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Hi, One site I work with unpublished a lot of thin content. Great idea, right? These unpublished pages were then 301'd up to the main category page that they previously existed in. Now Google Webmaster Tools calls them out as soft 404 errors. This seems unexpected since the pages were 301'd. Here is my question; Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results and if so what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy

Besides crawling with a bot, what kind of info about site construction, html, etc does Google get via users via alternate methods? Thanks... Darcy

GWT calls pages that have "noindex, follow" tags "access denied errors." How is it an "error" to say, "hey, don't include these in your index, but go ahead and crawl them." These pages are thin content/duplicate content/overly templated pages I inherited and the noindex, follow tags are an effort to not crap up Google's view of this site. The reason I ask is that GWT's detection of a rash of these access restricted errors coincides with a drop in organic traffic. Of course, coincidence is not necessarily cause. Should I worry about it and do something or not? Thanks... Darcy

Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow."  These old pages are in Google's index. At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy

I'm working on a site that has some non-productive pages without much of an upside potential, but that are linked-to externally. The site also has some productive pages, light in external links, in a somewhat related topic. What do you think of 301ing the non-productive pages with links to the productive pages without links in order to give them more external link love? Would it make much of a difference? Thanks... Darcy

I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy

Would you take the time to fix external links on your site on pages that are noindex, follow on pages that no one ever visits? The only reason to do it would be to present a tidier site to Google, but would it really care if those pages are noindex/folllow? The thing that makes it a non-trivial amount of work is that there are hundreds of these on a large site. Do you think Google cares, if they're noindex/follow? I know the safe answer is always fix everything, but really it has to get weighed against the likely benefit and other projects with a limited amount of time to work with. Best... Mike

Since Google shows more pages indexed than makes sense, I used Google's API and some other means to get everything Google has in its index for a site I'm working on. The results bring up a couple of oddities. It shows a lot of urls to the same page, but with different tracking code.The url with tracking code always follows a question mark and could look like: http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example http://www.MozExampleURL.com?another-tracking-examle http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example-3 etc So, the only thing that distinguishes one url from the next is a tracking url. On these pages, canonical tags are in place as: <link rel="canonical<a class="attribute-value">l</a>" href="http://www.MozExampleURL.com" /> So, why does the index have urls that are only different in terms of tracking urls? I would think it would ignore everything, starting with the question mark. The index also shows paginated pages. I would think it should show the one canonical url and leave it at that. Is this a problem about which something should be done? Best... Darcy

I recently started working on a site that has thousands of member pages that are currently robots.txt'd out. Most pages of the site have 1 to 6 links to these member pages, accumulating into what I regard as something of link juice cul-d-sac. The pages themselves have little to no unique content or other relevant search play and for other reasons still want them kept out of search. Wouldn't it be better to "noindex, follow" these pages and remove the robots.txt block from this url type? At least that way Google could crawl these pages and pass the link juice on to still other pages vs flushing it into a black hole. BTW, the site is currently dealing with a hit from Panda 4.0 last month. Thanks! Best... Darcy

I read this interesting moz guide: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt, which I think answered my question but I just want to make sure. I take it to mean that if I have category pages with nothing but duplicate content (lists of other pages (h1 title/on-page description and links to same) and that I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct? Again, don't want the category pages to index or have a duplicate content issue, but do want the category pages to be crawled enough to distribute their link authority to individual pages. Given the scope of the site (thousands of pages and hundreds of categories), I just want to make sure I have that right. Up until my recent efforts on this, some of the category pages have been robot.txt'd out and still in the site map, while others (with different url structure) have been in the sitemap, but not robots.txt'd out. Thanks! Best.. Mike

I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike

Hi, I've been looking at how various sites handle rel author tags linking to Google+ accounts to get rich snippets results. I've found more than a few that have the same code on every page, even though those actual pages clearly have different authors and some may not even mention the rel author's name. A site I'm working on has different authors for different pages. Although the convenience of putting the same rel author on every page seems dreamy, it also seems like a disaster waiting to happen, since it would appear to be trickery about who the author is and possibly one Google update away from disaster. Can you call a site owner or employee an author on pages that to the reader appear to be written by others? Am I being too cautious or what? Thanks! Cheers... Darcy

Hi, I work on a site that has a robust q&a forum. Members post questions and other members answer the questions. The answers can be lengthy, often by experts with Google+ pages and almost always by multiple member/commenters answering a particular question. Much like Moz's forum here. In order to get rich snippets results in search for a single Q&A page, what would happen if each of, for instance, 10 commenters on a page, were tagged as author?  After all, the q/a forum pages have many authors, each as author of their own comments. Or, should I pick one comment out of many and call that member/commenter the author or something else? If it matters, the person asking the question in the forum is almost always not the expert providing a ton of detailed content. Also, a question might be 8 words. One answer might be 25 to 500 or more and their might be 5 to 10 different answers. Thanks! Cheers... Darcy

