What's the best way to sculpt links on a page?
-
I know PR isn't a top ranking factor anymore, so "PR sculpting" isn't something to focus on. But isn't it still true that having more links that you need on any given page is worse than having fewer, in terms of that page's authority?
I'm managing a site that has a lot of navigational links in the footer, which are duplicative because they're almost all included in the top nav bar, and several are triplicated in the sidebar as well. I wanted to remove 85% of these duplicative links from the footer, thinking they diluted the page authority and that most users probably won't scroll there anyway when we launch the site.
The site owner is pushing back, though, not wanting to remove so many links because he believes they might be useful to some users. We can test our respective user-behavior theories after launching, but right now I have two questions:
- Will having a sizable number of duplicative links in the footer dilute the page's authority?
and 2) Are there any other ways to reduce this dilution, aside from simply removing the links? (I know nofollow is not the answer, but possibly using iframes or Java or something like that?)
-
Thanks much, Anthony.
Any other opinions?
-
-
I wouldn't worry about dilution. They may look spammy if the anchor text is highly optimized and they are really only there for SEO purposes. Or if there are a ton.
-
Don't worry about dilution/sculpting. Put links on your site for usability. Use descriptive anchors. Make the site easy to use and navigate.
That being said, I agree with you that removing them is probably a good idea. If they are all present in the top nav, I see no reason to duplicate it all again in the footer. Instead, use the footer to highlight some other important pages on your site that are important but not header worthy. Help, About, FAQ, Popular Pages and others.
-
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
-
404 errors & old unused pages
I am using shopify and I need to delete some old pages which are coming up as 404 errors (product no longer available!) does anyone know where you go to delete these pages which are no longer needed?
Web Design | | carleyb0 -
CMS dynamicly created pages indexed?
Hey Moz'erz, Looking at the indexed pages of my clients eCommerce website I noticed that dynamically created pages are being indexed. For example this page does not "exist" but is created by a drop down filter menu that sorts by product tag: /collections/tools/TAG I can only conclude that this page got indexed either through a backlink or once upon a time there was an internal link pointing to this URL and got indexed (currently there is not). Are either of these cases possibilities? In either case before considering removal or any action I would of-course reference analytics to check for conversions, traffic and any backlinks for those "pages". I believe at the end of the day is recommend a drop down filer that doesn't create new pages as the best solution. Thoughts, comments and experience is greatly welcomed 🙂
Web Design | | paul-bold0 -
We mapped 301's, uploaded htacces, submitted sitemap and still TANKED after redesign?
Hi All, We had some great rankings on store.jrdunn.com since 2006 and we switched to just http://jrdunn.com with cleaner url structures about 13 days ago. We were on Volusion now Magento. We mapped out a couple of thousand of 301's and carefully choose very similar landing pages on the new site. Uploaded an htcaccess file and submitted sitemap in GWT. We have been correcting 404's and watching GWT like a hawk. We dropped on several almost all of our great terms from page one to page 14 or 15 on the new site. We don't even rank yet on our own brand terms ?!?. ORGANIC traffic has dropped more than 50%. The only thing in our plan that we couldn't execute was using the "we moved" tool in GWT because they don't allow switches from subdomains to be entered. Bummer! Do you think missing that one thing caused the plummet? In retrospect perhaps we changed too many things at once ie hosting, cms and going down to root url. Anyways, I don't know what we can do from here but we'd sure be silly not to ask! Anybody's suggestions or past experiences with this situation would be huge! Thanks so much in advance, Sean
Web Design | | seandunn0 -
Best way to move blog from subdomain to folder?
Hey all, Our company has 4 product websites, and each has its own separate blog. They are currently set up as subdomain blogs (blog.company.com) hosted on wordpress.com, but I would like to transition them over to root folders (company.com/blog) in order to improve accessibility and SEO. What is the best way to go about doing this? Should I continue to host the blogs on wordpress or are there better options? Would I migrate the blog posts over or just redirect? I'd like to get a general framework/plan of action going in order to know what to expect. Thanks!
Web Design | | kslusarski0 -
Why do site links appear under one keyword and not another? Any ideas?
Hi everyone, I have a client whose website is doing the strangest thing. When I search the branded keyword (the company name), Google doesn't show any site links under the result. However, when I search for the company name plus Inc., I do get site links. Now, the website is ranking first in both searches, so that's not the issue. And, as near as I can tell, the site only contains one or two uses of the company name plus the word "inc." Most of the text on the page and all of the meta data only uses the company name, and most of the links that connect to the site use only the company name as well. Even the Who Is for the site doesn't use the term "inc." And ideas what might be going on? I know Google says that the process is still automated but for the life of me I can't figure out what kind of automated process would result in these results. Thanks! Megan (Rebecca's minion)
Web Design | | RebeccaRalston0 -
Menu Links
I am building a website with the category "water damage repair" and in the menu of the website I want a drop-down menu that contains the keyword + geolocation for example "water damage detroit" "water damage chicago" "water damage New York" and they will all be drop downs so that I can have the exact match keywords in the menu and on the page but I want them all to link to the same page so that I don't have to build out 5 different pages that all have the same general information on them, I would rather just have the categories with the keyword rich words then them all point to the same area. Is this a good idea to have a drop down menu for a category "Water Damage Repair" and then have 5 different Exact match keywords like "water damage detroit" and then have all of those exact match keywords link to the same page or should they all have individual content for each exact patch keyword even though they are all the same topic?
Web Design | | SEOWizards0 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
How is an SEO's time best used?
We have over 50 highly varied and niche sites in our company. Each website is for an annual event spread across the calendar. I am the solo SEO person here and was wondering what your opinions are about what would bring in the greatest SEO power in my limited daily allotment; link building? Keywords? Content? Oh, and to make my life even easier - its all based on SharePoint 2007!
Web Design | | DaveGerecht0