How I removed 1600 unnecesary external links from my site in 5 minutes
Its always great when you have one of those "doh" moments and realize that you are doing something pretty stupid.
Over the last year I have had plenty of those moments, and the latest one was made glaringly obvious to me when I used the following SEO tool..
http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank
This tool displays a given web page in a graphical format showing all the external links that the site has. I think we all learned in SEO 101 that the less external links the better. A site will rank well if it has other sites linking to it, rather than it linking out to every man and his dog.
Anyway you can see from the image below (you may want to click on it to view it full size) the tool shows you which of the links on your page are external ones, as well as the pagerank of the sites that you are linking to.
When I did this (I have removed them now) I noticed how all the digg this, furl this and add to delicious etc were all counted as external links. Now as there were at least 4 or 5 of these on each article and over 475 articles on the site it doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that removing these would be beneficial to the SEO of this site.
I have seldom been dugg, furled or added to delicious so I guess I am not really losing much by removing them. It was just a matter of editing the template and removing the code.
If you do this don't forget to back up your template first!
Happy link pruning - I suggest you weigh it up for yourself.
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4 comments:
While you're at it, you could add a nofollow to your feedburner links in the sidebar.
I was just wondering if it would work just as well to put nofollow on certain links instead of removing them?
Well yes I didnt even think of that lol.
What a good way to stop leaking pagerank everywhere.
Hi,
Very nice article. Keep it up. Regards,
Valencia
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