I use Moz's handy Keyword Difficulty Tool to get a relative feel for difficulty and traffic and specif competition. At the same time, my experience is that a term may show a local (U.S.) search volume of, for instance, 30 visits and in the end produce hundreds of visits for position #3. This is of course accomplished through the miracle of all the other searches the page may be judged by Google to be relevant for. Hundreds at times and some times few if any. Here is my two part question: What tools or steps do you use to get a better handle on this on the front side of going for a term? What tools or steps do you use to broaden the meaning to related terms/searches over time? Thanks... Darcy

So, this would be taking a domain with a domain authority of 50 (200 root domains, 3500 total links) and, for fictitious example, going from a subject matter like "Online Deals" to "The History Of Dentistry"... just totally unrelated new subject for the old/re-purposed domain.  The old content goes away entirely. The domain name itself is a super vague .com name and has no exact match to anything either way. I'm wondering, if the DNS changed to different servers, it went from 1000 pages to a blog, ownership/contacts stayed the same, the missing pages were 301'd to the homepage, how would that fare in Google for the new homepage  focus and over what time frame? Assume the new terms are a reasonable match to the old domain authority and compete U.S.-wide... not local or international. Bonus points for answers from folks who have actually done this. Thanks... Darcy

Hi, I'm looking for how I can use a star rating for a q&a discussion or article/blog post to achieve a rich snippets search result. I'm thinking about a user rating for "Was this helpful?" 1 to 5 stars. As I look at schema.org and do and other reading on it, it looks like it's possible to rate only a set group of content types, blogs and discussions not included. However, I've seen rich snippets ratings in SERPs for blog posts, like this example https://www.google.com/search?q=erp+implementation+challenges&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=panorama+consulting+blog&client=firefox-a&hs=gId&hl=en&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&ei=QmCBUYLLCOfwiwKHhIAQ&start=20&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45921128,d.cGE&fp=eb2f15e2a98a4631&biw=2144&bih=995 On page, it looks like they used some simple span tags. So, my question is, which content type category does that fit into for rating  and is that strategy safe enough going forward? Also, are there more steps to making this work? It it is okay to have users rate the helpfulness of a discussion or article and get rich snippets, I'd kinda like to do it. Best... Darcy

I have a client who has a site in Drupal and, for reasons too complicated to go iinto, wants to host part of the site in Wordpress from a different server. So it would be like oldsiteexample.com being in Drupal and the new oldsiteexample.com/marketing and everything below /marketing being in wordpress on a different server, obviously with a different IP address. Are there SEO considerations in this? The existing oldsiteexample.com has a lot of authority/rank/traffic and don't want to inadvertently risk that. Thanks... Darcy

Hi, What tool do you recommend (and why) for best assessing your organic search competition's keywords AND that includes some kind of reasonably accurate estimate of what organic search traffic they are getting by specific page or keyword? Thanks...  Darcy

Hi, We re-did a section of a site and got rid of hundreds of pages of no longer relevant content. We 301'd the urls to the category homepage. Now, GWT calls these soft 404s. a) Should we have done something differently instead of 301ing? b) Are these hundreds of soft 404 errors a big problem or threat to how Google sees us for SEO? c) Should we correct this in some way? Thanks... Darcy

A site I work with allows registered user to post blog posts (longer articles). Often, the blog posts have been published earlier on the writer's own blog. Is posting a link to the original source a sufficient preventative solution to possibly getting dinged for duplicate content? Thanks!

Okay, here 6 different ways to measure search rank on Google U.S. and I get 6 different answers: Looking for search term "Lunch Bags" for the site Zappos (just a random example - no connection to me). SEOMOZ RankTracker - #49 SEOCentro  - #36 http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html ZendProxy.com -  #21 (an anonymizer proxy) anonymouse.org - no rank (another anonymizer) Mikes Marketing Tools - no rank http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ RankingCheck.com  - #38 Can you duplicate a similar variation? What gives? Which if any of these would you rely on? Thanks... Darcy

I have a site with about 1000 pages. I'm planning to add about 30,000 pages to it. Can increasing the footprint by such an amount all of a sudden have any negative consequences for existing organic or hoped-for benefits from new pages? Would the site draw any increased scrutiny from Google for doing this? Any other considerations? Thanks... Darcy

