Yes it will.

Hi Mathew,

There was an interesting discussion on this subject on another question thread here

There was no definite yes or no to your question, some people experienced the penalty being passed over and others didn't. In theory, if 301's passed penalty, webmasters could 301 all their "dead" sites to competitors and this would be a mission for Google to control should the 301 pass over the penalty.

Based on Rands comments in that thread, he believes 301's dont pass on any penalties and it may be due to other factors that contribute to the low rankings on the new sites since implementing the 301.

My suggestion would be to go ahead and do the permanent redirect. As you say, you cant afford loosing return customers. Let us know how it goes.

Greg

Great insight John, thanks for the words of wisdom.

What are you thoughts regarding sub-domains? You could have also created a sub-domain and geo targeted a specific country for each.

Example:

www.website.com (Global)

uk.website.com (UK Only)

au.website.com (Australia Only)

I'm not sure if sub-domains or new domains have more weight than the other, but it makes sense to keep the site and brand as a whole intact rather than creating new domains and just geo target each for their respective country/audience.

Greg

Its not bad at all in my opinion, especially if its a sub domain.

All its going to do is pass on SEO value to your root domain.

If you'd like to keep the link juice on your blog intact, you could make the menu links no-follow.

Greg

Relevance is important, but then so is the domain authority and trust.

A link from a news website for example. Its unrelated, but can provide a powerful boost for your websites "trust"

Your main objective in my opinion should be to get links on relevant websites, however you can mix the two by getting links from high authority, unrelated websites as well. There are a few guest bloggers on SEOMOZ who link to their companies websites totally unrelated to SEO,

lets say you already had a mix of relevant as well as unrelated high authority links and you had to choose between DA80 (unrelated) and DA40 (related)

I would go with the most powerful site, DA80

Greg

Agreed. I'm keen to watch the vids as well.

I would email each webmaster and save the corrospondance so that you can atleast prove to Google that you have tried to remove the links when you send your next Reconsideration request.

We wernt hit by any penalties, but after running the detox tool, we found a few sites that had been deinexed and got a decent response rate when asking for the link to be removed

If we ever get hit by a dodgy link penalty, we can at least provide some proof that we tried to clean up our link profile.

Greg

Its all speculation at the moment, so the fear mongering is rampent.

In short, yes, bad backlinks can have a negative effect on your site, but it depends on how well established your site is. Negative SEO is real, but depending on the severity of the dodgy links, google just discredits them and asks you to get rid of them, rather than slapping you with a penalty.

When you say, you are afraid of "going out there" what is is that you are afraid of? Just don't be manipulative, get links on relevant websites and you have nothing to worry about. Just forget about trying to manipulate rankings, build relationships with other webmasters, after all, 1 great link is better than 50 suspect / low value links that take hours to "build"

It would be great if their was a plugin or Feed setting that automatically added the canonical tag for you, but im not sure about that.

If they are scraping the content via feeds, then you could include a link to the same page in the content.

Create a link in the content linking to the page URL so that when people scrape the content, the link will still be on other websites, linking to the original source. (do this creatively, perhaps hyperlink the page title in the article)

Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first.

Greg

Hi

You have 2 options.

1.) Add a rel=canonical tag on their page with the URL to the original content on your website.

2.) Link to the original content via a URL or text link on their pages

From Matt Cutts:

_We've had a lot of interest in these meta tags, particularly in how the syndication-source tag relates to rel=canonical. After evaluating this feedback, we’ve updated our system to use rel=canonical instead of syndication-source, if both are specified. _

If you know the full URL, rel=canonical is preferred, and you need not specify syndication-source.

If you know a partial URL, or just the domain name, continue using syndication-source.

We've also had people ask "why metatag instead of linktag"? We actually support both forms for the tag, and you can use either. However, we believe the linktag form is more in line with the spirit of the standard, and encourage new users to implement the linktag form rather than the metatag form we originally proposed.

Source

Greg

I would email each webmaster and save the corrospondance so that you can atleast prove to Google that you have tried to remove the links when you send your next Reconsideration request.

We wernt hit by any penalties, but after running the detox tool, we found a few sites that had been deinexed and got a decent response rate when asking for the link to be removed

If we ever get hit by a dodgy link penalty, we can at least provide some proof that we tried to clean up our link profile.

Greg

Great insight John, thanks for the words of wisdom.

What are you thoughts regarding sub-domains? You could have also created a sub-domain and geo targeted a specific country for each.

Example:

www.website.com (Global)

uk.website.com (UK Only)

au.website.com (Australia Only)

I'm not sure if sub-domains or new domains have more weight than the other, but it makes sense to keep the site and brand as a whole intact rather than creating new domains and just geo target each for their respective country/audience.

Greg

Creating links on different websites is the key... Submitting multiple articles to the same websites/Directories wont have as much of an effect as if you submitted to other websites.

I have also heard that links in article directories and web 2.0 sites are devalued by Google as they are easily "created" and not "Earned"

If i was you, I would search Google for websites looking for guest authors and submit your article to those websites.

Search this in Google and you should get a few websites to submit your articles too.

"keyword"+“Guest bloggers wanted” OR “guest blogger wanted”

Greg

Yes it does effect your rankings.

I cant say how much, but is definately a factor that Google considers when ranking your pages.

Make sure you are using a reliable host as not only Google gets mad when pages become unavailable.

Greg

Thanks, that makes sense YouON. I could create interesting/funny/entertaining videos on YouTube for brand awareness, and more product/tour orientated videos on my site for  pre-selling and SEO

Thanks for the advice everyone

Greg

Hi,

I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates.

The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date.

The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links.

Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain.

My intention is to:

1. Shut down the old site
2. Focus all attention on building up content on the new website
3. Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...)
4. Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site
5. Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage

Sounds good, right?

But there is one issue I need some advice on...

The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site.

I call these my "black sheep pages".

So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death?

OPTION A:

oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com

OPTION B:

oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com

OPTION

oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com

My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique.

What would you do?

Help

Meaning heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) are a critical part of good on-page optimisation. Fair enough. It helps humans and bots make sense of a page's content.

3 questions regarding implementation of heading tags:

1. Should heading tags appear in sequence in the HTML code. I.e. H1 first, then H2 lower down, etc.?

2. Can the page contain more than one H1 tag?

3. Can the page contain multiple H2, H3, H4 tags?

As long as YOU know that you don't promote your site via porn/gambling sites then who cares? Explain to them your sites history and then they wont jump to conclusions when they see your link profile.

Its impossible to remove that link anyway, unless you contact the web-master.

GREG

After testing that code in an HTML viewer, I would say no, Google wont see that as a link.

Could you give me a real example of the link?

Greg

It would be great if their was a plugin or Feed setting that automatically added the canonical tag for you, but im not sure about that.

If they are scraping the content via feeds, then you could include a link to the same page in the content.

Create a link in the content linking to the page URL so that when people scrape the content, the link will still be on other websites, linking to the original source. (do this creatively, perhaps hyperlink the page title in the article)

Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first.

Greg