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Thanks Josh,

In the main we rank very well for medium length & long tail searches about our plants, which made me confident about doing all this internal linking in the first place. It wasn't until the die was cast that I lost my nerve.

It's so hard to track rankings across so many products & keyphrase variations, especially when we add in the variables of ongoing link building & the fresh chunks of content that we added to almost all of the updated product pages when we put in these new internal links. We're tracking samples of the most valuable ones in SEOmoz campaigns and nothing dramatic has changed.

We have no accurate means of measuring whether or not these links have affected support calls & email traffic, which isn't much help! We knew this beforehand, but our reasoning was basically "how could it hurt?".

I suppose what I'm really asking for is an example of another site that has dealt with this particular issue, i.e. found a way to use (almost) site-wide links to necessary but commercially unimportant pages without draining the link juice of its important pages.

Hi,

We're doing a big content update on our product pages and I'm looking for some advice about our internal linking.

In a nutshell, the current design we're using links out from every product page (i.e. plants) to a set of accessory pages (i.e. things to help you plant the plants). The screenshot shows how this works.

The accessories we sell are a very small part of our business and don't attract significant or valuable search traffic. It's the plant pages that pull in the visits and make the money.
The reason for all these links to accessory pages is for usabilty & to reduce the volume of support calls about accessories (we get a lot of those).

So my concern is that by linking out to these relatively low value accessory pages from all of our plant product pages, we will be spilling link juice from all our important pages to a small set of unimportant ones.

Should I be concerned about this and if so, what should I do differently?

I have considered:

• Making an intermediary page, listing the relevant accessories, so  that each product page links to one intermediary page, which then links to all the accessories.
• Using nofollow on the accessory page links - there is so much info out there about this, much of it conflicting, that I just don't know if that's a good or bad idea.
• Using some kind of java-based pop-up box to list the accessory links that will hide the links from spiders.
• Linking back from the accessory pages to the relevant product sub-category pages to loop the flow of link juice.

All ideas welcome

zoBgC

But the 301 is still about a year old!

That's right: I updated the internal links a little over a month ago & the other stuff was during the last 3 weeks, with the last changes over a week ago now.

Howdy!

We're having the same issue with an important url. About a year ago, I slapped a 301 from

http://www.ashridgetrees.co.uk/Lavender

to

http://www.ashridgetrees.co.uk/Lavender-Plants

I've updated all the links on our site that pointed to the old URL and even managed to update some external backlinks. I've also built a new backlink from a respected, relevant site to the new URL, as well as tweeted & facebooked at it. Finally, I've updated our sitemap.

Despite all of this and the amount of time that's passed, the old url is still in the serps.  We have a good crawl rate and whenever we make a new page, even one that's quite deep in the site with no direct access from the main navigation, it's in the SERPs in less than a week.

Any ideas?

Our company is  Ashridge Trees

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=lavender+plants&pws=0&hl=en&num=10

Thanks!

Thank you Eric,

Speed is also one of our priorities and I'd be delighted to have good reason to buy some more server vrooom.

The charge for a listing idea was just being thorough, I doubt we really will, after all, we want backlinks. Affiliate links are a better of raising some nice lunch money.

You're spot on about the niche relevancy & user experience - we hope the directory will be popular, judging by all the calls we get about related products that we don't sell!

Was your site selling any / many products? Was there some clever tracking going on around people who left the site through the directory?

J

I've long held a business idea based on just this issue: hiring out henchmen who are paid to beat you up if you don't meet your deadlines. I'm sure a "gun to your head" option, charged hourly, could be arranged to suit your particular requirements.

I'm keen to hear feedback from anyone who has installed a directory onto their e-commerce site.

By directory, I mean that - subject to human review and possibly a small fee - a relevant site owner in my niche can create a listing that is effectively a page on my site where they control the main content, links & images.
People using our site would enter the directory section from our resources / advice top level category and browse the index of the directory to reach a listed site's dedicated page.

The idea for it came up when we were discussing ways to get more backlinks. Offering people a whole page directory listing seems like a good way of negotiating a link in return that isn't just from the other site's link page.

I'm looking for everyone's stories on this: your reasons for doing it, how you went about it and the tools you used and what your results where, in particular: was it worth it?

We aren't thinking about starting a new site for the directory, it would be added onto our main site (which is old and has good PR etc etc). However, it would still be good to hear from both sides of the fence on that issue.

Over to you.

J

I've long held a business idea based on just this issue: hiring out henchmen who are paid to beat you up if you don't meet your deadlines. I'm sure a "gun to your head" option, charged hourly, could be arranged to suit your particular requirements.