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Hi Dave,

Moz is actually pretty right about this. Those are duplicated versions of the same page and should have a canonical tag (or shouldn’t be generated in the first place).

You can find some more information about canonical tags here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

In your case I would check why these different URL’s are generated as well and make sure your internal links all point to one version. Screaming frog can help you map all your internal links and find any links to the duplicated versions of the pages.

I hope this helps!

Hi Via Trading,

Difficult questions since you’re asking about a border situation  on one of all the  different ranking factors out there. About a year ago I found myself trying to dive this deep into specific ranking factors as well and I found a lot of conflicts with “best practices” for ranking factors and what would make the most sense for users. Beside these conflicts I found there is a lot of exact (percentages for example) information not available in the SEO community. Looking at your questions, I think nobody is willing to invest his time in setting up large scale tests to find out how these two are correlating.  Not because the question isn’t legit, but because there are bigger ranking factors that we don’t fully understand.

When you find yourself diving this deep into a ranking factor I advise you to stick to what does make the most sense for your visitors. This way you don’t do any over optimization and you can quickly switch investing your time in more important aspects of your website (content, promotion and just plain making your product awesome).

To help you further on your question I will try to give you some more information (and my view on this topic) about your question.

1. If it makes more sense to use “liquidation channels” I would go for that one since your page will probably be about multiple channels. If this is the case then just switching your URL won’t make your page content go about one channel, it would still have content about multiple channels on it. Search Engines do a great job at recognizing this so if you want to rank for ”liquidation channel” you should probably change the  context of your webpage as well to become the perfect match for search engines. That said, I think you a web page about multiple liquidation channels can be very helpful when I look for one. In my experience you can rank for both keywords with either of the URL’s. Here is a screenshot I just took about a situation like yours I have on our own website.

http://i.imgur.com/pkfdAz3.png

With the keywords “tattoo shop” and “tattoo shops” we found it harder to rank on the singular then on the plural but with both keywords we managed to get a #1 position (we didn’t specifically linkbuild on any of those terms). Just like you I through changing my URL would increase my chances to rank for the singular (since this keyword has the most traffic). So when we expanded our business to a new industry (driving schools / rijschool in dutch). We used the singular in the URL but still found us ranking better on the plural. My bet is that this is because our page is about multiple driving schools and not just one driving school. Besides that I think our backlinks help a little to push this result as well so it’s not 100 exact science.

Backlinks are an important factor to consider as well, if you change your page about a plural into a singular but your content is still about a plural you will find other websites using anchor texts with the plural instead of the singular. So in the end, you will still have a harder time with the singular then with the plural.

2. The quick answer (this comment is already getting way out of hand ), it won’t be the full 100% per cent since a general term like that often triggers some results as Wikipedia or other descriptive sources. You will definitely have a correlation with this term but don’t expect too much from it. Your best change to also score on this term with your homepage is to make sure your whole domain is about this subject. That would make you a better fit for a general term like this. In my opinion you should focus your homepage on a more specific term that does the best job to describe your website or main product or service.

I hope this helps!

Hi Ravi,

Always use a Do follow attribute. Only in rare cases were you don't want pages indexed you could consider adding a nofollow tag but beside that, always use a Do follow.

Why: Do follow links pass PageRank and help your website score better in search engines. If you use a nofollow link your links won’t pass any PageRank and besides the homepage, your website won’t score with any pages.

There was a time people tried using nofollow tags to “sculp” there PageRank flow to help specific pages rank better. This practice doesn’t work since a nofollow tag won’t increase the PageRank flow to other Do follow links on your website.

Basically you can see a nofollow tag as a big PageRank eating black whole. You don’t want to throw your PageRank in it

I hope this helps!

Hi Landon,

I would first try to figure out if there are any communities within your industry that have a questions / answers section. If so, it might be more beneficial to focus on one or two communities and make a name for yourself (which can result in business relations and multiple backlinks from other websites).

