Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi

I have a number of highly ranked category pages. However, at times these contain no products for a few weeks, etc.

They are being flagged as duplicate content as they are just stub pages when they have no products, with the same "No products found" message.

I don't want to risk 'noindex' ing the pages though - because as soon as they have products in, they become valuable pages and I would hate to lose a good ranking.

Should I just leave them as-is and ignore the dupe warnings?

Hi

We have a website which lists both upcoming and past events. Currently everything is indexed by google, with no real issues (usually it finds the most up-to-date events) and we have deprioritised the past events in the sitemap.

Do I need to go one step further and noindex events which are past or just leave it as-is? They dont really hold much value, but sometimes will have a number of incoming links and social media shares pointing to them. We want to keep the page active for visitors, just wondering about google (there's no real link between past events and future either, so difficult to 'point' to newer version of an event)

We have approx 1M 'past' events and growing so its a big change. Also would you keep them in sitemap with lower priority, or just remove them?

EDIT: Just seen a Matt Cutts post from 2014 which indicates than an 'unavailable_after' meta tag might be best?

Hi

We have a few pages within our website which were at one time a focus for us, but due to developing the other areas of the website, they are now defunct (better content elsewhere) and in some ways slightly duplicate so we're merging two areas into one.

We have removed the links to the main hub page from our navigation, and were going to 301 this main page to the main hub page of the section which replaces it.

However I've just noticed the page due to be removed has a PA of 69 and 15,000 incoming links from 300 root domains. So not bad! It's actually stronger than the page we are 301'ing it to (but not really an option to swap as the URL structure will look messy)

With this in mind, is the strategy to redirect still the best or should we keep the page and turn it into a landing page, with links off to the other section? It just feels as though we would be doing this just for the sake of google, im not sure how much decent content we could put on it as we've already done that on the destination page.

The incoming links to that page will still be relevant to the new section (they are both v similar hence the merging)

Any suggestions welcome, thanks

I'd recommend you run some A/B tests. In our experience with site revamps, it's best to ensure your visitors are happy first, whcih you can measure using conversion rates.

If you notice a big dip in conversions, something may be broken which could then have a knock-on effect with your rankings.

From a massive revamp we recently did to make things responsive (1.5M pges) we noticed an increase in most of our rankings.

But just remember - treat google as a mobile user, so if  you start simple and progressively add more content via ajax as the screen size increases, remember google may not pick these up, it will see your 'simplest' page, so make sure you don't remove any important on-page factors.

Great, thanks for the info.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be seen badly by Google as it provided a valuable tool for the website - selling tickets. The 'old way' of doing this would be for the event owner to link directly through to our website ('buy tickets here...'), but using the widget we can improve conversions - keeping to Google's rules of designing for the customer, not SEO, I think this fits the bill. Adding a 'powered by' link also enhances customer trust?

An example of another company doing something similar, is

Eventbrite: http://www.outlookfestival.com/tickets/   (they include no on page link, just an iframe but that includes a link)

Ticketscript: http://deershedfestival.com/tickets/ (an optimised keyword, and it's almost hidden (tooltip) which I'd prefer to keep away from.)

Seeing as this replaces a traditional link, which I'd very much doubt would carry a nofollow (these event organisers would not be aware of it) then would you agree that a 'powered by' link under the box would be ok without a nofollow, as long as we just use our brand as the anchor text?

How about a brandname + keyword anchor text? Such as "ticket sales powered by xyx"

Hi all

We provide online services, and as part of this we provide our clients with a javascript embeddable 'widget' to place on their website. This is fairyly popular (100s-1000s of inserts on websites).

The main workings of this are javascript (they spit html iframe onto the page) but we also include both a

<noscript>portion (which is purely customer focused, it deep links into a relevant page on our website for the user to follow)  and also a plain <p><a href=''></a></p> at the bottom, under the JS. This is all generated and inserted by the website owner. Therefore, after insertion we can dynamically update whatever the Javascript renders out, but the <noscript> and <a> at the bottom are there forever.</p> <p>Previously, this last plain link has been used for optimisation, with it randomly selecting 1 out of a bank of 3 different link anchor texts when the widget html is first generated.</p> <p>We've also recently split our website into B2B and B2C portions, so this will be linking to a newer domain with much established backlinks than the existing domain. I think we could get away with optimised keyword links on the old domain but the newer domain they will be more obvious.</p> <p>In light of recent G updates, we're afraid this may look spammy. We obviously want to utilise the link as best as possible, as it is used by hundreds of our clients, but don't want it to cause any issues. </p> <p>So my question, would you just focus on using brand name anchor text for this? Or could we mix it up with a few keyword optimised links also? If so, what sort of ratio would you suggest?</p> <p>Many thanks</p></noscript>