Too Many On-Page Links
-
I'm getting the warning of "Too many on-page links".
I have a number of affiliate marketing sites, all Wordpress, all with sidebars.
In the header navigation bar is a link that offers "reviews" and links to each product/brand. This is not a drop down link but leads to a page with product links.
Also, in the sidebar I have links that also lead to the products/brands. Redundant yes, but in the beginning this seemed to be a good practice in site design.
It would be easy to simply remove the widget that contains the link process in the sidebar. The problem may simply be that the sidebar is the same for every page in the site(s).
Is this hurting total SEO as my sites are all over 95-percent indexed.
One site in particular does very well in traffic and sales so is removing these links potentially going to improve my SEO and ultimately by success?
Thanks,
Don
-
I will take your advise Ryan. The one site with numerous links was getting a little ugly so I'll let the navbar work for awhile and see what happens. Up to now people tend to find this site through long-tail keywords so the links in the sidebar is a moot subject as far as navigation.
All those warnings spooked me. When I built my first site many moons ago with Dreamweaver and even Frontpage there were tests built in to the software to analyze the site for broken links and a visual of your navigation.
My main site is that old and my linking system worked fine. If this was a real problem wouldn't an extensive sitemap be a problem? That could potentially be link loaded.
And you're absolutely correct - if they are helpful to the users than don't remove them - I always concentrate on ease of navigation for the user and page load speed. If you can't retain the visitor all the links in the world won't help or hinder.
-
I would recommend not removing any link which is useful to users. Don't remove a link in an effort to satisfy a SEO tool's warnings. The tool simply determines "too many links" as any page with over 100 links. It is possible to have a very successful page with 200+ links. There are many factors involved including the page's DA/PA and the useability of the links.
In summary, review your links and remove any links which are not helpful to users or otherwise are unnecessary. If you go over 100 links and get the warning, disregard it. You have investigated the issue and taken the appropriate action.
-
Hi Kieran, I answer above to Thomas that I may very well stick to the <100 threshold but I doubt if any one site would exceed that.
Thank you for the feedback and link.
-
Only one site actually had close to 100 links in the sidebar but this also happens to be my most successful site, it's also the oldest.
My backlinking efforts for this site has been extensive also, not so much with the others.
Since these niches have specific products they probably won't reach your threshold of 100 as I delete some products in favor of new ones so the net stays the same.
I will test a little without disrupting the navigation too much. Content is king in my book and I specialize in plenty of original content with matching products. That formula has been working I need to get busy on backlink efforts however.
-
All the links are unique to each product but because they are redundant I am beginning to remove them. I understand the point of having all pages linked to each other but with the sidebar redundancy and your example I suppose the link juice is better used elsewhere.
I really don't have related articles or most popular since these are niche sites I work very hard for original content to specific products. These aren't thin sites but they were created to provide relevant topics and reference with product that would exactly match the topics.
Adding value in information and driving traffic to the product for a sale. This formula has worked and since my indexing is very good I suppose I wasn't losing much.
The navigation bar is visible and leads users to specific criteria without misleading them.
-
Hi Don.
Think of your link juice as plumbing for your house. Your site has x-amount of water pressure coming in to your home. The links are pipes you create which allow the water (link juice) to flow throughout your site.
Each time you add a new link, the water has to come from somewhere. A tiny bit of water is taken from all the other links on your site so it can flow to the new link. One part of SEO is to ensure all pages on your site are linked so you don't have any island pages. Another important part of SEO is link optimization.
When you provide 50 sidebar links a relatively equal amount of juice flows to each of them.The question you need to answer is, are all those links worthy of an equal amount of attention? Ideally you should maximize the number of links to pages which are highly relevant to users such as "related articles" or "most popular". You can also increase links to your best selling products or services.
Perform some analysis to determine which links are not helpful. As an example, if you offer links to archived articles from 2010 which are hardly used, consider removing those links.
-
Don,
There is no set number for page links, but the general rule of thumb I've always used is 100 is the max. Typically I try to stay well below that. You also have to understand that your page rank and site authority will play a part into how many links google will "allow" on a page.
Will removing them improve your SEO and success? I have heard from individuals that have lowered their link count that their rankings do improve. Really, the best thing to do is test it. If you lose rankings then turn them back on. If you gain rankings then you have your own test positive that links should be limited.
If your site is doing well, then it doesn't sound like your site is hurting too much from your current linking structure. So if you like where you are then you don't have to worry about it. But if you want to improve, you will have to take some risks.
-
Hi Don
The rough (current) rule of thumb seems to be in the 150 range per page. If yours is really going way beyond this you may need to rethink your plan.