If there aren’t any or you’re not in it for the long run I would try:

1. Search Google with adjusted filters, content from the last 24 hours for example. Something like “seo question” with a filter on the last 24 hours will give some results.
2. Set up fresh web explorer or Google Alerts for frequently asked questions. Since it will be hard for a robot to give you only the questions about your topic. Most services just return very specific phrases like brand mentions.

I hope this helps!

Hi Justin,

Could you post a screenshot of the error message and any links pointing to this URL? This way we can identify what pages return a 404. If this are important pages on your website I would fix it right now, if it however are pages you don’t use or your visitors rarely see I would make sure you pick this up with the redesign. No point in fixing this now if things will change in the near future. Besides that, sitemaps help you get your website indexed, releasing this two weeks earlier won’t make a big difference for the number of indexed pages since you won’t change your internal link structure and website authority (both help you get more pages indexed).

About your last point, could you provide me with a screenshot of this as well? When I check zenory.com/sitemap.xml I find the .com sitemap, so that part seems fine.

_PS. I would suggest you change your update frequency in your sitemap. It now states monthly, it’s probably a good idea to set this much faster since there is a blog on your website as well. At the moment you are giving Google hints to only crawl your website a few times a month. Keep in mind that you can give different parts of your website a different change frequency. For example, I give pages with user generated content a much higher change frequency then pages we need to update manually. _

If your PPC pages use a part of the content that's already on the SEO page (duplicated content) I would noindex those pages. Trying to get both pages indexed can only backfire. A other quick indication, if those pages are only attainable through your Ads and offer no new information to users who started there visit on the home page I would also noindex them.

If however, your PPC pages offer unique value to your visitors they can't find on other pages on your website (or on your organic landingpages) you could let them get indexed.

For point 2: Having a useful internal link structure is a best practice for SEO. If your pages offer unique value I would add them (in a logical way) to your internal navigation structure. If however they **do not ** offer unique value those links won't be useful for your visitors and will only be there to support your SEO. In this case it won't do you any good.

For point 3: Your building a triangle. It doesn't make sense to try to give your PPC pages any status through internal links and then giving a canonincal to merge any status with your organic pages. Either way, I would not canonical those pages. Give them noindex or treat them like a normal page.

Since this question is pretty old, I would love to know how you handled the situation!

Hi Kayleigh,

Like Patrick said, just try to recrawl these pages. I assume that will fix the problem.

If that still gives the errors I would make sure to try it again with adjusted speed. Some servers automatically block crawlers (IP’s) that give a spike in there server requests. Screaming Frog can easily trigger this (happened to me aswell). You can set the speed under configuration.

If you give this a try I would go with one thread at a time and 0,5 URL’s a second. That worked for me. When it was a block it could be needed to get your IP address unblocked before you try it again. Good luck!

Hi Shamshuddin,

Like Dennis said, spam score shows how many of the 17 possible spam flags are triggered. These flags are triggered on link metrics or on-page metrics. Based on the amount of flags triggered Moz found  a correlation between those factors and the amount of websites that have been penalized.

Here is the correlation between the amount of triggered flags and the amount of penalized websites:

• 0 flags = 0,5% of found websites were penalized
• 1 flag = 1,0% of found websites were penalized
• 2 flags = 2,0% of found websites were penalized
• 3 flags = 4,2% of found websites were penalized
• 4 flags = 7,5% of found websites were penalized
• 5 flags = 11,4% of found websites were penalized
• 6 flags = 16,2% of found websites were penalized
• 7 flags = 30,6% of found websites were penalized
• 8 flags = 56,8% of found websites were penalized
• 9 flags = 71,9% of found websites were penalized
• 10 flags = 77,3% of found websites were penalized
• 11 flags = 87,3% of found websites were penalized
• 12 flags = 93,4% of found websites were penalized
• 13 flags = 98% of found websites were penalized
• 14 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized
• 15 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized
• 16 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized
• 17 flags = 100% of found websites were penalized

In your case there is no need to worry. If you wonder which spam flag you triggered you can check http://bit.ly/1P5WSeG and then click on any one of the graph icons  on the left of the domains in the results and you will see this: http://bit.ly/1GdbEyS 

I hope this helps!

