Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
-
Hello Mozzers,
I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow.
-
My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ?
-
Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated?
Any thoughts greatly appreciated
thanks
Pete
-
-
Hello Dirk & Mike
Many thanks for you advice and feedback.
Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url.
Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell..
Many thanks for taking the time to explain.
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
Personally I am not a big believer in trying to funnel link juice across the site - but theoretically yes, if you reduce the number of (unique) links on the home, the more link juice is passed to the categories below.
On the other side, the fewer links you have on the homepage, the more you are pushing content deeper in your site (number of clicks from the homepage to reach pages).
The other point - you can structure your URL anyway you want (best is to keep them quite simple so that they are easy to remember and not too long). For the depth - Google is looking at the number of clicks to reach this page (starting from home) - they are not counting the number of "/" in your url.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Edit: you might want to check these resources: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2316757/matt-cutts-on-linking-guidelines-how-many-links-on-a-page - and this one https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
-
Pete,
You shouldn't have more than 200 links on one page. I don't see why you would need so many duplicate links, a few yes, but 50%?
2c
Thanks,
- Mike Bean
-
Hi Dirk,
Many thanks for your assistance and advice. The homepage does look quite busy with alot going on, thats why I thought it would be better to have the homepaqe more about branding etc and less about the trying to get every category etc on there etc on there as we are small business, so building trust /brand etc is vital as we can't compete with the majors who seem to have an instant advantage with higher da etc .. Most users come in on a category landing page as oppose to home to so I think that would improve user experience and make the whole thing alot less cluttered. Then I would have the room to improve other aspects such as my diy news etc.
Am I correct in assuming though by having less links , If I was to tone the homepage down , would improve the concentration of link juice to the child pages.
Also another thing I've noticed is that my level 2 categories do not sit directly underneath my level 1 categories from a URL point of view. We were wondering if this would confuse google even though we have everything in mini sitemaps etc.
Many Thanks
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
No need to worry about the duplicate links - to quote Matt Cutts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ) - nothing to worry about (as long as it's not 5000 internal links with over optimised anchor)
266 links on the home is a lot - but not an amount of links that is surprisingly high for an average e-commerce site (especially with the duplicates). Regarding the number of links I would rather think about usability than SEO. If having this much links on the page is making it easier for your visitors to go through your site - keep them. If this number of links is making them confused - try to reorganise & regroup the links. A small user test with a few people not too familiar with your site can learn you a lot about the usability factor and how many people are actually using the links to navigate (vs just using the internal search function)
Hope this helps,
Dirk
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
-
Rankings rise after improving internal linking - then drop again
I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position. My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely? Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hjsand1 -
Does Navigation Bar have an effect on the link juice and the number of internal links?
Hi Moz community, I am getting the "Avoid Too Many Internal Links" error from Moz for most of my pages and Google declared the max number as 100 internal links. However, most of my pages can't have internal links less than 100, since it is a commercial website and there are many categories that I have to show to my visitors by using the drop down navigation bar. Without counting the links in the navigation bar, the number of internal links is below 100. I am wondering if the navigation bar links affect the link juice and counted as internal links by Google. The Same question also applies to the links in the footer. Additionally, how about the products? I have hundreds of products in the category pages and even though I use pagination I still have many links in the category pages (probably more than 100 without even counting the navigation bar links). Does Google count the product links as internal links and how about the effect on the link juice? Here is the website if you want to take a look: http://www.goldstore.com.tr Thank you for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onurcan-ikiz0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
Sponsored blog - pass any link juice?
Hello there, If a quality blog in our specific niche writes an article about us which is clearly labelled "sponsored post" as we have either paid them or given them a product, will Google discount that link going back to our website? Should we request for the link to be "no-follow"? Thanks Robert
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page
Scenario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links. Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0