Here's a question I was asked recently, and I can really see going either way, but want to double check my preference. The site has been around for years and over that time expanded it's content to a variety of areas that are not really core to it's mission, income or themed content. These jettisonable other areas have a fair amount of built up authority but don't really contribute anything to the site's bottom line. The site is considering what to do with these off-theme pages and the two options seem to be: Leave them in place, but make them hard to find for users, thus preserving their authority as an inlink to other core pages. or... Just move on and 301 the pages to whatever is half-way relevant. The 301 the pages camp seems to believe that making the site's existing/remaining content focused on three or four narrower areas will have benefits for what Google sees the site as being about. So, instead of being about 12 different things that aren't too related to each other, the site will be about 3 or 4 things that are kinda related to eachother. Personally, I'm not eager to let go of old pages because they do produce some traffic and have some authority value to help the core pages via in-context and navigation links. On the other hand, maybe focusing more would have benefits search benefits. What do think? Best... Darcy

With Google's penchant for listing at times many results - one on top of the other - from the same domain, is it now advisable to not worry about having multiple pages in the same site targeting the same or very similar keywords? Is this (keyword/page internal competition) one less thing that I have to worry about or worry about less or what? Thanks! Best... Jane

Hi, I'm working with a site that has multiple sub domains of entirely duplicate content. So, the production level site that visitors see is (for made-up illustrative example): 123abc456.edu Then, there are sub domains which are used by different developers to work on their own changes to the production site, before those changes are pushed to production: Larry.123abc456.edu Moe.123abc456.edu Curly.123abc456.edu Google ends up indexing these duplicate sub domains, which is of course not good. If we add a canonical tag to the head section of the production page (and therefor all of the duplicate sub domains) will that cause some kind of problem... having a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself? Is it okay to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to that same page? To complete the example... In this example, where our production page is 123abc456.edu, our canonical tag on all pages (this page and therefor the duplicate subdomains) would be: Is that going to be okay and fix this without causing some new problem of a canonical tag pointing to the page it's on? Thanks!

Okay, so have used video to both get my pages to rank and have Google see the Youtube result as another result for the same keywords as our page(s). All good. Now I'm thinking, "Self, am I better off embedding the video on our site with a third party service other than Youtube or continuing to embed the video from Youtube?" Would I be more likely to have our page show up higher and with a little player icon in Google SERPs if I hosted it outside of Youtube? Your thoughts? Thanks!

I notice that Youtube apparently does kind of an automatic transcription. What can Google tell about a video? Is it comparing text from a voice recognition transcript? Can it take compare the waveform of a video signal and see how different a video is from another video? I'm putting together a variety of videos that are similar for different pages and wondering how much do I have to change for each video. I remember one time I attempted to launch a video that was an exact copy but with a different file name, title and tags and Youtube said, "hey, that's the same video!" Thanks!

I uploaded a video to youtube one time and then went to upload it again, but saved differently with different tags.  Youtube rejected the second upload as being the same as the first. Really, it was the same... just a different file with different tags. Now, I was thinking about making and uploading some similar but not identical videos for embedding on some web pages. Was thinking I'd make the voice overs different, but the images mostly the same montage. Do you think Youtube/Google will see it as the same video? I kind of assume that it didn't fly when I first tried it some time ago because youtube was looking at the audio in the way it can make a transcription. Do you think if the audi,o, file name, tags were different, it wouldn't matter if the video was the same? Thanks!

Hi, I have a site with a site-wide footer that currently has 28 internal links.The footer terms are the terms the pages are focused on. This footer is on every page of the site (hundreds of pages). Some pages of my site have 10 or so additional links pointing to internal and external pages (besides the footer) and some pages (like the homepage) have about 50 links besides the footer. I'm going for a half dozen new terms with new pages that I would be adding to the site-wide footer. Do you think I should trim the existing footer before adding these new terms? I guess I would remove the terms that show no real hope of ever getting to page one... like pages stuck in the 40s. Or, pages I for whatever reason don't care much if they rank or not. Would trimming it to a smaller number do more to help the remaining linked pages/terms? What do you think? Thanks!

Hi, I don't know much of anything about Google Pruduct Feeds. Here is my starting point on thia: 1. Is this really free? We'd be doing it without Google checkout, just landing on our own pages with our own checkout. 2. Where do you upload the file? 3. What determines if you come up or not as a result? Any strategy or tactics involved? 4. We're the manufacturer of a product and late to the product feed game. The description that Google has used for our products is not ours or great. How do we change that product description that Google has for our products? Thanks!

