Sorry Becky, I forgot to say that without some level of testing, it is almost impossible to say with any degree of certainty just what you would get from this as a site-wide task. Depending on the products, searches conducted and how Google ranks the images, you may find a good deal of additional traffic or you may find very little.

Perhaps take a control group to test and monitor the products over the course of a month to see if sales / traffic has increased.

-Andy

Hi Juris,

You are fine with a rel=nofollow. Others use a hashtag, but I'm not sure this is as good a long term bet.

-Andy

One additional point on disavowing, when looking at sites, don't automatically disavow a single bad link as a page - if you think that there is a chance you could see a link from a site you never want a link from, disavow at a domain level. Leave page-level disavows for those links where you might just not be happy with what you have this time.

-Andy

IMO it is quite natural please share your views.

Well, it's natural in as much as you didn't request them, but they will do nothing for your SEO. For this reason, I suspect you will find Google will completely ignore them.

The best links are those that are earned by creating amazing content that others want to share with their visitors, not by a link in a coupon page.

Not a legitimate link building strategy I'm afraid.

-Andy

Hi,

Have a read of this Whiteboard Friday where Rand talks about this exact issue - Number 1...

_Number one: I'm worried because I have too many links pointing to my site from one particular domain. Maybe it's a site-wide link. Maybe they just embedded you in their blogroll, and it's linking to you. This isn't a problem unless the links are coming from a highly manipulative source, in which case you'd hope they weren't linking to you anyway. But I wouldn't stress too much about it. I'll get to people pointing bad links to you in a second. If you have 80,000 links pointing to you from one particular site, don't stress. This isn't going to kill your SEO. It's not the end of the world. If there's a good, editorial, natural reason why those links should exist, it's probably going to help you. What it won't do is help you 79,000 times more than if you just had a few pages on there, but it will help. It's not a terrible thing. Don't panic. I would almost never worry about this unless the links are from particularly terrible, spammy pages, in which case you might sort of worry, right? _

-Andy

As mentioned above, some CMS's will do this and if the site isn't configured correctly, like editing the .htaccess to take care of it. then it will just sit there. It is unlikely to be causing problems, unless there are multiple homepages being generated (/home, /index.html, etc).

Ideally it should be redirected to root if for no other reason, than to bring it up to date.

-Andy

I think you need to take a look at the page and how these have been used because it sounds like you haven't understood what the actual problem is fully.

With regards to relevance, it will probably give search engines signals that this page is no longer relevant and therefore affecting the frequency of the crawl for that domain/subdomain/page

It won't do that because they aren't complete links.

This is basically a means to an end. It serves a purpose and while there are better options to achieve what they want, this is certainly not an SEO issue.

-Andy

Hi Geoff,

This isn't best practice at all. You don't want to have two or more copies of anything anywhere.

I don't even think that re-purposing any of the articles would be a good move.

Imagine that you are Google - if you see the same article in more than 2 places, what do you do? Penalise one site? Realise that both sites are owned by you and punish both sites? Don't show either article in a good position?

The only safe move here is to create amazing content for both blogs - but why have 2 blogs? Why double your effort when you could be using all the content to prop up the main site?

-Andy

That's the wrong way to try and gain backlinks Geoff. You want to build links to your main site, but you want to be creating something in one place that is going to benefit you. An external site that then links back to you from duplicated content wont do it for you.

Good linkbuilding takes time, and it starts with your content - write something that is better than others have and take to social media to promote it.

I could honestly write a book about link building - it is that involved, but start by perfecting content that others will want to share and link to.

-Andy