query. But not always. Plus, in Google Webmaster Tools fetching as Googlebot only shows page content for the first version of the URL. For the second version it returns HTTP status code and a 302 redirect to the first version. I have two questions, really: Will these two versions of the page cause my duplicate content issues? I suspect not as the first version renders only in Flash. But will Google think the 302 redirect for people is cloaking? Which version of the URL should I be pointing new links to (bearing in mind the 302 redirect which doesn't pass link juice). The URL's which I see in my browser and which Google likes the look at when I 'fetch as Googlebot'. Or those Google shows in the search results? Thanks folks, much appreciated! Eamon
Technical SEO | | driftnetmedia0