Plug your link leaks!

Now back in 2005 or so one key way to ‘retain’ link juice to your site or ‘money pages’ was to no follow any external links and in essence sculpt it to the essential pages.

However in mid-2009 Google said ‘wait a min, that wont work now, nofollow means = link juice is just wasted’. Jeff from Perishable Press talked a bit how to deal with Google’s no-follow policy, though while you can use those methods. Here are a few more that may be worth some implementation to help plug some ‘leaks’.

Though First…..

What IS ‘Link Juice’?

Essentially “link juice” is the flow of link power that runs through your website and out of it. Ideally we would want to optimise the flow of it through our site and tailor our links to get the best out of this flow.

Why should we care about ‘flow’? Well in an interview in March Matt Cutt said:

The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well.

This meaning the pages you link to (i.e. number of links per page) effect what gets crawled by GBot.

One Quick indication of your flow can be seen using SEO Doctor a plugin for Firefox:

Link Flow for The Nexus Home Page

Sites are given certain ‘authority’ i.e. a default value. This is then added to and to an extent taken away from by giving and getting links to that site. That is why Domain (and page) Authority should play a role in your link building and why Parasite Hosts linkbuilding is so effective.

So we are happy building links to our site; gaining in SERPs by getting higher Page and Domain Authority. Though are we hampering our efforts? what is leaking links on our site and how can we improve it?

Well read below I try and cover as much as I can on Plugging the Link Leaks in your site.

Canonicalization

The most common ‘leak’ in a site is courtesy of non-canonicalization (say that 3 times fast). Namely have your site on both http://www.thesite.tld and http://thesite.tld. They are treated as two different sites. (Government sites especially always seem to have this issue.)

To fix this issue it is now MUCH simpler then before. Just open up your WordPress Settings and ensure you have the url set there. Doing this will make WordPress automagically redirect http://www.site.tld/post to http://site.tld/post (or vice versa).

I would suggest you also check out Ana’s post on this as the comments have a fair bit of troubleshooting in them.

There is more to be said about canonicalization, but as this guide is tailored to WordPress you do not need to worry about it, as a competent SEO plugin would handle it all for you.

Meta Widget

Now this image will be familiar to a lot
of you. It is the default Meta Widget on all WordPress blog sites.

Now this widget appears on every single page of your website and in honest fact it is a redundant widget.

In most cases the ‘Entries RSS’ has been replaced by your own Feedburner or aWeber or MailChimp etc feed, or a call to action to subscribe elsewhere. So this is not needed anymore.

For ‘Comments RSS’, most blogs I have come across now have the ‘subscribe to comments’ plugin, so again this is not needed.

The ‘Log in’. Well that’s up to you. I personally just use “http://thesite.tld/wp-admin” as that is the universal Log In screen for WordPress so I would suggest removing it!

Lastly the WordPress.org link. Now if you do want to accredit WordPress you can always add their link to your BlogRoll and for the purposes of this post I would suggest scraping the whole widget to stop you leaking ‘link juice’ to 4 links on EVERY PAGE of your site!

Broken Links

Now that we know each link passes juice, if its dofollow to the site and if it’s nofollow to OBLIVION!!! One other thing that ‘wastes link juice’ are Broken Links.

Now there are two main ways I try and combat broken links and I’ll explain each in turn below.

Broken Links Plugin

The plugin checks for broken links / images in your posts and tells you about them.

Broken Link Dashboard

Nice easy to read display. One word of caution though, because it searches automatically some servers don’t blame game and you get some false positives. So verify if the links are broken by clicking on them to check.

Using Google Webmaster

Among the mired tools that Google provides one is Google Webmaster. It has MANY uses that would require longer posts than this to go through every function and every use, heck may need a book.

Though for the purposes of this post we need to look at ‘crawl errors’ section of the tool.

The two areas we have to pay attention to is the ‘Not Found’ and ‘Unreachable’ headings. (You should check the robot.txt section to, so you can ensure nothing is blocked that shouldn’t be).

I would suggest crawl down to the bottom and download it all as a CSV and go through it.

Errors that come up range from links to deleted pages (in my case tags I deleted) to misspelt links from other websites.

To plug these leaks the easiest way is to setup a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file. The essential line would be as follows:

redirect 301 /the-link-that-it-says-is-not-found http://the-redirect-url.tld

Note that you do not enter ‘http://the-site.tld/the-link-that-it-says-is-not-found’ . You take the first bit out, BUT do add it to the end URL where you want the redirect to go to.

I would suggest you redirect it to a relevant post or sitemap so to effectively funnel the link to increase a pages authority.

The RSS Button

The RSS Button is again on all the pages, do you really need it there? Some people have subscription boxes on the sidebar (like I do) or after each post. If you are one of these people then you don’t need this to be present.

Do note though Keep both email subscriptions and RSS feed options available as a fair number of people use RSS readers.

The way to remove the dupe depends in your theme. Though it most likely resides in your header.php file.

My one looked like this:

<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>”>RSS</a>

If  this seems a bit techie for you I suggest you get some help. I only know if one techie, whose customers love her, so give Kim a shout.

The alternative is to keep the icon in place but block its crawling by your robot.txt files. Check out the following article for an ideal snapshot of what yours should looks like and some information about  WordPress Robot Rules.

