Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
-
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link?
thanks
-
You shouldn't be penalized if these are simply sister sites that are linked together in the header. This is common practice with a number of media websites, for example:
- xojane.com nav links over to xovain.com
- msnbc.com runs footer links to nbcnews.com, today.com, cnbc.com, and breakingnews.com
- cnet.com runs footer links to cbsinteractive.com
- foxnews.com runs header links to 7 other properties
- etc.
To be conservative, I would suggest linking with the brand name of the other site - don't use a commercial anchor text. In other words, link to it as "brand name" or "brandname.com", but don't link to it as "sports news".
-
Hi
No, it won't cause your organic traffic to go down. If it were me, I don't see a reason for it to be included in the top navigation because top navigation should only be utilized for pages directly on the site.
That's just my opinion though - I still like the idea of having a partners or sisters site page where you link out to other sites like this one. Or, having it as a dropdown list item in your navigation under "About Us" or something along those lines.
Let me know if this makes sense. Good luck!
-
thanks for the feedback. We have not received a Manual Action in Webmaster Tools about it, but I was wondering if may be the cause of our organic search traffic going down a lot. I feel like it is related to the rest of the site – just a sports version of what we are doing with celebrities.... do you see a reason to get rid of the nav bar link?
-
Hi Erik
There a ton of reasons for getting a manual action - bad, thin, or duplicate content, spammy link building tactics, or more - if you have one, I suggest you see what type of manual action it is, and act accordingly.
Now, for your link in the navigation, there could be potential for that link to be considered spam, although I don't see it being super likely. The reason being, it will be recorded as coming from every page that the top navigation appears on your site, and it's not topically relevant to celebrity news.
What I would do instead is link to the site through content opportunities with branded anchor text, or developing a page that is dedicated to sister sites or company websites. Although you will have to be careful and not link to 100 websites or go overboard.
You also have to consider that another website linked to in your top navigation could potentially be a bad user experience as it is inconsistent.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
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
-
Custom site to Wordpress transfer
Hi all, Custom site to Wordpress transfer was done a week back. Exact same folder paths and URL's, Analytics/adsense/webmaster etc should be added right? Webmaster where can i get the new code and will all old history be gone from webmaster? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | klambimut20 -
Sitemap include all site links or just ones we want indexed?
Got a quick sitemap question. We have a clients site built in opencart and are getting ready to submit the sitmap. The default sitemap setting generates urls right off of the root. For example site.com/product. These urls are also accessible through the site itself. We prefer to give the site some depth and have structured the products so the urls are site.com/category/product. All of the product pages have canonicals including the category so we should not have to worry about duplicate content on the /product page vs the /category/product page. My question is both types of product pages are included in the sitemap at the moment. Since we don't want google to index the /product urls should we leave them off of the sitemap even though they are readily accessible from the frontend(though not linked)? Or just leave them and let the canonical tag be used in directing google as to which urls to index. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Whebb0 -
No followed links, what happens to the PR?
Hi, I have read a few times, on here and other places that when a website applies a no follow tag to a link the PR is not retained but instead disappears (evaporates) thus neither website benefiting. Is that true? If so what is the actual benefit of no following a link?
On-Page Optimization | | Bondara0 -
Site Wide Title Tag Discussion
Do you think it's good to have an instance of your primary keyword occur on most of your site's title tags throughout your site? Or do you think having the keyword occur in most title tags throughout the site will dilute the ranking ability for the home page? I haven't read much about this in "best practices" for title tags. hmmmm...
On-Page Optimization | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Do Navigation links count the main link on the page?
After reading this article http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text it talks about how only one link per page counts if they are going to the same page. This is what i had learned in the past; however, my understanding was if it was a in the main navigation as a child or grandchild or in the side navigation and then in the main body text, the link in the main body would count/ be held higher than the other options.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Checking for content originality in a site
two part question on original content How would you go about checking if a site holds original content accept the long search quary within Google? ans also if I find many sites carrying my content and I am the original source should I replace the content? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
Navigation causing too many links
If I add pages to my site to cover major cities/towns/counties in the UK where I offer wedding bands and link them from the navigation using drop down menus/categories ( I believe this is the best option to allow users to find what they are looking for) I get a'too many links on page' flag. How can I best get around this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Three Sites or One?
I have a client who provides three distinct, although related, services. Some of his competitors only provide one of those services, and thus their sites are more saturated with that particular service. Would it be best to develop three different sites optimized for each particular service, or could I achieve the same effect by optimizing different sections of one site for each service?
On-Page Optimization | | kscotbarr0