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Hi Rachel, no problem at all, happy to help out!

We have a couple of clients in similar industries where it seems most of their successful competitors are using black hat tactics to get ahead and it seems to be working for them for now.

These clients are still too new to us to report anything valuable just yet - they're certainly moving ahead and I don't see an issue outranking their dodgy competitors, it's just frustrating that black hat SEO is typically much faster but their rankings could drop literally any day.

That aside, a disavow may help you somewhat but I always recommend spending the time removing as many as you can (without paying the removal fees that many will request!). Building new, high quality and relevant links will also help swing that ratio away from being almost exclusively spam. Everybody has at least some dodgy links to don't stress too much about getting it perfect, just improve the ratio.

It's great that you've got unique content coming and regional differences in law and restrictions is a great starting point for offering that unique value as well. Location pages like this are just fine, so long as they each serve a unique purpose. Just make sure the site structure and content caters to the user's intent, not just adding content to keyword-specific pages.

I would expect that removing as many of those bad links as you can, building quality new ones and improving the site's content will go a long way to lowering your spam score and more importantly, moving one step closer to driving qualified and converting traffic.

Whether or not this is an issue kind of depends on what your product or service is. If you provide a local-only service like a restaurant then your US site ranking in the UK would be unusual.

On the other hand, if you sell a physical product this may not be so unusual. For example, here in Australia we're quite limited when it comes to finding men's online clothing stores, most of it comes from the US or the UK so it's not uncommon to see something like the US Jackthreads show up in the SERPs here.

Since you do have separate domains for each location, this might be an indication that search engines aren't really understanding the different jurisdictions for each site; maybe they're not geo-targeted enough for the algorithm to comprehend the fact that each of the 3 sites server a unique area.

Some of the elements that can help define this, in no particular order:

• Server location
• HTML language ( e.g. lang="en-US")
• Regional language differences (e.g. US spelling vs UK)
• Location markup - on your location pages at the very least
• Location mentions throughout your content

While not specifically on-topic, Rand's Whiteboard Friday about scaling geo-targeting offers plenty of great advice that can be applied here as well.

Hi Marcel,

Internal linking between your blog posts is something you should definitely be doing, as long as they're relevant to each other. If one blog post is helpful to a user, linking to a related one may give them that bit of extra info they needed.

On the other hand, linking from your blogs to landing pages is something I'd avoid. Blogs are meant to be informative and/or starting a conversation. Linking to your products or services will often make the whole post feel like it was just written to promote what you do.

There are some exceptions to this but they are rare.

Also, don't get too tied up in using keywords as your anchor text. Just use whatever anchor makes sense and if it happens to have the keywords in there then that's great too.

Great tips Bryan! The only thing I'd add to this is to be realistic about your sales funnel expectations and how you structure your site.

Almost nobody is going to spend 10 - 20 minutes submitting personal information (or even generic information for that matter) on their first visit. Tailor your landing pages toward new clients without completely neglecting the returning ones. Capture at least an email address from those interested new users then use a combination of quality content, social presence and email marketing to build that familiarity and rapport to a point where they're comfortable in giving you their personal info and they see the benefit behind it.

You can't just tell someone your product or service is good and expect them to believe it, you have to provide an environment where they can arrive at this conclusion by themselves.

A good example of this being Moz vs a small SEO website. You're far more likely to spend 20 minutes completing a survey and providing contact info for Moz than you are a small firm you've never heard of because they do this stuff very well.

Hi Brian,

To answer your question directly, linking to these pages is the preferable option of the two.

That said, if it were my campaign I'd be looking to cut down on the volume of these pages to make them a bit more manageable first. I've listed some suggestions below that may point you in the right direction, take from them what you may!

Get Rid of These Location Pages These days, having a "Bands in Atlanta, GA" page isn't necessary to rank for that term. Your site is clearly about booking bands so if you've got a Georgia page in this example and your band's profiles list their locations, this combined with a generally well-optimised site means you can still rank for it just fine. Right now, having 750 orphan pages that are essentially duplicates of each other is not doing you any favors.