The ‘Home’ Button

Now a lot of people have two links to their homepage from EVERY page. One is generally their header image and the other is a link similar to what follows:

Wassup Blog Menu

The problem with this is that the link from every page has an Anchor Text that says ‘Home’ and as we know the best links should have keyword Anchor Texts, so this needs a change. (Not picking on you Sire just had your Blog open when drafting this).

What we should do then is change the Anchor from ‘Home’ to something ‘better’. Akin to this:

The Nexus Menu

I know not great but hey maybe I can rank for my blog name now :p Though be creative.

To make this change again it is dependant on your theme and most likely resides in your header.php, mine looked like this:

<a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”>The Nexus Home Page</a></li>

Again if your not comfortable doing this yourself grab a techie!

The ‘Read More’ link

I have just started to use excerpts on The Nexus,  I used to get ‘Read More’ written under it courtesy of this tidbit in my index.php file:

<?php the_content(‘Read More’); ?>

Now the Anchor ‘Read more’ Is useless and we are just wasting a linking opportunity.  Now for the majority of the time our ‘headlines’ for the post are keyword optimised. (Yes I know not in this post…I said MOST time :p) so it would be ideal to use them.

I would definitely suggest getting a techie for this as each theme has its unique pattern here and we don’t want to break anything. Saying that you will have to replace it with something along the lines of:

<?php the_content(‘<?php the_title(); ?>’); ?>”

Contact me / About / Privacy Policy / Partridge in a Pear Tree

Having a look at many sites you see that they have an About Page, Contact etc etc. Now the Hardcores would advocate to force these links on just the home page or add ‘Contact’ and ‘Privacy Policy’ etc as a link from your ‘About’ page so to restrict the Site Wide link  leak.

I however would say in the technical sense, yes it would be efficient to do this HOWEVER as a Blogger and a reader I would want these links to be easily accessible.

An example being many a time I have entered (90% I think) a Blog on an internal page and if I liked that post I would then hit the About Page, get to know more about the Author or Blog and possibly even contact him.

In regards to the Privacy Policy, if you are selling or have affiliate links on this / a post you have to let clients who come directly to the one in question that you are tracking them.

So to plug this leak what we do is noindex these pages. They are not directly relevant to your sites content so do not need to be in the serps.

This can easily be done with in the ‘edit post/page’ area in WordPress. Most SEO plugins give you this function, it will look something as follows:

Meta options in WordPress

Just hit ‘No Index’ and save the Page/post and your golden.

Archives

In my humble opinion like Meta information this is not needed on a website. Very rarely have I noticed people browsing the site via Monthly / Yearly Archives.

They are just a waste of space in your sidebar, leaking juice site wide again.

Archive Drop Down

Though this is not just a ‘link juice’ waste it can also be duplicate content, plus throw in pagination. and we have leakage! I’ll discuss a fix for this under the next heading.

Categories / Tags

You will see on every site that tags and categories appear on every single post. So every post links to at least 1 category and 1 post. i.e. it passes some ‘link juice’. What we need to do then is maximise their potential.

Now some advocates say pick one and noindex/nofollow the other. I disagree. I think you should pick your tags and categories carefully so when all this juice starts flowing to them the actual tag and category pages will start ranking.

As with tags your theme hopefully instead of giving the full posts provides excerpts for the posts. So not creating duplicate content and providing a link back to your related posts.

Pagination

Pagination creates urls like http://thesite.tld/category/page1 etc etc.

The problem with this is ‘link juice’ that should or could stay in one location is divided further. The quickest method to fix this is to get rid of pagination from comments, hompe page, archives, categories and tags.

For categories and tags the easiest way is to use this plugin by Maxblogpress. It allows you to set a different number of posts to display at different areas.

different post per page setting page

Set the amount so all your posts for each tag / category are displayed on one page and you are good to go.

The benefit of this is that every post in that category / tag will link back to that ONE page and that page will then link back and re distribute the ‘Link Juice’ throughout that page.

To remove pagination from the Homepage it a simple process of removing the code from your index.php. Mine looked like this:

<ul>
<li><?php next_posts_link(‘PREVIOUS POSTS’) ?></li>
<li><?php previous_posts_link(‘NEXT POSTS’) ?></li>
</ul>

again if you are not to techie ask for help.

In my opinion pages are not needed, as new posts will be on front so crawled via that and old pages are embedded via your category and tag pages. Not to mention your html / xml sitemaps. (you do have those right )

For comment pagination go to Settings > Discussion in your WordPress Dashboard and make sure the following is unselected.

This will keep all your comments on one page.

Conclusion

The above I hope are a number of areas in which I personally feel effect the flow of ‘Link Juice’ throughout your site. It may be overkill, it may not be a full list (if you have more let me know!), I know for one I have purposely avoided the loss of ‘Link juice’ via comments.

Some Further reading on the topic:

Link juice flow control – How posts with more links can be used to ‘power’ less linked posts.
Site structure for SEO – How to set up your site with SEO in mind (helps retain the juice).

Concluding thought, A WordPress site that is setup with SEO in mind and ‘flow’ is controlled within that site, throw in some good links and it is a VERY powerful SEO base for any project.

So keep in mind that ‘Link Juice’ flows from Off Site SEO, arguably the more important factor to your strategy as without incoming links, your site wont have much ‘juice’ to distribute!

Comment Below and Gets some Link Juice From Me

As a reminder to people who use CommentLuv to build links make sure your feed is setup correctly so not to loose ‘link juice’ that way . (The post is a bit dated but its still something to check in your settings in Feedburner/Feedproxy).

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