PS. There is a whiteboard friday about this subject too: http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday

Hi Harry,

If you already did implant HTTPS on your website you should definitely start redirecting since you will otherwise have a duplicated version on your website.

But I suppose you’re still in to process of making that decision. In that case I would read this post on Moz which can give you a great overview of what HTTPS can and cannot do for your website (and your SEO).

http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

SEO wise the main point is that this is just a small rankings factor which might not be worth the time and hassle. Personally I would implant it in a new website, but wouldn’t (solely based on the SEO benefits) change an existing website to HTTPS. In that situation the security, privacy and trust reasons should be important to you as well to justify the decision.

I hope this helps!

We saw a lot of this porn spam referrals lasts weeks as well with a brand new website. I would just filter it out and don't worry about it.

Hi Anirban,

As far as I know they don’t crawl websites that way. Did you check the following?

• Make sure there are no internal links (you already said so, but double check this since one link can get a whole lot of pages indexed).
• These pages don’t have external links pointing to them
• These pages aren’t in the sitemap

If you wish to keep pages out of the index you can try the following:

• Add the noindex tag
• Exclude them through your robot.txt file

I hope this helps.

It's indeed a paid option. I think it’s the most important that the server is responding correctly at the moment and you find out what caused the errors. If you check any pages with a 503 status manually, do they respond?

A other option is to check the server logs if you can find out anything there or call your hosting provider and ask them why the server is giving 503 errors. If you didn’t cause the problems it’s important to know what did since they may come back and cause your website to stop working correctly again.

Webmaster tools will only give you an overview of what Google finds at the moment they visit your website. So it might not give you the most accurate answer to what caused the problem.

HI J.P.,

When chancing URL’s always keep the redirecting (301) in mind.

About the URL structure:

From this example I can’t tell you if you’re right or wrong about your approach. In general I think about the following things while I format URL structures:

1. If I would read this URL in the SERP’s, is it clear on what section of the website I enter?
2. Does it contain any keywords?
3. Doesn’t it repeat  any words?
4. Isn’t the URL too long / hard to read?

Depending on those criteria I decide on the amount of folders in an website. For example, I own an review website which has an URL structure of /industry/city/company. Three layers, but the make sense to me.

I hope this helps!

I hope someone can help me make some decisions. I did read a lot about Local SEO lately but I’m not sure what way to go with this client.

Client:

1. Service provider with two physical locations (service is provided on the physical location).
2. In the coming 12 month there will open 1-2 new physical locations in other cities.
3. Has only one phone number. I will try to advise them to get a local phone number for both locations. But they prefer one (mobile) number to keep things simple.
4. Clients are willing to travel for the service, since it’s a one day course they take. Current clients do come from a lot of different locations.
5. The competition for around 5-6 big cities is pretty low since there aren’t a lot of service providers who deliver these courses.

Questions:

1. Should I put both addresses in the footer? It’s a best practice with only one location. I think it’s handy for users with two locations as well but I’m worried about how Google sees this. Also this will get confusing when the client passes 3-4 locations.
2. If the client sticks with one mobile phone number, should I make a Google + local page for both physical locations? The Google guidelines clearly state they prefer a local number as much as possible.
3. If I add “Our service areas “ to the top navigation and make a unique place page for every city (to rank organic aswell) is it wise to link those local Google + pages to the unique page about this service? Normaly I would go for yes, but I want to add places with and without a physical location under the same navigation.

With just one location I would just focus on that city and add unique pages for the other pages. I’m getting a bit stuck between best practices since the client got opportunities with multiple strategies.

I hope you guys (and girls ) can help!

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your answer! Our situation is exactly the same. Different brands, social channels, unique content etc. it's like coca cola and pepsi on the same adress. Both selling the same, but different.

Good to hear your story. In this case I will just start cleaning up all the other mess of the site migration first and will see what happens.

Thanks a lot!

Dear Felicity,

From what I'm seeing on https://www.ryanyoungdesign.com.au the 443 port isn't configured correctly. This is the standard HTTPS port. There are either two options:

1. The 443 port is set up, but is requesting the wrong files.

2. The 443 port isn't configured at all and picks up the first files it finds.

Either way you will have to ask your webdevelopment company to fix this and make sure they set up the 443 port to process the right files.