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
Indexation isn't the be all and end all though - you can always redirect them which isn't too bad
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
-
Page Speed or Site Speed which one does Google considered a ranking signal
I've read many threads online which proves that website speed is a ranking factor. There's a friend whose website scores 44 (slow metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Despite that his website is slow, he outranks me on Google search results. It confuses me that I optimized my website for speed, but my competitor's slow site outperforms me. On Six9ja.com, I did amazing work by getting my target score which is 100 (fast metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Coming to my Google search console tool, they have shown that some of my pages have average scores, while some have slow scores. Google search console tool proves me wrong that none of my pages are fast. Then where did the fast metrics went? Could it be because I added three Adsense Javascript code to all my blog posts? If so, that means that Adsense code is slowing website speed performance despite having an async tag. I tested my blog post speed and I understand that my page speed reduced by 48 due to the 3 Adsense javascript codes added to it. I got 62 (Average metric score). Now, my site speed is=100, then my page speed=62 Does this mean that Google considers page speed rather than site speed as a ranking factor? Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/YSxSwOG **Regarding: **https://six9ja.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingsmart1 -
URL open with double domain names when click on visit URL link in Google Analytics
I have configured Advance Filter to track the sub-domains traffic as follow : Filter
Reporting & Analytics | | gamesecure
Type: Custom filter > Advanced Field A: Hostname Extract A: (.*) Field B: Request URI Extract B: (.*) Output To: Request URI Constructor: $A1$B1 After that, I am able to see sub-domains record and View Full Page URL In Reports. But when I check reports in All page (e.g. Behavior >> All Pages) or selecting Landing Page as a Primary Dimension. Further I click on Icon given next to displayed Full URL to visit to same domain page, in browser the page
opened but the double domain name comes so page not open successfully. For example : In landing page list following URL given : www.sitegeek.com/compareHosting/arvixe_vs_hostgator If I click on icon given next the displayed URL, in browser following URL will
open https://sitegeek.comwww.sitegeek.com/compareHosting/arvixe_vs_hostgator Is this First Domain with HTTPs, coming from Google Analytic 'View' where this is taken ? How Can I remove double domains? Thanks, Rajiv0 -
How many ways to use Event in Google Tag Manager for Event Tracking?
Hello Experts, How many ways to use Event in Google Tag Manager for Event Tracking? As per me there are 5 ways given below are they correct? 2nd thing if yes can you please please tell me procedure of using all or which is the best one to use? HTML 5 Data Attributes Classic Google Analytics Example: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/downloads/pdfs/corporateBrief.pdf']);
Reporting & Analytics | | bkmitesh
3) Universal Analytics Example: ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’, ‘page path’); query string? or is it possible without any coding on website we can configure id's in google tag manager? Thanks! BK Mitesh0 -
Relation between Page and Landing Page
Hi all, I am looking through the Analytics data on a specific 'page' (404.html which is the Not found page) and as my secondary dimensions, I have Landing Page data. Now am I not sure how the page and the landing page are related here. Is it basically saying 58 Page views of the 404.html were originated by the users who landed on brochures.html? If someone could provide any pointers on it, it would be great. Thank you for your time. uZQJ
Reporting & Analytics | | nirpan0 -
800,000 pages blocked by robots...
We made some mods to our robots.txt file. Added in many php and html pages that should not have been indexed. Well, not sure what happened or if there was some type of dynamic conflict with our CMS and one of these pages, but in a few weeks we checked webmaster tools and to our great surprise and dismay, the number of blocked pages we had by robots.txt was up to about 800,000 pages out of the 900,000 or so we have indexed. 1. So, first question is, has anyone experienced this before? I removed the files from robots.txt and the number of blocked files has still been climbing. Changed the robots.txt file on the 27th. It is the 29th and the new robots.txt file has been downloaded, but the blocked pages count has been rising in spite of it. 2. I understand that even if a page is blocked by robots.txt, it still shows up in the index, but does anyone know how the blocked page affects the ranking? i.e. while it might still show up even though it has been blocked will google show it at a lower rank because it was blocked by robots.txt? Our current robots.txt just says: User-agent: *
Reporting & Analytics | | TheCraig
Disallow: Sitemap: oursitemap Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig0 -
Google Analytics Title tag vs landing page visitors numbers
Hi folks, Just wondering if anyone has any ideas as to why im getting different results in Google analytics. I'm using the Content Efficiency Analysis Report from http://www.kaushik.net which is absolutely awesome. When I search via my title tag I get 920 Unique Visitors over the month but when I search via the landing page URL with the same title tag I get 28. Any ideas to why their should be such a difference. I've also noticed that on that page i'm also getting a Rel Cononical TRUE using a site crawl. Any ideas are much appreciated
Reporting & Analytics | | acs1110 -
Google.co.uk (The Web or Pages From UK) Query?
Hi, Google.co.uk is ambiguous at best, it is geo targeted for the UK, however, by default all results incorporate "The Web" meaning outside the UK. If a user wishes to filter to "Pages From UK" then they have to click that specifically. Now my clients regularly ask me whether the traffic they are getting is from Google.co.uk (The Web) or Google.co.uk (Pages from UK) In analytics it combines these two as single source = Google.co.uk without any further breakdown, is there a way to figure this out. If I can split the figures then I can run necessary additional comparisons etc. Regards Ausaf
Reporting & Analytics | | conversiontactics0 -
Email campaigns. Should I link to my blog or to my site?
I have a client for who we write and post a daily blog article. The articles are optimized and linked to particular targeted content on his top level site. Now we are going to start e-marketing to his 3000+ website users to announce inventory changes and specials. My question is (from a SE standpoint) are we better off linking the e-mail content to the blog and introducing people to the blog (but adding an additional step for getting to the new inventory. Or are we better off putting a link in the HTML E-mail letter that we send out to both the blog and separately to the inventory section? Just to clarify, we wonder if the search engines would provide some additional authority for the extra blog traffic and thereby build the overall score of the blog & site. We are looking at the e-mail campaigns as a potential opportunity to impact SE scores not just awareness of new inventory. Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | webindustry0