Hi, I have a client who sells consumer products and is interested in affiliate advertising. Of course, they can get set up with something like CJ.com. They are also interested in possibly using some third party software to take their affiliate effort in house and be able to offer publishers simple urls. The idea is that this might help the link profile for SEO as well. Here are my questions: Does anybody have any experience with the complication level associated with third-party software for link value path? So, relative pluses and minuses. Can anyone recommend an affiiate software that is reliable and easy to use? Any opinion on one big site to go with... CJ, GAN, someone else? Thanks!

Hi, What does it mean when seomoz shows our domain authority as 43, but our homepage authority as 52 or higher? More recently, the two used to be roughly comparable at around 52. Maybe it doesn't matter, but it did change and it makes me curious. Thanks!

Hi, I have a client that makes products that are accessories for other company's popular consumer products. Their own products on their website rank for other companies product names like, for made up example "2011 Super Widget" and then my client's product... "Charger." So, "Super Widget 2011 Charger" might be the type of term my client would rank for. Everybody knows the 2012 Super Widget will be out in some months and then my client's company will offer the 2012 Super Widget Charger. What do you think of launching pages now for the 2012 Super Widget Charger. even though it doesn't exist yet in order to give those pages time to rank while the terms are half as competitive. By the time the 2012 is available, these pages have greater authority/age and rank, instead of being a little late to the party? The pages would be like "coming soon" pages, but still optimized to the main product search term. About the only negative I see is that they'lll have a higher bounce rate/lower time on page since the 2012 doesn't even exist yet. That seems like less of a negative than the jump start on ranking. What do you think? Thanks!

Hi, I have a client who is thinking about selling ads on one site they own via something like textlinkads.com. Do you think they run any risk of exposing their other sites to scrutiny, penalties  or problems?

I have a website that has some good rank on competitive terms. Most of the organic search traffic goes to the homepage, but some generally newer and better constructed, more user-friendly sub pages get organic rank/traffic for a variety of different terms/subjects as well. Then, I have about 8 pages that are older and suck. They fail in the SERPs and there's nothing much of interest from a user point of view. Rather than do the work to completely re-do these pages, I'm thinking of just 301ing them to the homepage. My hope is that this will help the homepages terms/rank which are similar to these pages subject & terms. Do you think this will help the homepage and it's terms or merely end the existence of some old pages and sort of evaporate the link juice? Is there some way that Google might see the site on the whole as being less relevant to their shared subject matter, if these pages go away? Thanks!

Was looking at a site's webmaster tools where there are a few hundred 404s for a site. God only knows where all those urls came from or what they once were or what. Two questions; How bad is all this for the site's overall ranking? Should I just make sure they go nowhere and 301 them all to the homepage or some other possibly relevant page? Anything bad that could happen with 301ing all this away? Also, the site has no sitemap submitted to Google. Any tips on that? Thanks!

Greetings! Is there an advantage in no-following links to pages like "Terms Of Use" and "Privacy Policy"... pages one isn't trying to rank for? Of course, the idea would be to not waste link juice on unimportant pages. Your thoughts? Thanks!

Hi, Are there any facts, opinions or anecdotal evidence to suggest that a video on YouTube has to have at least x length to rank as a result in Google? Everything else being exactly equal, is a 20 second video about as likely to rank as 2 minute video? Thanks! Best...Mike

I'm working with a site that finds standard linking to spread authority to interior pages ugly. Here's what they don't like: footers tag clouds sidebar lists of links text heavy paragraphs with links a gallery of images with alt text/links So, I'm looking for other ways to link from their homepage to these less prominent pages inside the site. Here are my two questions: 1. Would something like this work, with the links under the "Specs" tab (p.s., this is just a random example and not my client): http://www.goincase.com/products/detail/CL57925/ 2. Any other ideas for spreading the authority via links from their homepage and other pages on the site to less powerful pages? Thanks! Best...Mike

I have a friend with a site that has a lot of content. Some of that content has affiliate links with no follows to affiliate urls. Those pages also have a disclosure on them about the affiliate relationship. Now, he's talking about taking some of the existing under-performing affiliate links and renting them out to another site that wants them for the link juice. He says he'd have an on-page  disclosure, a display ad for the advertiser on the page and something in the text like "you might check out our advertiser..." and then some keyword targeted link. He was asking me how risky I thought this is for him and really I don't know.Do you think Google would find this and s**t a chicken over it?  I really don't know, given that I see really blatant undisclosed rented links all the time.Of course, my easy answer to him is "don't do it," but it does make me wonder how risky that is. Also, is that a realistic site-wide penalty kind of thing or it just doesn't pass any link juice to the advertiser kind of thing? So, I'm posting here for others to weigh in on. Thanks!