Consider How the Users Expect to Find a Band The user experience on the site right now is by now means bad but if you were to remove these pages, this is the way I would go about it:

Change "Browse Bands" to something more specific to their intent; perhaps "Find a Band". We're talking semantics here but "Browse Bands" suggests to me that I'm about to see a huge list of bands to sift through and I'm just as lazy as the next user.

Let the filters do the work. From this band finder page (essentially your existing /bands#band-finder page), have 2 drop-down options at the top. The first one for Location and the other for Type or Genre. Again, minor changes but I would expect that most users want to find a band in a specific location so rather than putting this option in the top corner as a text link, make it the most prominent option on the page. Also stating that the other drop-down is before they click it is another minor difference but helpful. "Now Showing: All Bands" isn't entirely intuitive. Minor detail.

Add a Page for Each State 750 location pages is not only hard to manage, it's also hard to offer unique value for. If you add a page for each state this is much easier to do. You can talk about the regional differences between each (most popular genres, different laws, any other common differences or booking requirements etc)

You could also include the pre-filtered results for each state on these pages to give users another way to find a band quickly. ie From the California page, show the California bands by default and they can select their specific town/city from there if they like.

Another great way to add unique and valuable content would be to have 1 to 3 featured bands on each state's page. This may be risky if it's going to upset other bands so it's obviously your call as well but it lets you expand a little more with something valuable and you could even include the areas they service which is a legit reason to talk about specific locations.

Include Serviced Locations on Band Profile Pages The current band profile pages are excellent. Videos, song samples, a list of songs, photos, reviews etc. Great work! The only thing it's missing is the areas they service. This is redundant for people finding the band through location filters but not if they go straight to the "Select a Band" drop-down.

Bonus points if this list of locations is also shown on a map rather than just a text list, though text is also important for those using Ctrl-F to find their location.

Build Links to State or Band Pages Building location-specific links to either of these pages will add another signal to search engines that you offer the solution to a user's intent. This can be as simple as offering your featured bands a "featured on" type of badge that links back to their profile on your site. Something similar to "as seen on TV" where them linking to you genuinely helps their own site/image by suggesting to their visitors they're trustworthy.

Don't Hide Too Much Content Be mindful of how much content is "hidden" in those pop-up windows. Bits and pieces of info is fine but if you do start populating pages with lots of content and obscuring most of it, you're devaluing your hard work!

This turned into quite the lengthy response that went on a bit of a tangent but hopefully it's at least somewhat helpful to you anyway!

Thin, duplicate pages bad; unique, rich landing pages good!

As Alick300 said, this has been confirmed. To add to that, Google stopped updating it some time ago which explains why your older domains still don't have a rating

It was somewhat helpful to beginners since it offered a single number but at the same time, the simplicity was also the flaw; you couldn't take it at face value. I saw plenty of terrible sites with a high PR and great sites with a low PR. This left the door open for spammers to manipulate their PR then sell links from it to unsuspecting victims on the basis of "it's a high PR site, how could I go wrong?!?"

Honestly, I'm glad to see it gone!

It isn't possible to do this when behind a login but I would definitely still spend the time doing what you can manually before pushing it live.

The other option you have is to push it "live" but block the whole site from crawlers with Robots.txt. Screaming Frog does give you the option to ignore the instructions in Robots so you could still crawl it. If this site is replacing an existing one that makes it a little more tricky. If that's the case, you could still do this but make sure that you get to work on your audit the second you push it live and get it done as quickly as possible.

If the site is up and blocked via Robots for 20 minutes it's unlikely to cause an issue. If you leave it that way for a week however... not such a good idea

Gaston has already answered your question well so I won't go into that any further. What I will say though is don't forget to consider the user intent here - depending on what your product actually is, people using that niche word may be looking for something different.

To use your cars vs automobiles example in a research context, you might find for example that people searching for "history of cars" are searching for recent history, whereas users searching for "history of automobiles" may be looking for info dating right back to the very first automobile.

Perhaps a poor example of my point but hopefully this illustrates what I'm getting at. While the two may technically be the same, sometimes we use variations of a word with a different intent. Your keyword focus should always be around this intent rather than just the words themselves.

I hope that makes sense!

I can't say I've seen an instance of that happening before but chances are it's just being redirected via the htaccess file.

