Not sure if I should disavow these links or not
-
I am on the marketing team for CandyGalaxy.com we are an online candy store that specializes in bulk candy for events. Were just about a year and a half old and i'm running into some SEO strategy road blocks lately. When we started the company we used an oversee's seo company. For the first few months results were great then things took a massive dive as google began rolling out updates early and mid last year. After that point we started taking things in house and have been trying to create content and begin content marketing. We launched a blog @ blog.candygalaxy.com and also launched and educational resource at candybuffet101.com -
However the question i'm up against now is what to do with those bad old links? Are they actually hurting us? Or just neutral?
I'm also trying to decided what to do about the links in my footer? We put those there because those are truly our most popular products and we wanted customers to have easy access, but are those links potentially harmful?
I'm questioning these issues because I feel like there is something holding back some of my pages from ranking. For example "blue candy" is a very popular section of our website. We have worked on a lot of content for the blog related to blue candy, made videos, photo shoots ect. We have customer reviews on page and unique category content. According to open site explorer our DA and PA are around the range of most of the sites in the 8-12 serp position. But we have more social activity then all but the top 2-3 spots. However the page almost impossible to find via search. Its not in the first 300 results and surely the page is more relevant then an entry about quilts.. Similar situations like this have led me to think that maybe there is a technical underlying issues that I have not addressed. ? The content is definitely there because if i type in a line from the content directly to google it is the first result. So the site seems indexed properly..
Would love to hear any feedback from similar experiences or ideas.
Thanks!
-
No, don't nofollow internal links, especially for pages you want to rank. That doesn't work well anymore, and will ultimately hurt you.
I see about 190 links in the primary nav. Can those all really be equally important to users and search engines? I'd be really surprised if scrolling through a list of brands hunting for the right one is the best user experience. Don't take my word for it: run some tests and see how people respond to a simplified menus along the top or side. Generally we want to pick a few terms (e.g. brands or candies) to prioritize, and otherwise work on a hierarchy/nav that users intuitively understand.
-
Hi Carson,
Thanks for taking the time to really respond to this! I really appreciate it.
The problem i've run into consistently is that the Nav menu's were not meant for excessive links, but were designed so that customers could legitimately navigate through the site fully from just the first page. But perhaps that goal is to ambitious for 2000 products. We've also implemented a script that is supposed to be taking those links off of the home page and effectively hiding them, but maybe thats no longer working properly....
As far as the "site wide" footer links, those also were initially intended for navigation as well? Would reducing them to no follow be sufficient? Or potentially just fully removing them be better?
I also took that advice on the internal linked and connected those two pages!
Thanks again for your time and insight
-
When it comes to links, the advice you've received is pretty good: it's all about the ratios. If many of your links are spammy with exact-match anchor text, it's possible that they're hurting you. A warning in Google's Webmaster Tools would confirm it, but I think it's fairly likely that you're being affected by Penguin. I see an awfully high number of links with anchor text that is overly-targeted.
I'd start by trying to remove the worst site-wide anchor text links, and then disavow if that doesn't work. At the same time, it will probably help more to think of ways to generate legitimate visibility and interest.
I don't see tons of legitimate links pointing to the site right now. Even if Google is just ignoring the links now and not counting them against you, I wouldn't expect the site to do amazingly well. There are a ton of links on each page, so the link equity you do have is being split many ways.
It's extremely unlikely that you're being penalized for internal links, but it might be best to focus link equity on key pages rather than spreading it so thin. With something like 168 links in the menu, you probably want to downsize. Does Christmas candy really need a link in May? Is there a better way to organize brands? You can't rank for every term - prioritize some pages that you rank moderately well for with high search interest.
And finally, watch out for keyword cannibalization. I don't think this is a huge issue on your site, but you should probably link to http://www.candygalaxy.com/blue-candy/ from within the content on http://www.candygalaxy.com/blue-candy-buffets/ as an example.
-
I wouldn't be worried about links like this, there are so many out there I think Google understands they can't penalize every site that has one of these. Every site on the internet would be hit
Keep an eye on those directory sites. I know in my first hit from Penguin 1.0 I found tons of directory links that were just spammy.
When you click on the "Submit Link" see if you can pay for the links. If you can then get rid of those links asap. Many of these directories are hard to get a hold of someone so I have had to disavow many of these links. I have a link of a text file that I add too of spammy directories I have found and I continue to add to it.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2659865/spammydirectories.txt
Directories while many may be safe, this late in the game of Penguin you are better of without them IMO.
Only a handful are safe:
Go to webmaster tools and find all those directories...
-
We are basing this on what research and real life example here? Has he been hit with a warning of any sorts? Was the website's rankings being dropped in any relation to this? Also, doing anything out of the ordinary when things are currently working perfectly is a straight path to problems in any aspect in life, but from what I know from personal experience so it is with optimization as well.
