Link juice distributed to too many pages. Will noindex,follow fix this?
-
We have an e-commerce store with around 4000 product pages. Although our domain authority is not very high (we launched our site in February and now have around 30 RD's) we did rank on lots of long tail terms, and generated around 8000 organic visits / month.
Two weeks ago we added another 2000 products to our existing catalogue of 2000 products, and since then our organic traffic dropped significantly (more than 50%).
My guess is that link juice has been distributed to too many pages, causing rankings to drop on overall. I'm thinking about noindexing 50% of the product pages (the ones not receiving any organic traffic). However, I am not sure if this will lead to more link juice for the remaining 50% of the product pages, or not.
So my question is: if I noindex,follow page A, will 100% of the linkjuice go to page B INSTEAD of page A, or will just a part of the link juice flow to page B (after flowing through page A first)?
Hope my question is clear
P.s. We have a Dutch store, so the traffic drop is not a Panda issue
-
Has the number of pages indexed changed? Specifically, do you have a sitemap and have you looked at what GWT is reporting for number of pages indexed? Maybe some of your pages dropped out of the index and that's why you're not getting as much traffic?
Also, do a quick look at your pages and make sure something silly didn't happen when the products were added, like a rel canonical setting everything to the home page, or 5000 items suddenly getting a noindex, or your analytics program suddenly being stripped from some of your pages and that's why you're missing visits.
-
it will follow the link and pass juice, however it just won't be indexed and therefore not show in the SERPs.
Page A will therefore pass juice (using its follow) to any pages linking off it.So if Page A links to Page Z, juice from X will page through A to Z (being diluted by A)
-
Hi Richard,
I didn't mean nofollow, but noindex,follow. Imagine this situation:
Page A has noindex,follow
Page B has index,follow
Page X has 1 internal link to page A and 1 internal link to page B
Will the linkjuice from page X divide between page A and page B? Or will page B get all the juice (since page A is not indexed?).
Thanks,
Stefan
-
If you have 10 links and 5 are no-follow, only the remaining 5 will pass juice.
-
Great tips regarding deeplinking and link distribution, thanks for that. However, I am still wondering what happens with link juice that is sent to a page with noindex,follow. Will all juice go to an indexed page instead, or will part of the juice go to the noindexed page (and get lost)?
-
Yes, rankings have dropped sitewide (according to SEOmoz web app). Unfortunately I don't have CTR data.
-
Do you have a history of;
1. Rankings
2. Impressions and CTR (Google Webmaster Tools)
-
Directories allows you to target deeper pages, so I would start with some strong sites there. If you run a clothing store, then target some deep links into Shoes, Mens Clothing, Outdoor, etc.
-
a) to EGOL's point, I would get more juice by obtaining more links from high quality sites. I like getting Facebook LIKE icons on each product as well as ShareThis so that you, as well as others, can share the products socially. (share through the ShareThis and using the LIKE button on the page shows others who are visiting that people are interacting with the product and encourages them to do so also).
a1) When building links, try to get good link into the product category pages and not all to the home page. If the deeper you go, the juice gets diluted, build strong inbound links to deeper pages.
b) I would evaluate how your juice is distributed on the site. perhaps you are diluting your juice too much by the time it reaches the products.
-
Thanks. We are of course working on more link juice, but it will take time unfortunately
Here's some data (all organic):
Traffic
May 1-15: 2.900
June 1-15: 1.600Landingpages
May 1-15: 750
June 1-15: 530Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 2.000
June 1-15: 1.300And i've broken it further down into short vs long tail (1-2 word phrases and 3+ word phrases):
SHORT TAIL
Traffic
May 1-15: 1.400
June 1-15: 1.000Landingpages
May 1-15: 550
June 1-15: 400Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1.000
June 1-15: 700LONG TAIL
Traffic
May 1-15: 1.500
June 1-15: 600Landingpages
May 1-15: 200
June 1-15: 130Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1000
June 1-15: 600As you can see, both the number of traffic sending keywords and landing pages have dropped significantly for both short and long tail terms. These really seems like a sitewide trend and followed shortly after we doubled the number of product pages. According to Google Trends and our supplier there's no noticable drop in search volumes or orders (this is a product that's been sold throughout the year).
How would you act upon this?
-
I agree with Dan. Let this go for a while to see what happens.
... more important.... before I went to tearing up the site I would go get more linkjuice.
-
Hi!
I would be very careful about guessing what caused the drop in traffic to begin with, before you go adding noindexes everywhere.