Through htaccess you can essentially say if the URL is prefaced with https://, redirect to the other domain.

As far as SEO benefits, there really are none that I'm aware of. Looking purely at rankings, the only value this will pass is ~90% of link juice from any links that explicitly point to the https version. From a legitimate SEO point of view (ie actually caring about users) it's more than likely going to give them a very confusing experience!

There are instances where it makes sense to push users to a https version and maybe a new subdomain or something (from www.store.com to https://www.store.website.com) but even then, there aren't too many instances where that would be ideal.

We've experienced almost exactly the same process in the past when a dev accidentally left staging.domain.com open for indexation... the really bad news is that despite noticing this, blocking via Robots and going through the same process to remove the wrong ones via Search Console etc, getting the correct domain ranking in the top 50 positions took almost 6 infuriating months!

Just like you, we saw the non-www version and the staging.domain version of the pages indexed for a couple of months after we fixed everything up then all of a sudden one day the two wrong versions of the site disappeared from the index and the correct one started grabbing some traction.

All this to say that to my knowledge, there are no active tasks you can really perform beyond what you've already done to speed this process up. Maybe building a good volume of strong links will push a positive signal that the correct one should be recrawled. We did spend a considerable amount of time looking into it and the answer kept coming back the same - "it just takes time for Google to recrawl the three versions of the site and figure it out".

This is essentially educated speculation but I believe the reason this happens is because for whatever reason the wrong versions were crawled first at different points to be the original version so the correct one was seen as 100% duplicate and ignored. This would explain why you're seeing what you are and also why in a magical 24hr window that could come at any point, everything sorted itself out - it seems that the "original" versions of the domain no longer exist so the truly correct one is now unique.

If my understanding of all this is correct, it would also mean that moving your site to yet another domain wouldn't help either since according to Google's cache/index, the wrong versions of your current domain are still live and the "original" so putting that same site/content on a different domain would just be yet another version of the same site.

Apologies for not being able to offer actionable tasks or good news but I'm all ears for future reference if anyone else has a solution!

No problem at all. As you said, the fact that you can do a site: search and see that your pages are actually indexed means that most importantly, your site is in Google's index.

As for it not showing up in Search Console, it's very hard to troubleshoot these ones without access to the account - after 3 or 4 weeks you really should be seeing at least some data in there. To my knowledge, the only part that really lags a whole lot is the number of indexed pages.

You should be able to see Content Keywords for example. If all data is completely blank, there may be a larger problem here. Can you see Analytics data for this domain? If so, was Search Console verified via Analytics?

hmm, that's frustrating!

The canonicalization idea isn't going to work too well since it essentially passes the strength of one page to the other so you will still only end up with a single page that ranks. Also, it doesn't present a great user experience. If anything, it probably further confuses the fact that they're both the same thing!

If you've got offices in multiple locations, you can go with a number of ideas from Rand's Whiteboard Friday on a related topic. If this does apply to you, you could use the most common term for each region. Location pages for Western states would talk about Attorneys and Western states focus on Lawyer.

It's far from ideal but if Google isn't understanding the difference here, it's about the best option I can see.

Since subdomains are treated as a completely separate domain, your options here are essentially to go with an aged domain with backlinks vs a fresh domain that will be "sandboxed" for a little while.

Before someone yells at me for it, no, the Google Sandbox no longer exists but you will still see fresh domains rank nowhere for several months in most scenarios.

With that out of the way, as long as moving those maps to the subdomain doesn't provide a poor UX then this is going to be your best option. Retain the strength you've already built and keep going from there rather than starting fresh. Just be weary of the potential for existing users who may have saved favorites or emailed links to the primary domain; you don't want them landing on a functional page that looks nothing like what they were expecting!

Updating them all at once isn't inherently bad, it's more about the quality of the updated ones that may see a negative impact.

When you say a breadcrumb structure, I immediately think of something like this: "Letterboxes - Steel - Small | Site Name" - is that what they're looking to move to? Handcrafted ones can be made far more compelling and often less spammy but it depends on the context of your site really and how many pages you're talking about.

Regardless of the number of pages, you should at least be writing them manually for the key landing pages - remember, the main reason for a page title is to attract that click from the right type of user in the SERPs.