Here's a checklist I go through when these matters come in hand:
1. When did the links get indexed by Google?
2. How much time has passed?
3. Was the site hit by any of the recent algorithm updates?
4. Did my website drop severely in rankings?
5. Am I doing the best to keep healthy and authoritative links creation in check?If you haven't been hit by anything, your rankings are there, your healthy link building is there, unique content being created and natural links pointing to the site itself, why would you waste time and money on something you clearly did not do, do not control and hasn't affected you yet? His example may be somewhat different, but basically fixing something that ain't broke is really not the go to way here.
If and when his website does get hit by a penalty, do something. Make the list of links, anchor texts, create a contact list for the administrators of that website, keep a disavow tool list in check, but use it when you need to do so. Thanks!
-
I wouldn't agree that you don't need to worry about bad links built 18 months ago. Google are always refining their algorithm so you shouldn't just hope that your links won't be seen and penalised.
-
Hello! It means that spammy link that just links to your site without anchor text and it's a nofollow links does not value the same as something with straight keyword name anchor text in the link itself. So page you have shown us here is probably devalued with Google it doesn't pose any real value or threat to your site, however you wanna put it. How are your anchor texts spread out through the link profile?
-
Here is an example of one of the links
-
Hi thanks for your insight. What do you mean by "link profile introduction" I didn't mean to leave relevant information out of the question?
Thanks!
-
Hi Jonathan,
Lets deal with the disavow-ing first. I'd do a backlink analysis of the website and find ALL the links that look irrelevant and spammy and try and get them taken down first, if that fails then use the disavow tool but only if you are 100% sure they are doing you harm. It's a tricky thing the disavow tool but Google does urge you to try and get them removed before using it.
In terms of the website and the products in the footer...Why not create a section in the main body of the website such as "Customer Favourites" or "Most Popular". The reason for this is because, I'm not sure if users would scroll to the footer whereas if it is in the main body of the website, your customers are more likely to see it.
-
Hello! Honestly you shouldn't worry about any bad links created two years ago. If they were hurting your website, it would of been seen a year or so ago, not now. One simple aspect of driving more traffic (but not directly) would be social media profiles created specifically for that phrase and thus allowing a lot more people to visit your website. Talking offhand about what's the cause of your issues without the link profile introduction is really unprofessional and thus if you want a more straightforward answer, some insights on the number of links, link profile looks and such would be useful. Thanks!
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
-
How would you build links to this page?
Hi i have ecommerce store and currently we are looking to build links to category pages like: http://www.theiconic.com.au/womens-clothing-dresses-party-dresses/ What are some natural ways to build links to a page like this? Our SEO agency has done guest posting and forums but these are not natural link building methods and against Google policy. Any suggestions on how to build natural links to these pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak651 -
How to detect a bad link and remove ?
As per google penguin, all the low quality back links are going to affect the website SERPS hugely. So, we need to find all the bad back links and then remove them one by one. What I would like to know is, what tool do you use to find all the bad back links ? And how do we know which is a bad back link or bad website, where our link should not be there ? Then what service what do you suggest for back links removal. I contacted LinkDelete.com and they quoted me 97$ for a month to remove all links in less than 3 weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monali123
Let me know, what you suggest.0 -
To recover from Penguin update, shall i remove the links or disavow links?
Hi, One of our websites hit by Penguin update and I now know where the links are coming from. I have chance to remove the links from those incoming links but I am a little confused whether i should just remove the links from incoming links or disavow the links? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Help Identifying Unnatural Links
http://bit.ly/XT8yYYHi,Any help with the below will be most appreciated.We received an unnatural links warning in Webmaster Tools and noticed a large drop in our rankings. We downloaded and carried out a full link audit (3639 links) and logged in an excel spreadsheet with the following status: OK, Have Contacted, Can't Contact, Not SureWe have had some success but the majority of the ones we identified are not contactable.We use the dis-avow tool to tell Google of these. We then submitted a reconsideration request where we explained to Google our efforts and that we can supply them with our audit if necessary by email as you can't upload any evidence.A few days later we received a response suggesting that we still have unnatural links. We are a little stuck as we don't know what they can be:1. Is Google actually looking at our dis-avowed links before making this judgement?2. We have missed something that Google is considering bad but we can't see in our audit?Again we need a little help as we are trying to sort this out but can't see what we are falling down on.I can provide our spreadsheet if necessary.Many ThanksLee
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeFella0 -
Maximum number of links
Hi there, I have just written an article that is due to be posted on an external blog, the article has potentially 3 links that could link to 3 different pages on my website, is this too much? what do you recommend being the maximum number of links? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Does Google WMT download links button give me all the links they count
Hi Different people are telling me different things I think if I download "all links" using the button in WMT to excel, I am seeing all the links Google is 'counting' when evaluating my site. is that right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Links from Directories
We are currently listed in a number of Association Buyer's Guides. We signed up for these last year in an effort to increase our external links. With recent Panda changes, do these links carry any value for us? Here are some examples: http://buyersguideforeducators.com/ http://wasteindustrymarketplace.com/ http://wefbuyersguide.com/ We're in about 40-50 of these different directories. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colbys0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0