Too Many Links Explode Upon Upgrade
-
We upgraded our CMS system in September and then had an explosion of new errors appearing in SEOMOZ.
Most concerning was the too many links area. Our main site is www.thenorrisgroup.com. Many of the links on the page are set up as no follows and nothing else changed so I don't understand why it's tracking differently all of a sudden. Any ideas?
-
Hi Aaron,
Have you been able to sort this out, or are you still looking for some help?
-
You should definitely remove the NoFollow tag. That is a separate issue from the "too many links" warning. I noticed it because you specifically mentioned you had added the NF tag to links.
With respect to the change, it is possible some of your links were previously not crawlable due to the site design. It is also possible your CMS is adding extra links as well. The only way to know for sure is to perform a thorough analysis of all links on the page. SEOmoz shows your home page has 125 links. In my experience the tool is quite accurate.
When I performed a quick scan of the page, I noticed 75 links visually. I would suggest checking the HTML of your home page and account for every link. Either I am missing something or you have a lot of links which are not visible. For example links contained in
<noscript>tags can cause this problem.</p></noscript>
-
I am so discouraged. Why would it change all of a sudden? It was fine and then it just exploded. Did SEOMOZ change the way they were tracking certain issues?
So bottom line I should take the NF off.
-
Ryan is correct; you cannot control the flow of PageRank or link juice around your site using the NF attribute, and, in general, it is not a "best SEO practice" to use the nofollow attribute on your own site links. If you would prefer the search engine to not index a page, it is far better to prohibit the crawl of that page via your robots.txt file.
Unless you are selling links (or trying to prohibit spam in blog comments, perhaps) I would not use the nofollow on a site. Why would I put a link on my site that I don't trust? I don't think I want to send that message to Google.
-
Hi Aaron,
A few things to know about your links:
1. The SEOmoz flag for "too many links" on a page is triggered when you offer 101+ links. In reality, there is no magical number whereby 100 links is ok and 101 is bad. It is a judgment call involving numerous factors and can vary per site.
2. Overall I find the number of links offered on your home page to be fine. Your site's DA of 43 can support 125 links if they are all necessary. Your sidebar and content links look good. I would suggest evaluating your navigation menu and footer menu in Google Analytics. There is a tool which allows you to see which links are used and how often. If you find links which are not used (footer links have very low usage normally) then you may wish to consider removing them.
In the end, if you research the matter and determine your links are necessary and valued by visitors then you can leave them and disregard the warning.
3. In your case, the flag is a good thing because it allowed this conversation which will be helpful. Specifically, it is a VERY bad idea to nofollow your internal links in the manner that has happened on your site. Many people think if they "nofollow" a link, the link is ignored by search engines. That is not the case.
Adding the nofollow tag to a link means you do not trust the link. You still lose link juice. It can be confusing so I will share a couple examples:
Case 1 - you offer 100 links on a page. All links are followed. Each link receives roughly 1% of link juice (1/100). In reality there are a couple other factors such as link decay and link location, but they are not relevant to this conversation.
Case 2 - you offer 100 links on a page. 50 links are nofollowed. Each of the remaining links still only receive 1% of link juice (1/100). The 50 nofollow links still have link juice flow to them, but rather then that juice being passed on to the target page, it evaporates.
As a general rule, do not ever no follow any internal links. There can be some minor exceptions but you are far better off never using nofollow on an internal link then ever misusing nofollow on any internal links. For external links, only use nofollow if you do not trust the target site.
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
-
Google Parsing jQuery Links as Real Links
While trying to diagnose a recent Google penalty I found out that links were being parsed by Google even though they were made using jQuery. I had the linkify plugin on my site and configured it to convert URLs to links on all of my pages. Today I found links to other sites of mine from sites that should not have been linking to them and found that the links came from pages whose links were generated via jQuery. This makes me wonder, how do I know if Google is counting javascript generated links? Is it possible that my native ad widgets are creating links that Google might count? Since I don't own any of the sites that advertise via the widgets I don't know how to tell if they are getting link juice or not. It used to be that Google didn't parse javascript, so you could add as many links to your site via javascript as you wanted without being seen by Google as linking to those sites. Does anyone know of a jQuery plugin that does turn URLs into clickable links that Google won't parse as real links?
On-Page Optimization | | STDCarriers0 -
Need suggestion: Should the user profile link be disallowed in robots.txt
I maintain a myBB based forum here. The user profile links look something like this http://www.learnqtp.com/forums/User-Ankur Now in my GWT, I can see many 404 errors for user profile links. This is primarily because we have tight control over spam and auto-profiles generated by bots. Either our moderators or our spam control software delete such spammy member profiles on a periodic basis but by then Google indexes those profiles. I am wondering, would it be a good idea to disallow User profiles links using robots.txt? Something like Disallow: /forums/User-*
On-Page Optimization | | AnkurJ0 -
E-commerce On Page Concern - Links and Anchor Text
Hi, how you doing? I have a set of very specific questions or concerns about anchor text and linking on an e-commerce category page. I was wondering if you could give your opinions and counsel. I own an e-commerce store about steel construction products. I have several category and product pages. One example of my categories is this. URL http://aceromart.com/Losacero-25-Ternium.aspx My concerns or questions: I have several technical specs or sheets. Which i include the link on the right part in "Informacion Adicional". How should i link those? I am bit worried on the anchor text. Should i use something like [download "product" technical sheet] or just [technical sheet of product] . I dont want to cannibalize, but i also want to appear as descriptive as possible. what would you recommend? The same thing happens on my videos. How should i link my videos? Is there a best practice? **what would you recommend. ** Thanks in advance for your opinions!
On-Page Optimization | | JesusD0 -
Internal Links: Navigation Bar vs. Body Text
Hello. I have a page on our site that is especially popular and has many inbound links. This page has the same site navigation buttons (at the top) as every other page on the site. Do these site navigation buttons pass along link juice to other pages in the same way that an internal link would elsewhere on the page? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Several Links in Some Pages
Dear all, Our main site is a bussiness directory, and following some SEO advices, we are creating landing pages for each category, in order to optimize them for the keywords. Those landing pages have links to the listings related to them. Using the same idea, we have created pages related to the regions, and those pages include links to the listings located in them. The only problem that I see with that, is the number of links that some categories or regions could have. Is there a limit of recomended number of links per page, from a SEO perspective? We also have a main category page, that includes a list of all categories, and this page could also have a relatively high number of links. The pages have around 300 to 500 words, some include also images, some include videos. Many thanks for your help, Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | te_c0 -
Footer link to home page?
Quick question - is it a best practice to add a footer link on each page of a website that points back to your home page, with the anchor text being your official brand name?
On-Page Optimization | | Bandicoot0 -
More than 100 internal links from a page
Hi, we have been developing our new site and improving the internal linking for 2 reasons, 1 to improve spidering and 2 to up sell more to customers. The error reports from SEOMoz are showing our biggest problem is too many internal links from 2000+ pages. How much of an impact does it have by having say 180 internal links compared to say 99 on a page? Our website has been moving up the SERPs so should i worry about it or should I ignore the warnings and continue with the menu system and internal linking we have in place already? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PottyScotty0 -
Number of links in breadcrumb
Does google take the number of links in breadcrumb as a indicator to the depth of the page in the site structure? That will mean that a page with 5 links in the breadcrumb is a page very far away from the index, therefore a less important page.
On-Page Optimization | | seo.academy0