If you'd like to share some examples of the proposed ones I can probably be much more helpful

Hi Bob,

Like so many things in SEO, I'd be looking at this from a UX point of view first and foremost, then do a quick revision through your SEO glasses before implementing.

Will making this H1 change help or hinder your user experience?

To offer my own opinion in response to this question, I think the answer is 'hinder'. As a user I would much rather see just the name of the shoe both on the category page and in the H1 of the product page.

It's clean, succinct and doesn't feel like someone had an SEO agenda when they crafted it. I'd even go so far as to say I'd think twice before handing over my credit card details to a site that used product titles like "Adidas Action Series Shoes size 5 through 10 for running, walking, and hiking" rather than simply "Adidas Action Series". Even the word "shoes" is quite redundant here in my opinion.

To give you an idea of a website that ranks very well in this field in Australia, check out HypeDC. They're not our client, nor have they ever been but they deserve that link because they do a great job in most areas and they highlight my point. They sell shoes (and all things shoe-like... sneakers, boots etc) and yet they don't jam the word(s) into every title, heading and paragraph they can.

If you're looking at the Nike Air Huarache Ultra shoe, that shoe's product title on the category page is simply "Nike Air Huarache Ultra". That's it. No mention of shoe, shoes, running, walking, hiking, footwear etc. The page title is almost identical and even the content on the product page has no mention of the word shoe!

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend avoiding the keyword like they have, it's a clear demonstration that Google understands your website as a whole so there's no need to go jamming all those keywords everywhere. Craft a pleasant user experience and make sure your website in clear, as a single unit, what you do.

You may be wondering how the hell HypeDC ranks so well without using the keyword even once? All I can offer is external suggestions but I'd say it's a combination of the following:

• They don't sell 'cheap shoes' so they know their target audience are "shoe people" who are pretty likely to know what they want already so I'd expect the search volume of specific shoe models is quite high. Just referencing the specific model on a product page likely works in their favor for these searches.

• Their link profile is highly relevant, as is their anchor profile. This means from the link profile alone Google can start to understand that HypeDC = shoe store.

• They have no shortage of pages on the site that relate directly to things in the shoe industry. A "shoe size guide", a bunch of shoe questions in the FAQ, a page for each of their shoe manufacturers etc.

I'm sure there are plenty more but this post is already getting long (sorry!) but you get the picture. Don't get caught up in "where and how exactly should I place my keyword in this element to appease the Google Gods?", just make a user friendly website and 9 times out of 10 you will have made a well-optimised one by accident!

I realise shoes is possibly not even your vertical but I'm just working with the example at hand. Everything I've just said can be applied to any industry because the core principles don't change.

I hope this helps!

Deacyde and Mike have offered some great advice and it's very hard to add to that without being able to look at the site.

If you're comfortable sharing your URL I'd be happy to take a closer look for you, though I certainly understand if you're not.

No problem Cesar.

With 1500 pages, the most time-efficient thing to do right now is to keep and/or write your own for the most important landing pages and use a different template format for the others.

It's not reasonable to go writing 1500 page titles and meta descriptions right now but for at least your primary landing pages (if it's ecommerce then your category and subcategory pages), you should be writing them manually.

As for the other pages, using a templated approach is your best bet for the time being but the breadcrumb style will still give you quite a lot of duplication which is a bit of a worry. If you have 200 products under a single subcategory, that's 202 pages that all have the same keyword(s) in the title:

Category
     Category - Subcategory
     Category - Subcategory - Product 1
     Category - Subcategory - Product 2
     Category - Subcategory - Product 3
etc

A better-templated approach for an ecommerce site is to use basic product info and your brand as the page title.

For example, _iPhone 6s Replacement Screen - VX902 | FoneScreenz _

In this example it includes the name of the product on that page, and a product code which would both be variables, as well as the business name (FYI the product code and business are fabricated). This covers users searching by either product name or the specific code and is descriptive enough that it will do just fine.

Basically, the template would look something like:

[Product Name] - [Product Code] | Business Name

Hi Alex,

There are a couple of misconceptions here that I'll explain in a moment but in short: doing this isn't going to help you

so in the browser it shows up as www.ourcompany.dk

Redirecting from one domain to another will actually take the user to that second domain rather than showing the second website but keeping the original URL. What I mean by this is if you redirect example.com to website.com then visit example.com, after a moment you'll see the URL change to website.com.

