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.
Cross Linking two related ecommerce websites
-
Hi Guys,
Hope you'll be able to help me with a technical problem I am facing right now.
We are a company right ? We own 2 webistes.
Let's say one sells car parts, the other one buys second hand car parts to refurbish them and sell them. (It is not our case, just an example very similar to ours).
Both are ecommerce websites, with large catalogues (7000 skus). sellparts sells a lot and is a big actor in its market. buyparts.com doesn't work nad has a really low DA.
My new SEO external consultant, which I am not too convinced about, is telling me to cross link the sites on product level using cross-linking extensions. He want have them do-follow.
That would mean having hundreds or thousands of links with really similar linking patterns.
buy [parts] [model ] [make]
sell [parts] [model ] [make]
That to me seems a bit too much and I am worried it compromises the sellparts site's SEO.
So should i no-follow the links ? Or do it differently ?
-
That's really true.Perhaps the best solution is to have another shop @ sellparts.com/buyparts
Perhaps the best affordable solution is to have another shop @ sellparts.com/buyparts ?
It then could be another site on the same Magento install with different shopping cart extensions.
I really appreciate your help. Thanks.
-
Keeping all of your business on one domain will help with your branding, since there is a natural overlap in buyers and sellers of auto parts. It will expose your buyparts business to everyone to comes to the sellparts domain.
My preferred method would be to keep all of the pages in folders on the sellparts domain. That is best for SEO purposes since Google does not give subdomains the full benefit of their root domain. I would work hard or pay for development to make that happen.
My very last resort would be to use a subdomain. The pages on the subdomain would not perform as well as if they were on the root domain.
-
That answer, truly, is a spot on. Combining sites is actually what our competitors are tending to do.
The matter is that buying and selling on the same site is a really tricky thing to do on a Magento based website as shopping cart aren't prepared for that and custom development is a nightmare on the long run.
One last question. What about if, buyparts would be on a subdomain where shopping carts wouldn't be shared. The development would be easier.How do you think it could affect the SEO ?
How do you think it could affect the SEO ?
Thanks.
-
If these sites belonged to me, I would not place site-wide links on either of them that point to the other. In this situation, links from BuyParts will probably be of little to no value in lifting the rankings of SellParts since it is so much stronger.
If I thought that many customers of these sites would be natural customers of the other, then I would combine the sites. I would test this by making a large pdf of parts that I am willing to buy, placing it on the SellParts domain and linking to it from several obvious places saying "we also buy parts, click here for our buy list".
That is what I would do if these sites belonged to me.
-
You are absolutely right and I am glad you pointed it. English isn't my first language...
Buyparts.com has a REALLY low traffic and revenue as no SEO work has been done on it. It receives very few orders a month although the potential is good.
Nonetheless, it will never make the profits of sellpart.com. sellparts.com represents 99% or our revenue.
Thanks
-
"buyparts.com doesn't work"
I don't want to give a response without having a clear understanding of this.
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 to fully index big ecommerce websites (that have deep catalog hierarchy)?
When building very large ecommerce sites, the catalog data can have millions of product SKUs and a massive quantity of hierarchical navigation layers (say 7-10) to get to those SKUs. On such sites, it can be difficult to get them to index substantially. The issue doesn’t appear to be product page content issues. The concern is around the ‘intermediate’ pages -- the many navigation layers between the home page and the product pages that are necessary for a user to funnel down and find the desired product. There are a lot of these intermediate pages and they commonly contain just a few menu links and thin/no content. (It's tough to put fresh-unique-quality content on all the intermediate pages that serve the purpose of helping the user navigate a big catalog.) We've played with NO INDEX, FOLLOW on these pages. But structurally it seems like a site with a lot of intermediate pages containing thin content can result in issues such as shallow site indexing, weak page rank, crawl budget issues, etc. Any creative suggestions on how to tackle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AltosDigital-10 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
How to structure articles on a website.
Hi All, Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc. So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc. My question is this
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences. My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page" Thanks Mark0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Where to link to HTML Sitemap?
After searching this morning and finding unclear answers I decided to ask my SEOmoz friends a few questions. Should you have an HTML sitemap? If so, where should you link to the HTML sitemap from? Should you use a noindex, follow tag? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290 -
Site Architecture: Cross Linking vs. Siloing
I'm curious to know what other mozzers think about silo's... Can we first all agree that a flat site architecture is the best practice? Relevant pages should be grouped together. Shorter, broader and (usually) therefore higher volume keywords should be towards the top of each category. Navigation should flow from general to specific. Agreed? As Google say's on page 10 of their SEO Starter Guide, "you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content ." OK, we all agree so far, right? Great! Enter my question: Bruce Clay (among others) seem to recommend siloing as a best practice. While Richard Baxter (and many others @ SEOmoz), seem to view silos as a problem. Me? I've practiced (relevant) internal cross linking, and have intentionally avoided siloing in almost all cases. What about you? Is there a time and place to use silos? If so, when and where? If not, how do we rectify the seemingly huge differences of opinions between expert folks such as Baxter and Clay?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DonnieCooper7