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Hello there

Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the  products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013).

My question:

Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example).

(NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.)

We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were..

Cheers,

Will

Hi Stephen

I've been using the links downloaded from Webmaster (as directed to by Matt Cutts in one of his videos IIRC) plus also the data set from Link Research Tools.  Is that insufficient? I've only got so many hours in the day as my day job is running this company...I figured taking the links that Google gave me would surely be enough...but these days who knows. G seems to want to make people jump through a lot of hoops...

Hey Marcus

Thanks for your input. Yeah, we have a lot of links but then we've been around for 7 years and weirdo scrapers and random replicants of DMOZ alone contribute a zillion links without us even having done anything. Not saying we didn't do link building back in the day (we did, just like everyone else, in what was at the time a white hat fashion but apparently no longer is) but we have had no permanent marketing team at all for the last two years as we've focused on some B2B parts of our business. So frustrating that bad links just kept growing and we're supposed to be responsible for them!

Anyway, as you say, will need to go in a bit harder I guess. eg just because a site is PR0, I didn't remove it before, as some random person with a no marks blog who used our birthday balloon picture on their blog didn't deserve to be disavowed as far as I thought. But, well, I can't take any chances now so will just have to bin anything under PR1 and take another look at links from themed websites (eg should I disavow other blogs that have added us to their blogroll unsolicited even if they're in our vertical? It's hard to tell. What about genuine flower directories? Who knows?).

What's really frustrating is that the whole message from Matt Cutts is "you really shouldn't use this tool" (ref disavow) as you could damage your site but 1. barely anyone takes links down when requested as far as I can tell and 2. given the amount of junk that's been pointed at our site that we're not responsible for (though we are are responsible for some), then I think the contention that very few people would need to use it is a bit optimistic and there's therefore a danger or people like me totally shooting themselves in the foot, given there are no clear rules on the grey areas I mention above.

PS understood that it's not some magic solution and we'll rank #1 for everything afterwards. I just want to get it cleared up and be able to get back to my day job. God knows how a smaller business than us would cope with something like this. Seems to me it pushes the advantage even further in the direction of bigger companies with the resources to manage a screw up like this.

Anyway, blah blah. Time to get the machete out.

Well, I also went through all the links manually which was the world's most boring task, then followed up with a healthcheck. Gah.

We've disavowed about 35% of all linking domains now...

Hi all

We have a link penalty at the moment it seems. I went through 40k links in various phases and have disavowed over a thousand domains that date back to old SEO work. I was barely able to have any links removed as the majority are on directories etc that no one looks after any more etc and / or which are spammy and scraped anyway.

According to link research tools link detox tool, we now have a very low risk profile (I loaded the disavowed links into the tool for it to take into consideration when assessing our profile). I then submitted a reconsideration request on the same day as loading the new disavowed file (on the 26th of April). However today (7th May) we got a message in webmaster central that says our link profile is still unnatural. Aaargh.

My question: is the disavow file taken into consideration when the reconsideration request is reviewed (ie is that information immediately available to the reviewer)? Or do we have to wait for the disavow file to flow through in the crawl stats? If so, how long do we have to wait?

I've checked a link that I disavowed last time and it's still showing up in the links that I pull down from Webmaster Central, and indeed links that I disavowed at the start of April are still showing up in the list of links that can be downloaded.

Any help gratefully received. I'm pulling my hair out here, trying to undo the dodgy work of a few random people many months ago!

Cheers,

Will

Yeah. Very odd. Oh well. I'm sure it's just a bug. I looked a minute ago using the SEOMoz Chrome plug in and for a few moments it told me that our site was based in Ireland. Erm, no.

Hi there

A simple one. I was just looking at our site in opensiteexplorer and notice that it says we have no internal links at all: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s244/sh/dd8cc88f-fee4-4ba2-8ec0-f3f8d5c408db/8d3fc3d2aa6fc9d5406051bc91731402

Rather odd as we do. Is this a bug with OSE that anyone knows about or something else?

Any ideas / thoughts gratefully received.

Hi There

I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools.

We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found.

However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control.

This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate.

Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further.

Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri..

URL    Discovery Date
http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
Sep 12, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
Sep 9, 2011

I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control.

Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves?

Thanks!

Sam.

Hi Mozzers,

We had a question about our twitter app  http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers-fun/flowers/home  This app sends messages out to tweeters for their Birthday, to say congratulations etc.

Our question relates to the fact that we are generating 1,000 of pages of content (like this:http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers-fun/flowers/message?id=394447 ) with some unique content, but these orphaned pages aren't really linked to and only have short-term traffic influx. Our question is whether these small, orphaned pages are likely to be seen as lots of random, low quality, low content pages - and whether that might hurt our Google ranking.  Sometimes the virtual cards are linked to by blogs and tweets etc, so we don't want them not indexed but equally, we don't want our rankings to be damaged by them.

Wonder if anyone has any thoughts, opinions or any similar experience?

Thanks,

Arena Flowers