Try to find a correlation to the drop in traffic. Did rankings drop? CTR? Amount of brand searches? What type of organic traffic dropped, long-tail or head terms? Also, you may want to compare the amount of unique visitors compared to the past and check the amount of new visits compared to the past.
I'd investigate a little more before taking action.
-Dan
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
-
Link in my blog to external pages - no follow?
Hi everyone. I'm quite new to SEO (started 6 months ago, but I'm very lucky to work the company that is willing to pay while I'm learning). I also create some content for the website - I write wood flooring industry blog. Following some advise from few SEO experts around the world whom I follow I have decided to write 1-2 off topic blogs/month but I have found the way of writing off topic but in reality bringing together wood flooring industry and let's say fashion industry. My question is - if I want to link to one or two pages (let's say bug fashion brands) shall I use no-follow link? I do not want to harm my website or theirs. Can those type of posts be the part of building my position within my industry and in general, building authority of my website? Of course appart from getting links TO my website. Tom
Technical SEO | | ESB0 -
How to optimize for new subdomain when root domain has all link juice and built up authority?
We recently took control of a root domain for a business that was not doing e-commerce. They just had a single page business card website at the root domain. However, it had been around long enough to have built up some amount of domain authority and link juice. When we took over to enable the site with e-commerce, we redirected the root domain to point to a www subdomain where the store is now located. Now, in my seomoz campaign, i see that all the link juice and authority stats are in the root domain metrics, and the subdomain we are tracking has nothing. What is the best way for me to take advantage of all the built up authority for the root domain to help with the newly enabled ecommerce site at the subdomain? or am I basically starting from scratch since i have been reading that link juice does not flow as well from root domains to subdomains. thank you and happy new year to all!
Technical SEO | | devinjy0 -
Similar pages: noindex or rel:canonical or disregard parameters?!
Hey all! We have a hotel booking website that has search results pages per destinations (e.g. hotels in NYC is dayguest.com/nyc). Pages are also generated for destinations depending on various parameters, that can be star rating, amenities, style of the properties, etc. (e.g. dayguest.com/nyc/4stars, dayguest.com/nyc/luggagestorage, dayguest.com/nyc/luxury, etc.). In general, all of these pages are very similar, as for example, there might be 10 hotels in NYC and all of them will offer luggage storage. Pages can be nearly identical. Come the problems of duplicate content and loss of juice by dilution. I was wondering what was the best practice in such a situation: should I just put all pages except the most important ones (e.g. dayguest.com/nyc) as noindex? Or set it as canonical page for all variations? Or in google webmaster tool ask google to disregard the URLs for various parameters? Or do something else altogether?! Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | Philoups0 -
Duplicate Home Page content and title ... Fix with a 301?
Hello everybody, I have the following erros after my first crawl: Duplicate Page Content http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Duplicate Page title http://www.peruviansoul.com http://www.peruviansoul.com/ http://www.peruviansoul.com/index.php?id=2 Do you think I could fix them redirecting to http://www.peruviansoul.com with a couple of 301 in the .htaccess file? Thank you all for you help. Gustavo
Technical SEO | | peruviansoul0 -
Inter-link Optimization for Pages
Hi Guys, How much interlinking is okay for between pages? Can i start link my internal pages like Wikipedia does? 20,30 interlink per page? OR is it all depends on Page Authority? Can i go inter-link crazy on 1 year old legitimate site? Big Thanks?
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Will loading ads in an iframe increase page response time?
We are experiencing slow response time because our pages are ad heavy. If we load ads in an iframe, will the google bots, when indexing the page, count the time it takes for the contact within the iframe to load? Or is that load time separate from the total page response/load time?
Technical SEO | | kbbseo0 -
Mask links with JS that point to noindex'ed paged
Hi, in an effort to prepare our page for the Panda we dramatically reduced the number of pages that can be indexed (from 100k down to 4k). All the remaining pages are being equipped with unique and valuable content. We still have the other pages around, since they represent searches with filter combination which we deem are less interesting to the majority of users (hence they are not indexed). So I am wondering if we should mask links to these non-indexed pages with JS, such that Link-Juice doesn't get lost to those. Currently the targeted pages are non-index via "noindex, follow" - we might de-index them with robots.txt though, if the "site:" query doesn't show improvements. Thanks, Sebastian
Technical SEO | | derderko0 -
"Too Many On-Page Links" Issue
I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page. The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/ Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?
Technical SEO | | BethelMedia0