Changing our business strategy and linking structure

Will this impact our SE rankings?

[Bradley]

Our site currently ranks well in the major search engines. I believe our site is considered a hub/authority within our industry. We have hand-reviewed over 5,000 submissions to our directory.

Currently, we have a Yahoo-style directory whereby we link to 5,000+ company websites.

We are changing our business strategy and I am contemplating the idea of changing how we link to the vendors listed in our directory. Instead of linking directly to the company's website (for free), we would only display their company name and phone number (no link to their website). If the company paid a small monthly fee, we would then create a link to their website.

Because of this new strategy, how would/could this affect our search engine rankings? We would go from linking to 5,000+ vendors to (initially)linking to just a hundred or so. Could this have a detrimental effect on our search engine rankings?

[Bradley]

Thoughts anyone?

I have two train of thoughts that are competing against each other:

1. I first think that everything will be okay if I drop all the external links because the website has sufficient inbound links to help maintain its positioning in the search engines.

2. Then I think the loss of external links will trigger a reduction in the rankings of all the pages. If an optimized category page having 10 external links drops down to zero external links, will the original optimization done on the page enable the page to continue to rank well in the SEs?

I look forward to receiving any help / personal experience regarding this.

[mil2k]

Can you give an idea of what kind of home page PR you have? also are you gonna do this modifications all at once? I suggest you can look into the possibility of doing this for a section of your site ... observing any detrimental effects and then go ahead a section at a time if time permits.

I think there should not be a problem in doing the switch. But if I were in your place I would keep one outbound link per page. HTH :)

[Bradley]

Homepage PR is a 6 or 7.....The modifications would more than likely occur all at once. I think we MIGHT be able to transition the site over to the new format over a period of time. The only thing with doing that is that the site would probably have two different designs to it.

[buckworks]

I strongly agree with mil2k's suggestion to do some smaller-scale testing before you make such a big change.

Keep in mind that the links themselves might be contributing to the optimization ... keywords in URLs, etc..

[claus]

Outside of search engines there are also such a thing as users, thought i'd just mention it...

[Bradley]

Yes, very true claus.....

There MIGHT be an opportunity to slowly transition to the new database and directory style. We shall see......

[rogerd]

Bradley, one question is how much of your inbound traffic from search engines goes directly to individual link pages. If that traffic is a major percentage of your SE referrals, I'd be pretty careful about dramatically altering the link structure. OTOH, if the traffic isn't that high, or if your business model isn't totally dependent on SE referrals, a change wouldn't be that risky. I guess it depends on your business model - I see many directories and associations taking the kind of approach you describe.