Hope this helps!

Hi Joshua,

I think it’s important to know what system you’re using. If it’s all custom made and the webdeveloper needs to “get into” your code it will probably cost a bit more then when you’re using generic systems like Magento or WooCommerce.

I’m not a developer, but my companion normally fixes these things within a few hours. A quote between 100- 200 sounds reasonable since it’s just adding pieces of code on the right spot.

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the screenshots. Dirk's suggestion about screaming frog should be really helpful. This should give you an insight in the true 404 errors that a bot can encounter while crawling through your internal site structure.

Based on what I see I think your main problem is the manual updated sitemap. Whenever you change a page, add a new one or mix up some categories those changes won't apply to your sitemap. This creates a 404 error while those pages aren't linked to from your website and (without a sitemap) wouldn't give any 404 error messages in Google Webmaster Tools.

I saw you were using SEO by Yoast already, I suggest using their sitemap functionality. That should resolve the problem and save you work in the future since there is no need to manually update your sitemap again.

Let me know if this works!

Hi Miriam and Kristen,

I didn't do a big case study or what so ever on this topic but I reported this kind of keywords in the business title through Google Maps and I didn’t see any noticeable changes after the changes were applied. At least not with the top 3 in the local pack. I can however confirm that adding this information causes fluctuations since I did some testing with a few websites. Although It didn’t cause a big boost it did help a tremendous amount with being shown on certain keywords. Since there isn’t a category for every niche this helped some business being showed on the right keywords on the first place.

This is a subject were a bigger case study will be needed I think.

Btw, another interesting aspect I found is the local business support desk recommending Google plus activity on the account. Views, followers, posts etc. Did get this tips 2 times after I called them a few times. Not sure it works, but we’re trying this out for our own account at the moment.

Ofcourse!

I think your website isn't ranking on HTTPS at the moment. I couldn't find any HTTPS urls when I used the site:https://ryanyoungdesign.com.au command in Google.

Also, I don't think you have any backlinks pointing at the HTTPS domain. When I check your backlinks MOZ is automaticly showing the results of the HTTP version (see notice in Open Site Explorer on top). When I manualy ask for the links of the HTTPS domain I still get links that point to the normal HTTP domain (I checked a few manualy). So I think there isn't much of a problem there. Althrough I'm curious, were did you get the list that you included? I Couldn't replicate it through Open Site Explorer.

Your latest server provider is right about not setting up HTTPS. That's exaclty were the problem is. Every website has a 443 port and if the server provider doesn't do anything with it it will automaticly search the first configured 443 port. In this case it found the port of a other website on the server that does has HTTPS set up.

Disallowing it in the robots.txt file won't solve the issue of showing a different website. Your server provider should configure this by either showing a blank page (404) or by requesting the HTTP folder through the 443 port. I would prefer the second option since it's the most user friendly.

Hope this helps!

Hi LupoNorth,

I didn't read anything about it but my guess is that the perception of the search engines on these new TLD’s will change over time based on how they get adopted. At this moment I would say a .com domain will rank better then .shop although the purpose of this TLD should be clear to humans.

I know search engines are struggling  with TLD from other counties. So if I’m in the Netherlands (in fact, I’m) and I decide to use www.example.it because I got a IT business the domain won’t pop up in the Dutch search results (although the text is all Dutch). Something similar could happen with the new domains. If for example .shop gets adopted by a lot of web shops it could happen that a blog would score less with a .shop domain.

I hope this helps and I’m interested in how others feel about this subject.

Hi Justin,

In that case I would ask your developer to make the sitemap on the website update automatically (or generate a new one every day). And submit that link to webmaster tools. If he's a real genius he could add your blog pages from Wordpress to this sitemap aswell but I'm not sure if Wordpress has a hook for this.

