Link juice distributed to too many pages. Will noindex,follow fix this?

[DeptAgency]

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

[evolvingSEO]

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

[EGOL]

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. 

[DeptAgency]

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: 1.600

Landingpages
May 1-15: 750
June 1-15: 530

Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 2.000
June 1-15: 1.300

And 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: 1.000

Landingpages
May 1-15: 550
June 1-15: 400

Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1.000
June 1-15: 700

LONG TAIL

Traffic
May 1-15: 1.500
June 1-15: 600

Landingpages
May 1-15: 200
June 1-15: 130

Traffic generating Keywords
May 1-15: 1000
June 1-15: 600

As 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?

[Getz.pro]

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.

[Getz.pro]

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.

[evolvingSEO]

Do you have a history of;

1. Rankings

2. Impressions and CTR (Google Webmaster Tools)

[DeptAgency]

Yes, rankings have dropped sitewide (according to SEOmoz web app). Unfortunately I don't have CTR data.

[DeptAgency]

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)?

[Getz.pro]

If you have 10 links and 5 are no-follow, only the remaining 5 will pass juice.

[DeptAgency]

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

[Getz.pro]

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)

[KeriMorgret]

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.