In your particular instance, directing www.ourcompany.dk to your .com domain would just take the user to the .com. Also, a redirected URL won't rank so you'd have to be driving traffic directly to the .dk site via social media or something for anyone to even hit that redirect.

The only time this would offer you any benefit would be if you had a great backlink profile on the .dk domain since you'd be transferring ~80-90% of that link strength.

There are options available to do what you're looking to (display the .dk address but the .com site) like iframes but both of these methods would also see your .dk site ignored by search engines since it would be a weak duplicate of your .com.

I hope that helps, let me know if I can clarify anything for you here

Yep, you're on the right track Jason.

Since search engines view a subdomain as a separate entity, building valuable content and natural traffic/links to it means you're essentially driving all that referral traffic and strength to another website.

It's not so much that this is going to hurt you but it also won't really help. You're far better off putting the effort into creating genuinely helpful content for each one. It's time-consuming but you only get out what you put in!

You're not going to get a manual penalty for this sort of thing but it isn't exactly a great quality signal to have most pages on your site showing the same content over and over.

Hmm, ok. So you'll be handling the .com which targets the UK and each other location will be responsible for their own optimisation?

That does make it somewhat more viable, provided they are actually going to optimise their respective sites and do it properly.

If not, there's still no real reason why all locations couldn't exist in subfolders for all the reasons I mentioned above.

As a working example of a large site covering multiple locations with this subfolder model, check out HP. Below are 2 different location "home pages" depending on where you are.

http://www8.hp.com/au/en/home.html
http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/home.html

Depending on your position in the company/team, if I were in your shoes I'd be pushing to have all locations run from the subfolder model and setting the international standard that other locations must abide by to keep it all uniform. ie Each page must use the same template including styling etc and cover the same information on their equivalent pages.

As an example, since artificial grass is your product, you might add content to your UK page that offers sections about general information, size and colour options, photos of the product and shipping information for the UK in that order.

You can then use that as a template that must be followed for /dk/, /uae/ etc. The aim here isn't to be a control freak but to maintain a certain standard of quality and continuity; the last thing you want is for any use who jumps from one location to another to feel as though they just arrived on a new website. Much like in the HP example, it's actually pretty hard to tell you're on a different subfolder until it comes to shipping or price information.

Also, I hope you don't mind but I had a 30 second skim over your website. While it's generally a pretty good site, it is a little too keyword-heavy and this isn't something you want to replicate across multiple subfolders.

Looking at the page title for the home page as an example, it's Artificial Grass Lawn, Astroturf, Fake Turf | Easigrass.

The fact that it starts with "Artificial Grass Lawn" is already a signal to users who see your site in the SERPs that it's probably quite spammy and should be avoided.

There are a few other similar elements on the site too, even the location page URLs:

http://www.easigrass.com/uk/glasgow-artificial-grass/

Just easigrass.com/uk/glasgow would be sufficient. Having 25+ pages with artificial-grass in the URL isn't ideal.

I also found 5x 404s and a bunch of internal links pointing to redirected pages. If you want to look into these, Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is a great option for that.

Also, from a user perspective I'm a little confused as to why there are locations under "Find Local Branch" and what seems to be a different set of locations under "Artificial Grass".

Rand actually just did a Whiteboard Friday that covers some of this if you'd like some more info

There are definitely some benefits to well-structured URLs but they don't really offer a significant ranking improvement. In fact, John Mueller from Google gave the following response in a Hangout a few months back when asked whether this mattered:

_"I believe that is a very small ranking factor. So it is not something I'd really try to force. And it is not something I’d say it is even worth your effort to restructure your site just so you can get keywords in your URL." _Source

What this means is if you can get them in there, fantastic but I wouldn't completely stop doing what you're doing based on this alone.

Some of the benefits that can be gained from getting the keywords or title in the URL are to do with users and at the end of the day, they are the true aim of SEO so it is worth investigating. I'm not sure what platform you're using but the vast majority do offer some way to fix this, it may even be worth speaking to the platform's support team or a dev to see if it's something they can do, I'd expect it's quite a simple fix.

