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If your planning on adding several different article directories why not have a main articles link from main navigation, then have droop down menus for sub directory articles? So it would look something like this:

/articles/

/articles/buying-guide/

/articles/software/

/articles/hardware/

etc, etc, etc.

Or you could have your main articles landing page list all links under various sub categories with H tag titles separating the directories.

Are you talking about internal or external links, or both? All internal links should be updated to the preferred page. There is an htaccess that will make your non www redirect to www, and also .com/ redirect to .com or vice versa. If your internal links are pointing to a page that redirects to another page, I would say that is not good and would advise to update to the preferred page right away.

If your talking external links, there is really nothing you can do about that. I get links to my site from sites I never even heard of before and they tend to get the wrong url on my site as well. Just build a 404 error page to visitors who land on a wrong page can easily navigate back to a page on your site.  For all future external linking strategies, use the preferred landing page. I wouldn't recommend linking to a redirected page if at all possible.

Hope I understood your question correctly and my reply is helpful.

I would still take precautions to not end up with duplicate content. Its an easy fix, so why take the chance. Hers an excerpt from google webmaster tools for using canonical tag.

If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. Our algorithms select the page we think best answers the user's query. Now, however, users can specify a canonical page to search engines by adding a element with the attribute rel="canonical" to the section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google: "Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results."

per google webmaster tools:

If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. Our algorithms select the page we think best answers the user's query. Now, however, users can specify a canonical page to search engines by adding a element with the attribute rel="canonical" to the section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google: "Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results."

Does the CMS have a SEF plugin that can help make each page unique to the title, description and keywords that you enter when adding new pages? I am pretty sure Joomla has a feature like this and would think most cms applications would.

Business.com external links are no follow, which is in accordance with Google paid links policy, so you would get no seo benefit from buying a link from business.com. I don't think many people would use business.com to find a service or product anyways...They would most likely just use google.

I think google's stance is that any paid links for search engine ranking purposes is bad. Purchased links for advertising purposes is ok. If your purchasing internal links from directories for the sole purpose of rankings, I think google will pick up on that and end up penalizing you sooner or later.

Well, the answer would be yes and no. A robots.txt file would stop the bots from indexing the page, but links from other pages in site to that non indexed page could therefor make it crawlable and then indexed. AS posted in google webmaster tools here:

"You need a robots.txt file only if your site includes content that you don't want search engines to index. If you want search engines to index everything in your site, you don't need a robots.txt file (not even an empty one).

While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site, or the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results."

I think the best way to avoid any conflict is applying the rel="canonical"  tag to each duplicate page that you don't want indexed.

You can find more info on rel canonical here

Hope this helps out some.

email sent. your most welcome. Hope it helps.

I used funnelweb profiler. Let me see if I can Print or copy and paste the results for you. Ill post back here shortly.

edit:

Where would you like me to send the results? its exporting into html documents.

In running your site through some tools I think you are hurting for ranking for your desired keyword phrase is because your lacking quality inbound links using that phrase as anchor text. The inbound links that do use that anchor text have poor or low page rank.

There seems to be 19 broken links on your site and 43 invalid urls. 6 pages have too many links, over 160, 54 pages have no keywords, though that may be irrelevant now as SEMOZ says keyword meta-tag is no longer needed, and there is also 24 pages with missing description tag.

I am also showing 109 alt attributes that are missing and these could be a big help with backing up keywords.

I wold suggest joining the chamber of commerce and try getting some quality local links back to your site for your targeted keyword as a start.

I think the way you are suggesting would appear to be keyword stuffing. Proper title should appear in more of a short statement, like the following:

Mens leather boots and footwear at bootsjeansandleathers.com

The above would appear to be a more natural flow of text in a statement form while still encapsulating your keywords. Try to target only one to two keyword phrases per web page. otherwise your diluting your page and losing its focus.

Per google webmaster tools:

Removing an entire directory or site

In order for a directory or site-wide removal to be successful, the directory or site must be disallowed in the site's robots.txt file. For example, in order to remove the http://www.example.com/secret/ directory, your robots.txt file would need to include:
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /secret/
It isn't enough for the root of the directory to return a 404 status code, because it's possible for a directory to return a 404 but still serve out files underneath it. Using robots.txt to block a directory (or an entire site) ensures that all the URLs under that directory (or site) are blocked as well. You can test whether a directory has been blocked correctly using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools.

Only verified owners of a site can request removal of an entire site or directory in Webmaster Tools. To request removal of a directory or site, click on the site in question, then go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL. If you enter the root of your site as the URL you want to remove, you'll be asked to confirm that you want to remove the entire site. If you enter a subdirectory, select the "Remove directory" option from the drop-down menu.

I would suggest no index no follow in the old sites robots.txt file. Take down entire site with exception to a blank index page with text stating your site has moved to the new location, and the robots.txt file. I would not have a hot link to new site.

Then bring up the new site. On the next indexing, google should pick up the no index no follow from old site and start the indexing for the new site. I think that would be the best option so that you don't miss out on any potential business or orders.

Are they internal missing links or external missing links?

If internal, then that would be a big problem.You can click on the link that will show you three options. Error details, in sitemap or linked from. Make sure none are from sitemap.