Okay, so I'm working with a site that has pretty good domain authority, but the interior pages are not well linked or optimized. So, it ranks for some terms, but everything goes to the home page. So, I'd like to increase the authority of the interior pages. The client is not wild about spreading targeted juice via something like a footer. They also don't like a "Popular Searches" style link list. The objection is that it's not attractive. They currently use cute euphemisms as the linking text, so like "cool stuff" instead of "sheepskin seat covers." In that made up example, they'd like to rank for the latter, but insist on using the former. What about a slide show with alt text/links? Would that increase the authority of those pages in a term-targeted kinda way? Are there other options? Does it matter how prominent those links are, like footers not as good as something higher up the page? They currently use a pull-down kind of thing that still results in some pages having no authority. Do bots use that equally well? Thanks!

Hi, So, I have a term that would bounce around #3 to 5 for. I make a page some months ago that is solely targeted to that term. And, voila! Google sees the new page as the best result instead of the home page and the new page ranks, but at #9 or #10. Of course the homepage is a stronger page, but the new page is better targeted to that term. Using the handy SEOMoz toolbar, the homepage has a page authority of 59 and the newer interior page has 32. Both are equally functional to my purpose. Part of me just wants to 301 in the interior page to the homepage and forget about it. It would take forever to get that interior page up to a similar page authority through the magic of links. What do you think I should do. I feel like I'm channeling Wile E. Coyote. Thanks! Best...Mike

Hi, What's the best/easiest way for a client to grant access to his Google Webmaster Tools to me? Thanks! Best...Michael

Okay, so I have a client who wants me to manage their ppc on Google. It seems like either they give me access to their PPC account or I manage it via my own account and pre-bill for the cost, later supplying reports. Are those the two options? Thanks...MJ

Could changing one's physical address for a domain or going from public to private registration have a negative affect on rank? Other factors? Thanks!

Okay, so I'm working on my site, minding my own business and everything is just great. Many different terms on pages 1 -4, all inching ever upward. When suddenly, one term that got all the way to #11 gets blasted to oblivion... #75! Is there some kind of landmine one could step on that would cause that? All the other terms are fine.Nothing on the page changed since it first went up two months ago. Thanks!

Hi, Do you think an alt image tag on an image as a link is going to impart the same juice or targeting as a link with a text anchor? So, for example, if one made a clickable image link with the alt image tag of "bowling balls" would that do as much for you as the text "bowling balls" as the anchor link? Thanks! Best...Michael

Hi, How much of an SEO issue is it to have relative links vs. fully written out links, like http://www.seolinkquestion.com/my-silly-question ? If I have a site that uses relative links, should I change them all? Thanks...Mike

Hi, To what degree do you think user signals like bunce rate, time on site, pages per visit are a factor in search rank? I know Google says they don't use Google Analytics to get data (and I believe them), but I don't think they would need to use G/A to know your bounce rate and other user signals. All things being equal, wouldn't a non-blog site with a 70% bounce rate (that doubled in the last year) have a big negative to overcome in how Google sees the quality of that site and how it then ranks its terms? Thanks... Mike

I work with a site that saw their super competitive top terms drop off page one with the Farmer update. So, #4 to #12.... that kinda thing. In the last year they've added a huge catalog of 500,000 item pages. The catalog has climbed to a 76% bounce rate, where as the handful of top pages is in the 20s +/-. To date, I haven't had much of anything to do with the catalog. That makes for a sitewide average bounce rate of almost 70% which has almost doubled in the past year as the catalog has ramped up. The catalog gets a ton of search traffic and sells a lot of items via that organic traffic. I'm advocating for a variety of measures, including cleaning up the catalog: 301ing out of stock pages to the homepage 301ing 100% bounce rate pages who've had hundreds/thousands of visits over time.. Improving the user experience. Offering rainchecks for out of stock items. They generally don't believe that the huge bounce rate (bad user experience stats) is hurting their top terms on their top pages. They see it as two different issues. Any thoughts on how to present evidence that the catalog is the culprit? In researching it, I found these two quotes: "In particular, it's important to note that low quality pages on one part of a site can impact the overall ranking of that site," the Google spokesman said. and... "Google spokesman told PCMag that sites that believe they have been adversely impacted should "extensively evaluate their site quality." Not only that, but the item descriptions are straight from the manufacturer, so the pages aren't that unique text-wise. Any industry standard on catalog page bounce rates? Not that it's the only possible area of SEO improvement, because it's not. I thought those quotes were pretty conclusive, but I guess not. Is there some straight-from-Google additional info to suport this? Or, am I just wrong to focus on user experience... bounce rate, pages, time on site, etc? Thanks! Mike