Do we need to Disallow profiles from discussions or forums?
-
Hi,
We have a forum where users create different threads like any other community...ex..Moz. Thousands of pages are getting created. New threads and comments are Okay as they have relevant content. We are planning to "Disallow" all profile pages as they do not help with content relevancy and may dilute the link juice with thousands of such profile pages. Is this right way to proceed?
Thanks
-
We have never had to nofollow internal links within any of our websites, I am sure their are some circumstances where you could, but since Google's algorithm no longer "penalizes" links I don't see a need to as they are simply ignored. Just avoid spammy tactics like having 100 links under the footer or a bunch of affiliate links, etc.
-
Hi Lure,
Thanks for the answer. We are going to de index these profile pages. Just wondering about "nofollow" as nofollowing internal links is not always correct. What's your call on this?
-
I would if I were in your shoes. Having all profile and/or comment links be "do-follow links" can cause alot of spam and potentially be the downfall to the longevity and credibility of your forum.
-
I would normally say yes, but it really depends on how good your forum is. Sometimes people like to do reputation marketing and if the site is authoritative you want to show for your name's queries that you are part of an important website with lots of contributions. But if your profile pages are not that relevant or nice or provide any interest to your users, I don't see why you'd like to let google index and serve them
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do I need to track my rankings on the keywords "dog" and "dogs" separately? Or does Google group them together?
I'm creating an SEO content plan for my website, for simplicity's sake lets say it is about dogs. Keeping SEO in mind, I want to strategically phrase my content and monitor my SERP rankings for each of my strategic keywords. I'm only given 150 keywords to track in Moz, do I need to treat singular and plural keywords separately? When I tried to find estimated monthly searches in Google's keyword planner, it is grouping together "dog" and "dogs" under "dogs"... and similarly "dog company" and "dog companies" under "dog companies". But when I use Moz to track my rankings for these keywords, they are separate and my rankings vary between the plural version and singular version of these words. Do I need to track and treat these keywords separately? Or are they grouped together for SEO's sake?
Algorithm Updates | | Fairstone0 -
Do pages with canonicals need meta data?
Page A has a canonical to Page B. Should Page A have meta data values such as description, keywords, dublin core values, etc.? If yes, should the meta data values be different on Page A and Page B?
Algorithm Updates | | Shirley.Fenlason1 -
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Profile Picture Display Next to Map on Google Search
On a recent Google search, I noticed that the top result also displayed the Google map of the location next to it but aside from that, it also displayed that business' Google+ Profile picture. I'm wondering how that is done. We have a Google+ account as well with an image associated with our business. At this point, the map doesn't even display for our business, but how does one get the map and the profile picture to appear on search results? Here's a link to the search result in question:
Algorithm Updates | | atuomala
http://www.google.com/search?q=tech+squad&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS511US511&aq=f&oq=tech+squad&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS511US511&sclient=psy-ab&q=tech+squad+wi&oq=tech+squad+wi&gs_l=serp.3..0l2j0i30l2.6041.6590.0.6592.3.3.0.0.0.0.79.158.2.2.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.4.psy-ab.DoA-PSlyt-A&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.42768644,d.cGE&fp=b5d841bb1ab219dc&biw=1440&bih=785 tech_squad_serp.jpg0 -
Google doesnt index my Google+ Profile
Hey guys! I know it sounds like a novice question, but I have checked ALL THE BOXES THAT TELL GOOGLE TO INDEX MY GOOGLE+ PROFILE. It is Visible for search - 100%. It's been 3 weeks since I opened a Google+ profile and it still hasn't been indexed for its name. Any guesses what's going on? (It's not this name so don't try to google me)
Algorithm Updates | | Yoav_Vilner0 -
Backlink profile
Hi there Thanks for everyone here for their posts. As a newbie (with dozens of SEO providers asking me to pay them!), I was wondering if there's a preferred / better backlink profile to target in light of Panda/Penguin. I get a lot of companies offering 1000's of profile creations, which seems worthless to me! Surely certain types of links (local vs international), blogs, articles etc, have more value just through the fact that they offer something to the user who sees it (and hopefully that something is sticky, high quality content!) I understand that there is no magic formula, but at least want to know whats not worth doing and working backwards from there. Any opinions from users who have ranked well recently? I've got a mailbox full of sales pitches, so would be good to see this from an expert's eyes! Thanks in advance Regards
Algorithm Updates | | avgjoe0070 -
I need help with drastic SERP difference between Bing and Google
One of our sites that has been around for a couple of years has about 60,000 pages showing on google, however, bing only shows 90 pages for the site. This same phenomenon has been happening across the board for our sites. Any ideas to improve our indexing results for bing?
Algorithm Updates | | atuomala0 -
Do we need to worry about where our domain is hosted anymore?does it make a difference anymore?
I went to a really interesting conference last week and one of the speakers who has been working in the SEO industry for 15 years now said that it doesn't make a difference anymore ranking wise. I would like to see what the community thinks on this subject? Thanks Ari
Algorithm Updates | | dublinbet0