Hi Alex,

No problem at all, happy to help!

The naming convention creates an interesting problem. It makes perfect sense now but without understanding your range, it was very confusing. It's great to have an outside set of eyes on these things sometimes, especially since I'd expect most of your SEO target audience to be new users.

For starters, I'd consider changing the nav text from Artificial Grass to something like Our Range or Artificial Grass Range to make it clearer that this is a range, not locations; Artificial Grass is a little more ambiguous.

To further clarify this for people, you could also add a heading to the drop-down menu under that item. Something like "Select from our range below" or "Already know which product you need? Select from our range below" - something that suggests the items in this drop-down aren't locations, they're the different types of grass.

Search engines these days are quite clever so I'd expect that as long as you always reference "Easi-Mayfair" and don't allow variations like Easi Mayfair or just Mayfair, this should be clear enough.

the worry of current email addresses and redirecting the TLDs to the subdirectory.

Don't be too concerned about this. I can't imagine too many users would try to visit the domain used in your email address and even if they do, the redirect is in place and working correctly so they'll end up in the right spot. The .dk email addresses still work so changing all those users over to .com address is likely more hassle than it's worth.

No problem at all, happy to help. Unfortunately the best tools that we have to evaluate these are tools like Open Site Explorer which try to emulate how Google looks at links but they're imperfect for the very same reason that I can't possibly give you a definitive answer: Google doesn't want us to know!

Unfortunately, the only way we can ever know the outcome is to implement the change and see if the rankings get better or worse - welcome to the struggles of SEO!

If you really can't afford to be taking a hit right now but it would be more acceptable in a month or two (e.g. right now is your busiest period) I'd be inclined to wait. Otherwise, it's a tough call but I'd still lean toward having them removed. Don't forget that Google has been promising a Penguin (backlinks) update "very soon" all year! If that damn update finally rolls out tomorrow you may find yourself getting slammed by it... or it could roll out next year... or maybe it'll roll out and you'll be fine. Sigh.

We have had success in doing it steadily with one of our larger clients who were in a similar situation and the results were as good as we could have hoped for but YMMV. We essentially did the removal in stages. We divided the bad domains up into batches then contacted the first batch requesting removal then disavowing.

While all this was happening we also got to work building quality links to the site as well so they roughly cancelled each other out. Then we did the same thing with the other batches of bad links until we'd been through the lot.

For us, the end result was a series of fairly marginal peaks and troughs that directly correlated with link removal and link acquisition so the net position at any given time was approximately the same. I must stress though that YMMV here - since I have a total data sample of 2 domains (this client has 2 companies/sites), it's impossible for me to say with absolute certainty that what I saw is the direct result of our process.

Hi Meier,

That seems like a bit of a strange suggestion. The thing about Yoast is that it's great and powerful but it can't really be used as a task list. Rather than seeing the items as "it's on the list so I have to do it", see them more as an indicator of "I should investigate that, it might need to be fixed.

Focus more on the UX here - would changing the landing pages to blog posts improve the user experience? Chances are the answer is no so I'd just stick with your current configuration.

Hope that helps!

Hi Rachel,

Not a problem, glad to hear you're on the right track! It's great to see the pages looking unique and much better for UX.

Looking at the elements flagged in your spam score breakdown, there are some relatively easy fixes in here still which may be contributing at least somewhat. To answer your question directly I would expect it will still be related to your link profile meaning less poor links and more quality ones will be the fix.

Don't forget that this score isn't a direct Google metric either. The entire Spam Score system is meant to be little more than a system of red flags for you to investigate - having a bad spam score isn't inherently a bad thing but it also shouldn't go ignored.

As for whether or not the Spam Score takes disavowed links into account, I can't find confirmation for this either way but I'd doubt it. This would require them having access to your Search Console to see the disavowed file.

Low MozTrust or MozRank Score / Large Site with Few Links These will obviously be resolved with ongoing link building but are likely the most significant factor in current score.

Small Proportion of Branded Links As you go about your link building, it tends to happen naturally but be sure to continue building links that use your brand name as the anchor.