Alternative options:

1. Let him make the automatically updated sitemap for the custom part of the website and use this combined with the sitemap from the yoast plugin. You can upload both separated in Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure both got their own URL. In this case it’s all automated and is just as good as the previous method.
2. Keep on updating your sitemap manually. Just make sure you don't use the yoast sitemap and include the blogposts in your sitemap from screaming frog since this would give double input. If you choose to refresh your sitemap manually I would disable the sitemap within the Yoast plugin and use the Screaming frog sitemap which should include your blog pages aswell.

Good luck and let me know if this works for you!

Hi Miriam,

I added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and I didn’t see any big ranking improvements on categories the business already appeared at.

I added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and I saw a big improvement on categories the business didn’t already appeared on. So adding “SEO” in the business title of an webdevelopment firm could result in them being shown on keywords like “SEO The Hague”.

I Removed keywords from (compeditors) business titles and didn’t see a drop in their ranking visibility.

At this point I believe keywords in the business title could help Google associate your business with a keyword or service type but isn’t (or is only a small) rankingfactor. It’s the difference between being shown, or not being shown at all. Not the difference between position 2 and 3.

Note: I only tracked this with a few Google my business pages for a short period of time.

About the advice from the Google support staff, heard it the last time on 10 dec. 2015.

Hi Chris,

I think limiting your title tag to 50 characters is a waste of visibility in the SERP’s. A good meta title (in my eyes) combines the essence of the page, keywords and a clear call to action. In this case I wouldn’t use your company name in the meta title unless you’re an well-known brand or advertising your way to it at the moment.

I think the meta title of your competitor is pretty ok, if you remove “cheap” it would be a good sentence in my eyes and it gives the searcher extra conformation that this cartridge fits it’s printer.

A few things I would keep in mind:

1. What makes your websites stand out? That might be a good addition to the title.
2. What is it people are looking for? Sometimes people want to see a price very quickly, if so, and you’re not the most expansive one you could add this.

I hope this helps!

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Justin,

You're thinking in the right direction. You should indeed 301 redirect the old URL. This helps you transfer your linkjuice to the new page and it gives searches engines a clue about were the content went. This way they will drop the old listing faster and pick up the new URL earlier.

In case you’re not redirecting, 404 URL’s will drop from the SERP’s over time and the new ones will be picked up. A good sitemap and internal URL structure can help speed up the indexation.

Good luck, sounds like you’re making some real progress last few weeks!

Great to see you found an answer Justin!

Thanks for the link, didn't know about that. Could indeed be game-changing!

Hi Marvellous,

Patrick provided you with a great answer. Notice he mentions the sitemap as well, if you’re using an automatically generated sitemap (from Yoast for example) these pages will be included and that way they will get indexed. Besides the option that Patrick mentioned you can exclude them from your sitemap with the advanced settings of the Yoast SEO plugin (assuming you’re using it).

If you want to be sure they aren’t indexed, you can use a site:yourwebsite.com command to view your indexed pages. You can add a text from the pages you don’t want to be ranked for ass well to narrow down the results.

Best regards,

Bob

Hi Justin,

I just checked out your new design and it looks great!

About your question, if the 301 redirect is set up correct it will be processed first so every bot or visitor will get redirected and won’t see the old page and it can’t cause duplicated content. Take in consideration that keeping a page live will prohibit you from using this URL anywhere else on the website. If you wish to keep the pages in your backend through I would set the pages to concept.

Good luck!

Hi Swendt,

Personally I would stick to what fits your overall branding strategy best. this means I wouldn't change anything about how your business name is displayed just because it's in the meta description. A few things I would consider when making this decision:

1. Is your business name merged or separated in your logo?

2. If your a existing brand, do people search for your brandname merged or separated? This gives you more insight in your customers perspective. (you can check this through Google Keyword Planner in Adwords)

3. If your business name tells potential customers something about what you do I would definitly consider readability aswell. If your business name contains two worlds I would, in most cases, separate them.

Also, I'm not a huge fan of TM aswell, but I'm from Europe so I'm not sure if it's more common in other parts of the world.

Good Luck!