If external, not so much a problem because it would be beyond your control as to who is trying to link to your site. My webmaster tools show missing links all the time from outside sources we have nothing to do with. I usually just contact the source and ask them to remove the link, or if its from a semi quality site Ill ask them to fix the link and give them the accurate url.

I would make sure you have a 404 error page setup for any bad urls linking to your site. Hope this helps.

I was always taught to place all original articles on site, let them get indexed by Google, then put out for distribution through various press release outlets.

With the latest penguin update, how does this practice work out concerning duplicate content? In theory, I wrote the article so I should get credit for it on my site first, then push through various distribution outlets to get it out to my targeted audience in my niche field.

Typing out loud I would tend to think if the article is on my site first then I would get credit and any others following would be hit by duplicate content if in fact google considered it a dupe violation.

Any input on this? Am I on track or am I heading for a train wreck.

1. Yes, the link juice will eventually be applied to the new page. This is part of the benefit behind 301 redirect.It sometimes just takes a little time for it to process and show up in reports.

2. The link juice or link equity will eventually pass through to new url once Google has established and indexed the new page. This could take weeks to months.

3. I would continue to optimized on a regular basis. Make sure that after each 301 redirect you also adjust all internal linking to the new page, especially in your sitemaps! Other wise it could get confusing for both visitors and bots.

Hope this helps.

We had two different product sites that ranked number 1 in google for their respective keywords. They basically had the same outside seo co strategy applied to both. Right before penguin we did a site wide makeover. Noticed some articles were duplicate or too similar and removed the dupes and applied 301 redirects. Also added the htaccess code for non www to www. Penguin comes along and wham. One fell like a rock, the other is still ranking strong at number 1.
Now how can that be? They have almost same number of pages, similar inbound links and linking footprint.
The co that did the seo work has closed down over night. So I am now left with having to try and contact tghe questionable inbound links and try and get them removed. other than that I cannot see why one flourished and the other dropped. ???

Have you updated all internal links from old to new shortened title page? Double check that first then resubmit sitemap to see if you can get re-indexed faster.

ZenCart is a popular shopping cart system as well and its free open source. Ive been happy using zencart and virtuemart for my shopping cart applications. Virtuemart Ive only used in conjunction with Joomla CMS websites. Not sure if it works as a stand a lone.

I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9.

As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles.

The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc.

Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page.

I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings.

AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table.

Thanks for any advise on this.

Thanks alsvik,

Im kind of surprised as well how long it takes. My site has maybe 50 pages, so 3-4 days seems like along time to wait to see if you cleared out all the title and duplicate content issues or any other errors. Pretty disappointing to have to wait that long. So if one slips through the cracks its make a correction and wait another week to test and see results. I just cant see how this is practical in today's fast paced seo evolving world.

Being new to seomoz Im not sure if I understand the crawl test completely. You setup a campaign, enter all your info, rogerbot goes out and crawls your site and gives you results as to what your doing right and what is wrong or could use looking into.

So once I get my results, I make edits to my site pages. In my case Im getting lots of duplicate content and duplicate titles. So I go back and make adjustments and then submit a crawl test to see the change results.

In other tools Ive used in past I was able to re run crawl immediately and fine tune results on the fly. seomoz crawl test is still pending after three days. is this normal? or is there another way to make changes and run reports to see results instantly?

If your working on many sites and making changes, having to wait 3 or more days to see how your changes were received seems like a long time.

Thanks MargaritaS, good point on the spammy links and redirecting with them. To clarify, it is the article content that is not well written and just about keyword stuffed, but not terribly. The articles look like someone use a boiler template and just replaced keywords and a sentence here and there and called it a new article.

I was thinking the best thing to do would be to bury the evidence (haha!!) and apply redirects to valued pages. Then I would have them start writing good original content in a blog.

So should I apply 40+ individual redirects? or just redirect whole directory to a single page?

Thanks again for your feedback.

A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page.

Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website?

Or do you have a better suggestion?

Thank you for the feedback and help.

I have looked up url removal in webmaster tools and it states that the page must be removed from the site. If I remove index.html I wont have a home page. Am I understanding you correctly? Heres what google states on url removal.

To remove a page or image, you must do one of the following:

• Make sure the content is no longer live on the web. Requests for the page must return an HTTP 404 (not found) or 410 status code.
• Block the content using a robots.txt file.
• Block the content using a meta noindex tag.

Please clarify when you get a moment.

I would have thought the htaccess 301 redirects from www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com would be enough.

Thank you in advance.

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently => Date => Tue, 08 May 2012 13:44:26 GMT Server => Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS) Location => http://www.domain.com/ Content-Length => 330 Connection => close Content-Type => text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

I have a site that was recently hit by the Google penguin update and dropped a page back. When running the site through seomoz tools, I keep getting duplicate content in the reports for domain.com and domain.com/index.html, even though I have a 301 rewrite condition. When I test the site, domain.com/index.html redirects to domain.com for all directories and root. I don't understand how my index page can still get flagged as duplicate content.

I also have a redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com.

Is there anything else I need to do or add to my htaccess file?

Appreciate any clarification on this.