Large Number of External Links You do have a fair volume of external links but they all appear to be legitimate so I'd ignore this one.

Low Number of Internal Links This one is quite valid. Beyond the nav I couldn't really see any internal linking practices going on. They shouldn't be promotional links within your blogs but just making sure that any piece of content that may be relevant to another page also includes a link. For example, if we mention Adwords on our SEO page, we'd include a link to our Adwords page for users who may want more information.

No Contact Info
May be caused by the fact that the phone number tends to show up with slightly unusual formatting in each instance; either:

• 855.4.CYNTOX (429.6869)
• 855.429.6869

I'd be interested to see if changing this to just 855 429 6869 would clear that flag in the spam score. Applying schema markup here may also help.

External Links in Navigation This seems to be referring to the nav links to your login areas so it's another area I wouldn't really worry about. Changing this would frustrate users for the sake of satisfying an arbitrary checkpoint in this list which is exactly what we're not supposed to do with a tool like this!

On an interesting side note, ahrefs is still showing 42 obviously spammy referring domains. This won't change anything to do with your spam score since Moz isn't pulling Ahrefs metrics but it may not be great for your Google rankings if they're seeing the same links.

This is the correct answer.

To expand on this slightly, just make sure none of the 404s are internal (ie there are no links on your site pointing to one of these dodgy pages as a result of the hack) and you're all good.

Remove the entries from your htaccess file to avoid having to parse them constantly and let any external links to dodgy pages 404. This sort of circumstance is exactly what 404s are made for!

The only site at risk of a ranking drop from these 404s is the one pointing to those dodgy pages - who cares about your hackers' rankings?

The other comments here are correct; Adwords will not alter your organic rankings.

The issue here may be something else entirely. You mentioned that your onsite factors are better than the competition and both your site and your top competition have few backlinks. It sounds like that should basically put you on an even playing field there roughly (though it depends on link quality too) so perhaps there are some holes in your onsite that could be addressed.

You also mentioned that your engagement metrics like time on site and page views are better than the competition. Assuming you're getting this info from something like SEMrush, it could simply be that you're relying on inaccurate data to make your decisions. SEMrush is great to give basic information but it isn't 100% accurate.

If you're comfortable dropping a link to your website I'd be happy to take a much closer look for you and offer some helpful feedback? If you don't want that link public you can PM me if you prefer.

For internal links, just keep them relevant so people know what the link is before even clicking on it. If you have a guide on how to write page titles, make the internal anchor something like "guide to page titles".

As for external backlinks, if they're editorial links that someone else is posting, it's usually best to just leave this up to the site owner since they're going to make it relevant anyway. The best way to have a natural looking anchor text profile is to make it natural!

If you have to control the anchors (e..g directories or a guest post) then we typically lean toward this priority order:

1. Your brand name
2. Your URL
3. Your primary keyword(s)

That means that if you did web design and the name was "ProWeb", your anchor text profile would probably look something like this, in order of highest to lowest volume:

1. ProWeb
2. Pro Web
3. http://www.proweb.com
4. www.proweb.com
5. Web Design
6. Website Design
7. webdeign

You will get all kinds of variations like mis-spellings, "read more", "click here" etc as well but you get the picture.

I hope that helps! Just make sure you don't have your keywords as the most common anchors - it's pretty obvious spam!

Hi Laura,

Welcome to the Moz community!

Without a domain to do some further investigation, these types of questions can be some of the toughest to answer because there are so many variables that could be causing the problem.

I can't comment on your current site but what I can say is that from experience, if this is happening it's typically going to be one of three things (maybe a combination?):

• More links pointing to the individual product pages than to the category pages
• Either no or low quality content on the subcategory pages; basically just showing a big chunk of products and nothing else
• Poor internal linking with more internal links pointing to those products, the category pages in a separate section of the nav, no category breadcrumbs etc. URL structure ties in here in much the same way.

If we think about typical user behaviour, it makes perfect sense that your product pages would be getting more backlinks than the categories. If we're talking about real users in a forum and they want to reference a product you sell, they're going to link straight to that product and the same can be said in most other contexts too.

This isn't a problem at all - real backlinks being earned in a natural way is always good. It just means you may need to put some effort into driving strength to the category pages too.