Hi sdwellers,

Tools give you an insight in what might be the cause of ranking problems but they don't tell the whole story about a websites rankings. Algorithms are very complex and they do take in account a lot of different signals. A few signals that are very hard to take into account by any tool.

-       Dwell time (the time people spend on your site, and if they do or do not find the information needed)

-       The total backlink profile. Moz has its own index (PA/DA are based on this index) which only covers a fraction of all the links. A normal backlink audit would at least combine links from three different sources including the links from Google Webmaster Tools

-       Reviews about your business.

If you are serious about beating your competition I would dive deeper in SEO, or hire an expert. That said, I can give you a few tips based on my first impression of your website.

1. The black text (on the blue background) above and under your website are very toxic. This is a classic spam tactic which gets you discounted by Search Engines.
2. Your website isn’t mobile friendly (this will become an important ranking factor on 21 of April this year (next week). Google has been talking about this date for a while.
3. On first sign, I would say you could make your content more engaging. Your competitors website give a whole different feeling. I would take a good look at your design and the use of visual content. Scuba diving is all about a life time experience, keep people hooked to your site and you  dwell time (and sales) will go up.

I hope this helps! Good luck, and I would love to hear if you could make a difference the coming months.

_PS. Facebook likes aren’t used to rank website. Although a big social audience can help you get more backlinks which help a lot.  _

You're right to set your priority on keeping them under the limits. I normally use the keyword preview tool from Moz to check this since Google started using pixels instead of characters.

https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

In your case, I would use one of your longer product names and make a good title with that so the majority of your pages won't cross the line. At least, that's what we do in this situation.

I don't know if a longer title will dilute the effectiveness of each keyword. Interesting question, sounds logical (especially if the title gets cut off) but I never read anything about it. Would love to hear someone else his view on this.

Hi Justin,

I’m afraid I can’t help you with this one since it got a lot to do with how your website is structured and how you’re setting up your redirects at this moment. I would ask a programmer for advise to provide you with the best solution.

Of course I would love to help you with any more SEO questions!

Good luck!

Hi,

About point one:

Links in comments can be a great addition to your posts if they are legit and an extent of your post. Typically this is not the case with most comment links. Make sure you clean up any spammy (promotional) links or work with a trusted user system. This way you can promote legit user that are actively participating on your blog to post (do)follow links. I know Yoast.com works that way on their blog.

About point two:

This discussion on Moz should provide you with an answer:

https://moz.com/community/q/do-pingbacks-in-wordpress-help-or-harm-seo-or-neither

I hope this helps!

Best regards,

Bob

Hi OLLI_M,

I would definitely focus your homepage on the keywords / search intents for your primary keyword. This page is your best change of scoring in your own city and has the possiblility to score in city’s close by.

You don’t have to worry about scoring on your brand because:

1. When people search for your brand name they want you. So from an search engines perspective you’re the 100% match with this search intent and you will have a great dwell time and CTR which work in your favor.
2. You will probably get enough inbound links with your brand name in it. That’s very natural.

There are probably a lot more reasons why you will score on your own brand name but I hope these make it clear you don’t have to worry about it.

When you determine your website structure you will probably need some insights in the following:

1. Are people adding local modifiers like “Car service [city name]”
2. What is the search volume on those keywords? Based on this, are there any more city’s in your service area you intent to rank on besides the city you’re located?
3. What is the competition on the keywords you intent to rank on?

In a normal situation where you have one physical location and you serve a couple more nearby city’s I would advise you to focus your homepage on the city you’re based in and add level one pages for the city’s in your service area you intent to rank for. Make sure these pages are added to your normal navigation and are interesting for visitors who do either enter your website through your homepage as directly through the local landings pages.

Miriam wrote a great guide for creating those service area’s on Moz. You might want to check it out:  http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

You can also check out this project we have been working on some time ago: www.skaya.nl (Dutch website).

When you click on “Waar rijden wij” you will find a list of the city’s they give driving lessons. Every page has some unique tips and information about driving lessons in those specific city’s. In this case we also added the city we’re based in as a level one page. So either our homepage as the local landings page can score on the city were based in.

