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Wow, there are a lot of things going on here so hopefully I've understood it all correctly.

By the sound of it, your client purchased the supplier then populated that supplier's website with their own content?

If this is the case, I'd expect their biggest issue will be the duplication. If they've now got 2 websites with the same content, it's very likely this alone with limit the second site's ability to rank well.

While having duplicate product descriptions isn't the end of the world, it certainly doesn't help. In this scenario they've taken unique content and replaced it with duplicate and so the drop you're seeing is exactly what I would have expected.

My question is what's the best thing to do in this case so that the rankings will be back to higher positions and they'll get back their traffic.

If I were in your shoes, I'd be looking to get as much uniqueness happening in that content as I could. Since the supplier's site had original content for the same products, you could try reverting to that for the time being. You can test it with a single category as a proof of concept and if that works, move ahead from there.

If you're going to try that, make sure you block the subdomain via Robots.txt so Google isn't crawling those old descriptions there or you'll end up in the same position

This is all general info since I can't look closer at the site. It could also be a site structure/speed/navigation/page title/meta description problem etc. If you're comfortable sending me the links I'd be happy to take a closer look. Feel free to drop it here or PM.

Hi Christopher,

Thankfully this sort of scenario is pretty straight forward these days. I've answered each question below but let me know if you have any other questions.

Should I also list my old domain on the dedicated server over the shared server or does it matter? It won't make a difference. Google does look at some sever-related info (IP/subnet, location etc) but whether you're on a shared or dedicated server won't alter your rankings.

Even if both sites share the same IP/subnet, it's really not an issue unless you've purchased a volume of domains to do this with.

Will the backlinks of the old site show up in my new site's links via Google's search console, Open Site Explorer, etc.?

You know what? I've actually never thought about this. I doubt they will but either way, it doesn't really matter. You don't lose any strength via 301 redirects these days so whether Google shows them in GSC or not, you're getting that strength.

Will the backlinks of the old site improve the authority of my domain? Also, keep in mind that I have the 301 redirects pointing to a directory on my new site, not the root page of the new domain.

Theoretically yes, though this is another situation I've never tried or seen tested. Is there a particular reason you haven't pointed them to a specific page on the site?

Will the backlinks of the old site help my new domain's authority?

Sure will. As I touched on above, a 301 redirect now passes 100% of that strength (PageRank). While PR is no longer visible to us, Google continues to use it internally and that metric is mostly what we're talking about here.

Cyrus covered the whole topic very nicely last year, it's worth having a read.

Whether or not Moz's metrics will demonstrate this I'm not too sure but ultimately, Google/Bing are the ones we're interested in when it comes to acheiving rankings/traffic.

How exactly do the backlinks of the old domain benefit my new domain and is there a way to measure this/see the relationship?

Also something I touched on above. The theory here is that Google is still using PageRank internally and 301s pass 100% of PR. Assuming this is all accurate (we can't possibly know for sure), then 100% of the PR from the old site will be getting pushed through to your new one.

An important point that Cyrus raised in the post above is that PR isn't everything when it comes to links. If the old site was still receiving traffic, keep an eye on how that redirected traffic is engaging. While the link strength is nice, you want to capitalise on the traffic as well.

Assuming you've only got one instance like this, search engines are typically smart enough these days to see this is an anomaly rather than a pattern of intentional spam.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to disavow them I suppose but if it were my site, I wouldn't worry about it. On the other hand, if you have a number of instances where this is happening, I'd look to address that quite quickly.

Google understands that weird things like this can happen to all of us and they can't be judging everyone by the individual links or perceived actions. As a perfect example of this, my latest client has never done any form of digital marketing. Looking at their backlink profile they have 7 quality, natural backlinks and 2 Polish spam/scraper sites in their backlink profile. They can't help having their site scraped, just like you can't control the structure of that site you have 45k links from

1. Definitely not.

2. Hard to say for sure but I really doubt it. You can't actually get penalised for duplicate content so if anything I'd say it's a positive signal that 2 duplicate sets have been consolidated.

3. No. Theoretically there may be a window there where the new site is crawled before Google has noticed that the old one is no longer live (rankings are done based on their cached version, not the live site so if they still have the old site in cache, to Google it's still considered live) but that's both temporary and unlikely to have any measurable impact.

I'm working through a similar situation for a client at the moment where I'm waiting on their dev team to finish up the new site and I have a bunch of rubbish pages I want to do away with. The most efficient way to deal with both situations given they're just a couple of weeks away is to wait for the new site.

Hope that helps!

Interesting question but unfortunately I think the answer is quite boring (while the inner workings behind it are fascinating)!

With the advancements Google has made in recent years around semantic search and truly understanding both what your website is about and the intent behind a user's search, I really don't think that space is going to make any difference.

They have no issue at all in understanding that Car Hire terms are very relevant to me when I'm searching Car Rental. Far more impressive is that I can search for the phrase "I need a car in Perth tomorrow" and I still get car hire options for that location. I didn't mention Hire or Rental at all yet they still nailed it based on my intent!