Content is a topic that gets so much attention in this industry that I don't think I really need to elaborate here - just make sure there is a decent amount of high-quality content on the pages, styled in a way that doesn't bury the products. UX first!

Finally, the internal linking. It's very hard to give advice on this part without seeing the site but basically, search engines tend to look at your nav to get an indication of which pages are likely the most important on the page from left to right, top to bottom. If you have an unusual structure where the category pages are buried down in the drop-downs (or - gasp - not even in the nav because there are buttons on the home page or something!) then you're missing an easy win there.

Don't forget that breadcrumbs and URL structure should ultimately match this same layout. Something like website.com/category/product.

This is all quite vague but hopefully it makes sense to the site you're working with now. Always happy to take a closer look if you'd like to share the URL here or in PM but I completely understand if you're not comfortable with that too.

It's something you shouldn't _really _doing so it comes with the usual warning of "use with caution"...

That said, the chances of anything negative happening here are so slim it's probably not worth worrying about. If you were cloaking shady anchor text relating to gambling or viagra it would be a different story.

There are two other points to be aware of here though. Firstly, it's very unlikely you'll see any ranking difference between those two link anchors in your link profile. The other is that it sounds like you're dropping footer links on your clients' sites to build your link profile. That one is cause for genuine concern if it's on a large volume. If it's only a couple of sites, disregard everything below!

How these are treated post Penguin 4.0 I don't know just yet but at best, they're given very little weight. We've just finished pulling one of our web design clients back up from ~ page 8 after he built a large volume of those same footer links over about 6 months. It may be because they were all irrelevant links (his clients have nothing to do with web design, obviously) or perhaps because his anchor profile was 98% "Web Design". Which of these caused the problem is quite irrelevant.

We removed those links from all but a handful of sites and he's back to the middle of page 1 so the real work just started. This was earlier in the year so again, I have no clue how that same thing would play you now after the latest update.

Hope that helps!

Given this situation, that's exactly what I'd be doing.

John's advice does appear to be true; you won't be penalised for duplicate content but your rankings won't be great either.

Theoretically, Google should have no issue determining the fact that site A was the original source of that content and so it should suffer no ranking change at all. Canonicalisation is the path I'd be taking to hedge bets there and mitigate risk as much as possible.

It's still not guaranteed to be safe (Google may choose to ignore canonicalisation) but it's about as close as you're going to get. Hopefully the client doesn't drag their feet and take 2 years to get that content production started

It's hard to say exactly without seeing your site since there are so many potential variables (e.g. are most of your blog posts low quality or just a minority? etc) that would define the best way to go about it.

What I can say though is that you're on the right track as far as using analytics data to determine which ones are providing value right now. There is a danger in losing some rankings if you go removing a huge volume of these posts. Unless they're utter rubbish posts, they'll likely be providing relevance signals to Google on what your site is about. That said, I do think it's a necessary evil and I'd expect you'll be rewarded for it in the long run provided you start replacing the trash with high quality posts in the future.

As for the benefits, if they really are low quality then user engagement is going to be terrible which is obviously not what you should be aiming for. It's also going to be chewing up your crawl budget for no good reason so the leaner your site is, the better base you have to start rebuilding with quality instead of quantity. For the same reason, I generally suggest removing tags and categories that aren't providing any actual benefit too - in most cases I see they're just there either "for good SEO" or because the site owners things that's how users are browsing their site but in almost all cases, that's not true. As always, check your own data on this to be sure.

As for removing vs noindex, this one is always contentious but I lean toward removing simply because it's going to clean things up for the user too and ultimately they should be your primary focus. Having 40,000+ pages of trash on your website is a fantastic indicator to them that your site may not be somewhere they want to be and noindexing them won't do anything to change the user's experience.

Hope that helps!

You can click on the domain and see the full list of links. If you've done this and confirmed the links really are dead, it's likely that they used to exist and Google is yet to re-crawl them and notice they've been removed.

Search Console does tend to be quite laggy (ie data you see in there is quite a bit behind) so don't put too much emphasis on what you see there. If the links are gone then that will be noted soon and ultimately there's nothing you can do to speed that up unfortunately.