Two more great resources when you want to start local SEO I would love to share with you:

1. http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered
2. http://moz.com/blog/11-ways-local-businesses-can-get-links

I hope this helps!

PS. When you look at the example there are two improvements for this website. The tabbed content should be shown immediately and there should be less duplicated content like the prices for example. Just so you don’t copy the wrong parts of this tactic

Hi Silvio,

In general I would say that you should focus on getting mentioned on places where you can find your target audience. Just looking at websites with high PA/DA scores won’t be the best fit for your business.

That said, if you buy any sponsored backlinks you should apply the nofollow tag or you risk a penalty. And since nofollow links don’t pass PageRank it won’t help your site ranking any better. It could however be a way to get some eyeballs which could result in earned backlinks. This is however heavily depending on where (relevance) you place a sponsored link and to what resource this link leads.

I hope this helps!

Hi Kasper,

I think your own suggestion is just right. Put a 301 redirect on the /defailt.asp page and your linkjuice should be fine.

Two extra hints:

1. Make sure your internal links point to your normal homepage (not the /default.asp).

2. If you have any valuable backlinks pointing to /default.asp you can try to change (ask the webmasters) the backlinks to your normal homepage.

Both suggestions prevent your linkjuice from going through a 301 redirect. Although 301 redirects pass linkjuice there is a damping factor (0,85) in the original PageRank system which lowers your linkjuice a bit with every link / 301 redirect it passes through.

Good luck!

Hi Mike,

Your solution is pretty common and effective. Like James said, this doesn’t transfer all the linkjuice (wide spread misconception). In the original pagerank system there was a damping factor of 0.85. So through every link or redirect 15% pagerank was lost. Although it’s unknown if these rates stayed the same during the years you can expect a small lose in linkjuice.

This is why people do outreach to change their backlinks after a sitemigration. In most cases I recommend to only try to change your most important backlinks since it’s probably not worth your time chasing down every link you got.

Hope you this helps you plan your next steps.

Hi Andy,

Thanks for sharing. I stumbled upon it right after I posted this discussion on the Q&A. It's an great video and does indeed gives a lot of helpfull information!

Hi scienceisrad,

Great to see you investigate SEO on your own!

Personally I think there isn’t any specific “best day”. With all measurements it’s important to do it consistent on the same way to make sure you’re equation is right. I would compare this with tracking weight lost. It doesn’t really matter which day of the week you pick, just make sure it’s the same day , same time and uhmm before or after you take a crap.

In your case, I would just remove the one campaign and set it up on Monday again. Although rankings fluctuate a bit I think you just need a global picture of your competitors to make decisions about your own strategy (unless you’re doing some big SEO project with a whole team ofcourse).

I hope this helps!

PS. It’s also possible to make one campaign and add competitors so they do get monitored as well.

Thanks for your comment Dirk!

Rewriting the content would be the best case scenario. Do you think it's a absolute must to rewrite those words (let's say, because Google would els filter out the .be domain if it's a exact copy) or would it be an extra to make the website convert even better and add a extra trust signal to Google?

It would probably be a pain in the ass for this webshop to check all there product descriptions for any possible words to change. They would probably not launch the .be website if it would take them a week or two to go through all the pages.

Hi John,

Beside the great points mentioned before these suggestions might help you.

1. I ones saw a few inserted casino / gambling URL’s pop up in a Google Analytics reports. Might be worth your time to check if there are any new URL’s created.
2. Run some security scans on your site to find any vulnerabilities that might have caused the hack.
3. Since you didn’t find it in your database, you could check for any hard coded links with the search through files option in Notepad. If the link is hard coded you should be able to find it.
4. If you are using a CMS like Wordpress, check if all your plugins and themes are up to date. Poor maintenance could have caused the security breach.
5. If your website is hacked, could it be that the hacker changed links to prevent an easy discovery? Might extent your search to more generic spam terms.

As Dirk said, don’t wait too long solving this issue. If you are depending on your SEO and you can’t fix this issue within days I would rather hire an expert then wait a few weeks.

Goodluck!

Thanks, valuable advice! I will put it to good use.