I've seen countless other examples of this over the years so based on that alone, I'd say the difference between C300 and C 300 is immeasurable.

While it's true that two websites with exactly the same strength may rank differently with and without that space, SEO is just too complex for that to ever be possible in the real world.

To answer your question directly around how to target both, I'd suggest using the correct C 300 format and let Google work it out

Hi Eric,

Without having too much info to work from, it does sound like you're on the right track here. If the tags aren't really serving a purpose there's no reason to have them junking up your site with duplicates.

If those tags are removed correctly they won't generate 404s because nothing should be linking to them. The only way you might end up with an internal 404 through removing them is if you've linked directly to them in your content.

It's always a good idea to crawl your site with something like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider after the removal to make sure.

The other thing to double-check is your referral traffic in Google Analytics and your backlink profile. Between these two you can confirm that you don't have any links pointing to a tag page that's actually sending real traffic. It's unlikely but still worth checking!

Hi Carrie,

Unfortunately, the honest answer here isn't going to be what you want to here because it's the same info you see everywhere for link building.

Done properly, guest posting targets strong websites that make sense. There's no magic number that you need, the more strong and relevant backlinks you can pick up, the better your rankings can be.

Since I'm sure you don't just want links for the sake of having links, you'll also be targeting something very specific so nobody can provide a "top 10 guest post websites" that perfectly applies to you. Those articles definitely do exist but following them is not "guest posting", it's just article submission which has been a pretty bad idea for quite a few years now (thankfully!).

Here's a grossly oversimplified look at my thought process if I'm looking for guest post opportunities:

**1. **What do I want to talk about? General digital marketing? Just SEO? Specifically page titles?

**2. **Who would genuinely benefit from knowing more about that topic?

**3. **Where do those people currently go for their information, even if it isn't specifically to do with digital marketing?

4. Would it make sense for me to have a guest post in that location?

**5. **If yes, what websites in that vertical seem strong and trustworthy enough that I'd want my brand to be associated with it?

With those questions answered, you should then know who your target audience is (that's the end reader, not the site owner you're going to reach out to), what they care about, what strong websites you can potentially collaborate with to get that information to the right people and also how it should be written to best appeal to them.

The alternative here is if you're starting with a website you want to collaborate with and you need to figure out how best to approach it. In this instance, the thought process is similar though it then becomes about identifying the crossover between what that site's users care about and what information you can share with them that will genuinely be of value.

Site owners/webmasters/marketing teams care about delivering the best resources to their user base. When doing your outreach, make sure you're appealing to that notion, not just begging for a favour.

Hope that helps!

This is quite the ants nest of a topic and you'll probably get some very strong opinions either way.

A simple overview of my take on it is this:

If you want fast rankings and you don't care how long they stick, go black hat. If you want long term rankings, take the time and invest the effort doing it with White Hat SEO.

While I'm not a black hat advocate by any means, to say that black hat doesn't work would be ignorant and it certainly does have its place. As an example, if you were selling a fad product (maybe yo-yos become super popular again for a few months!) then that's a perfect opportunity for black hat. The fad will likely only last for a few month so spending 6-12 months building a strong site would be misguided. The risks of black hat are also fine because you don't really care if you get penalised a few months down the track once sales have died off again. Granted, there is always a risk you'll be hit almost immediately but one very strong positive of black hat SEO is you can just go spin up a new domain and try again in a matter of hours.

On the other hand, if you're trying to build a sustainable business and rankings are expected to bring you business for the foreseeable future then, in my opinion, taking the black hat gamble is silly.

Our website is the perfect example of this. When we started the company the first page of results for our most competitive term were filled with sites using black hat SEO. Over the years they've all suffered the wrath of Penguin to some degree and sit on page 2+.

Rather than trying to copy their efforts, we went with the white hat approach and have been sitting in #1 for a couple of years now and don't expect that to change so long as we keep our site and link profile maintained.

Agreed, I'd happily answer here to leave both the questions and answers available for others to find when they go searching

To answer your question directly before I explain, I believe it's a combination of Google not really caring about the exact words you use and the strongest sites in this vertical using "flooring".

The easiest way to think about keywords these days is in terms of "themes" rather than individual words. I just tried this in Google AU and the result is actually quite an interesting demonstration of search themes because I've got results ranging from Wood Floor Solutions to Timber Flooring and even Hardwood Floor.

Here's my understanding of what we're seeing here: Google isn't all that interested in exact-match these days and instead tries to determine your intent and offer what it believes to be the most qualified results for that intent.

For this particular search phrase, it's assuming that rather than wanting to see pictures of a wood floor, you're likely actually looking for information on some kind of wooden flooring options. So, that's what you've been given; the strongest websites in your local area that offer various forms of wooden flooring, paying no attention to the phrasing of the topic.

Much like the clips from College Humour, If Google Was a Guy, if you were to walk up to someone on the street and ask for "wood floor", they're going to point you to the closest flooring expert(s) they know. This is basically how Google connects the dots these days too, albeit a grossly oversimplified explanation.

