Best practices for controlling link juice with site structure
-
I'm trying to do my best to control the link juice from my home page to the most important category landing pages on my client's e-commerce site. I have a couple questions regarding how to NOT pass link juice to insignificant pages and how best to pass juice to my most important pages.
INSIGNIFICANT PAGES:
How do you tag links to not pass juice to unimportant pages. For example, my client has a "Contact" page off of there home page. Now we aren't trying to drive traffic to the contact page, so I'm worried about the link juice from the home page being passed to it. Would you tag the Contact link with a "no follow" tag, so it doesn't pass the juice, but then include it in a sitemap so it gets indexed? Are there best practices for this sort of stuff?
-
Here is my simplistic take:
- Create a logical site hierarchy that works for UX. Don't worry about link juice to pages like the contact page.
- Focus on linking to your most important (high ranking, high converting, revenue earning) pages from the home page and other high level pages.
-
To add on here, creating authority to your website comes from siloing your website. Meaning your keyword research and knowledge on certain subjects will guide you in setting up many pages in your "site" that can help in passing link juice to your most top-seeded-keyword-directories. As a result, the deeper you have pages that cover specific content of a certain category, the better your authority and page rank juice will develop. So worrying about your contact page should not be a huge concern.
You absolutely do not want to no follow any of your own pages.
-
First of all, nofollowing your links will not prevent you from losing link juice. In general, you do not ever want to nofollow your own pages.
If you really want to prevent link juice from going to your Contact page, you could use Javascript instead of an HTML link. However, this will break if the user does not have Javascript enabled.
In the big scheme of things, it is probably not worth your time worrying about linking to your Contact page. Link juice that goes to your Contact page is not lost, since the Contact page itself also links to your homepages and other pages, and thus keeps the link equity flowing.
As far as site architecture goes, just link prominently to your most important pages and less prominently to your secondary ones. Then focus your efforts on acquiring more links, because that will have more impact than fiddling with some links on your page.
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
-
Deindexed site - is it best to start over?
A potential client's website has been deindexed from Google. We'd be completely redesigning his site with all new content. Would it be best to purchase a new url and redirect the old deindexed site to the new one, or try stick with the old domain?
Technical SEO | | WillWatrous0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
Cloaking? Best Practices Crawling Content Behind Login Box
Hi- I'm helping out a client, who publishes sale information (fashion sales etc.) In order for the client to view the sale details (date, percentage off etc.) they need to register for the site. If I allow google bot to crawl the content, (identify the user agent) but serve up a registration light box to anyone who isn't google would this be considered cloaking? Does anyone know what the best practice for this is? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Nopadon
Technical SEO | | nopadon0 -
Best practices for migrating an html sitemap? Or just get rid of it all together?
We are migrating a very large site to a new CMS and I'm trying to determine the best way to handle all the links (~15k) in our html sitemap. The developers don't see the purpose of using an html sitemap anymore and I have yet to come up with a good reason why we should migrate rather than just get rid of the sitemap since it is not very useful to users. The html sitemap was created about 6 years ago when page rank sculpting was a high priority. Currently, since we already have an XML sitemap, I'm not sure that there's really a need for a html sitemap, other than to maintain all the internal links. How valuable are the internal links found in an html sitemap? And will it be a problem if we remove these from our link profile? 15,000 links sounds significant, but they only account for less than .5% of our internal links. What do all you think?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Drop down navigation and link juice
Hi! We are desperately needing to overhaul our site navigation setup, and we have so many categories that we think our site could really benefit from a drop down navigation similar to what these sites have: http://www.paychex.com/ http://www.bmc.com/ We've held off doing this type of navigation in the past because we were only seeing people use flash to create it and we knew that it wouldn't be good for link juice. But these two sites are using HTML and CSS - which seems like a much better style and good for SEO. Do you agree? We want to make the switch but are worried about losing linking power by nesting our navigation in 's and CSS styling.
Technical SEO | | sciway0 -
What is the value of english links with foreign language anchor text for a foreign site?
I have a site in Spanish that is hosted in Spain with a .es TLD. I already have many Spanish-language links from websites in Spain, but I obviously want more and I'm finding I might need to look beyond typical Spanish sites. In talking to some of my link builders who work on my English/American sites, they are recommending that I build links on the normal article sites, blogs and web 2.0 sites that I normally build links on but that I make all the content English and insert the anchor text in Spanish. For example, if my site were about "weightloss", my keyword would be "perder peso" (in spanish). They are recommending that I have articles, reviews, etc written about weightloss in English with the anchor text "perder peso" worked into the English article. Most of the sites are English sites that are hosted in the US (article sites, web 2.0 properties, etc). My question is what is the value of these links? Does anybody have any experience with this?
Technical SEO | | jargomang0 -
InSite Linking Best Practices
When creating links within your website, is it bad to have a anchor text link pointing back to the same page? Say the page the homepage is optimized for "credit cards". If I have a "credit cards" anchor text link on the page the link points to, is that bad practice? Secondly, if it's better to put that link on a different page, wouldn't I be placing a keyword that's optimized for a different page on the wrong page? (hopefully I'm making sense) Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
What are the SEOmoz-suggested best practices for limiting the number of 301 redirects for a given site?
I've read some vague warnings of potential problems with having a long list of 301 redirects within an htaccess file. If this is a problem, could you provide any guidance on how much is too much? And if there is a problem associated with this, what is that problem exactly?
Technical SEO | | roush0