Google Discounting Pages Heavy on Links?
- SEO |
I've noticed recently (but imagine this happened farther in the past), that sites that SHOULD be the authority on say a certain collection within a brand, if their collection page has a very brief introductory paragraph or none at all, followed by a very good looking listing of the models within the collection, maybe 8-12 models each with the specific model title a link, their pages are ranking lower than individual model pages for several 'lesser sites'
Now obviously on-page attributes are just part of the algo, and the SERPS can be manipulated to a degree, but I'm seeing more widespread occurrences of this than isolated ones. One thing I noticed that also may contribute is that looking at the source, the page is obviously SEO optimized as the model names are also in the link title attributes and the img alt tags. This is standard good HTML practice though, but it makes the page flooded with the collection name appearing several dozen times since it is in all these different HTML attributes, and the link text for each model.
Has anyone else noticed something similar and decided to de-optimize their page and remove the target keyword from some of the tag attributes? Possibly write more content for the page?
It seems Google is heavily favoring pages with a 'balance' between text, images, and links and doesn't like tons of links. But if you are navigating an online catalog of sorts where you have to drill down to details through a hierarchy, pages with lots of links are virtually inevitable from a browsing perspective.
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