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
-
Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content. And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rignite0 -
Page has Noindex, nofollow, still ranks #1
Hi there, I have a question about a few pages on our site, whom has a no index, nofollow meta tag but they are still indexed and even rank number one in our market for the term. How is that possible or is it that Google just ignores the tags when they think it´s an error from our side? The url is www.drogisterij.net/kilo_killer and the keyword is kilo killer. We rank number 1 if you search from Google.nl Anyone have seen it before and know why this might be? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JaapWillemDrogisterij0 -
Ecommerce website with too many links on page
Hi, I'm working on onsite seo for an ecommerce website and my recent report has shown that I have a high number of pages where there are 'too many links on page'. Does anyone have tips on how to avoid this when we're using mega menus, plenty of navigation for the user and links to products on each page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Will_Craig1 -
'No Follow' and 'Do Follow' links when using WordPress plugins
Hi all I hope someone can help me out with the following question in regards to 'no follow' and 'do follow' links in combination with WordPress plugins. Some plugins that deal with links i.e. link masking or SEO plugins do give you the option to 'not follow' links. Can someone speak from experience that this does actually work?? It's really quite stupid, but only occurred to me that when using the FireFox add on 'NoDoFollow' as well as looking at the SEOmoz link profile of course, 95% of my links are actually marked as FOLLOW, while the opposite should be the case. For example I mark about 90% of outgoing links as no follow within a link masking plugin. Well, why would WordPress plugins give you the option to mark links as no follow in the first place when they do in fact appear as follow for search engines and SEOmoz? Is this a WordPress thing or whatnot? Maybe they are in fact no follow, and the information supplied by SEO tools comes from the basic HTML structure analysis. I don't know... This really got me worried. Hope someone can shed a light. All the best and many thanks for your answers!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
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 -
Too Many On Page LInk
The analysis of my site is showing that I have a problem with too many on-page links. Most of this is due to our menu, and wanting users to be able to quickly get to the shopping category they are looking for. We end up with over 200 links in order to get the menu we want. How are other people dealing with a robust menu, but avoiding getting dinged for too many links? One of our pages in question is: http://www.milosport.com/category/2176-snowboards.aspx
Technical SEO | | dantheriver0 -
Too many on page links
Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important. But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590