As much as I love Moz and what they have to offer, the answer here is no.

From what I've observed, they seem to offer the most helpful information on links in your backlink profile but have the smallest volume of links catalogued What this means is that for what does show up in your backlink profile in OSE, the info on these backlinks is fantastic but you'll only see a small portion of your true link profile.

That said, no tool (including Search Console) offers a complete list of links pointing to your site. The difference is that the two other major providers in this space (Ahrefs and Majestic) do offer a larger database and so a more accurate indication of link volume.

Having tested all three major tools for a few months, it was quite common to see a site's profile show 100 referring domains in Ahrefs, approximately the same in Majestic give or take a few and more like 5 - 20 in OSE.

Crawling such an insane volume of sites (billions? trillions?) on a regular basis takes a significant amount of resources so I don't blame Moz for having a less exhaustive offering... but in it's current state I also don't find it particularly useful I'm afraid. Time will tell if they dedicate more time/resources to changing this now that they've returned from broader digital marketing efforts to their original core of SEO.

I think the best way to answer this is to determine exactly how Moz calculates the score in the first place. They have a handy video explaining it on this page along with more detailed info.

Long story short, to improve your Trust score, improve the overall quality of your backlink profile.

Technical Definition of MozTrust

MozTrust quantifies the trustworthiness of a web page relative to all other pages on the web. It is based off of an algorithm developed by Yahoo! search engineers that is likely similar to the trust algorithms used by Google and Bing search engineers. Just as links express global link popularity, they also express information about the trustworthiness of URLs.

As mentioned above, receiving links from sources with inherent trust, like university and government homepages, is a strong trust endorsement for your own page or site. By measuring the occurrence and frequency of these endorsements, MozTrust can quantify trust on the web.

Since 3xx redirects don't lose page rank anymore, theoretically it would seem the end result here is going to be the same regardless of which route you take.

That said, I'd probably suggest going with option B here simply for the fact that search engines are looking at link/referring domain volume among many other things and I would expect redirects are going to be treated quite similar in that respect.

This is speculation of course but assuming the link profiles on each of these other domains are healthy, it's not going to hurt; worst case scenario it makes no difference.

No problem at all.

The legal implications certainly make it more complicated! Unfortunately the only suggestion I could really offer here is to block out a time where you can get through them all at once or withing a day or two max.

The longer they're down, the greater the chance you'll drop in rankings and not see an easy recovery.

It may even be worth doing them in batches of 10 - 20 posts and re-publishing them as you finish each batch. At least this way you're steadily minimising the number of pages that are offline rather than taking the all or nothing approach.

That's a very tough situation. Unless by "temporary" you mean a day or two, removing the only section of the site that's providing real value is almost definitely going to see a pronounced downturn in your rankings.

I suppose the best way to handle it is the 302 to a "Sorry, our blog is undergoing some maintenance and will be back in March" type of page.

What I would actually suggest to a client in this scenario though is to build the new blog (assuming that's what's happening here) and have it ready to go before taking the current one down. You've probably thought of that though so I imagine there's something in this scenario that makes it impossible?

From my understanding, it doesn't really matter so long as the links from foreign language sites makes sense.

For example if you're a travel company specialising in trips to Japan, it would make perfect sense for you to have a number of links from Japanese sites (still keeping them relevant to what you do).

On the other hand, if you're a local plumber servicing a 50mi radius around Las Vegas, a large volume of links from Japanese sites seems a little fishy. Maybe a small number from supplier sites or something but that's about it.

The overarching rules of (white hat) link building don't really change with the language; build links from strong and relevant websites and search engines should understand that relevance just fine.

I'd expect that content duplication is going to be a big part of it.

We know that you don't get "penalised" for duplicate content but you can expect a slide in rankings if the duplication is significant enough which I think it is in this case tbh.

There's also the link profiles to consider. From what I can see, some domains have 0 backlinks and others have a handful of low quality ones with little to no relevance to what you do.

In your shoes, I'd have to consider consolidating these sites into a single domain to remove duplication and give a single link profile to build. Turning the current 4 domains (and the "more coming"!) into strong sites that are likely to perform well in the SERPs would take a significant amount of time and effort.

It's true there are some benefits to having a specific site on the relevant TLD for each location but each site should be treated as a whole new campaign and so quadrupling the number of domains you're trying to rank also means quadruple the workload. 4x the campaign planning, 4x the unique content, 4x the link building effort etc.

Hi Pamela,

I'd lean toward redirecting the other sites to the one that currently carries the most power, assuming that site is also producing the best UX and engagement metrics (bounce rate, conversion rate etc). Rankings and user metrics typically go hand in hand but it's worth double-checking.

As for how to do the redirect, this is where it becomes more of a grey area because there are so many variables so it depends on your situation. Ultimately all pages that are receiving direct or referral traffic should be redirected to the equivalent page on the strongest site so those users will still arrive at the right product rather than just the home page.

The reason it's not that simple is because you might have 300,000 products with 60% of those getting direct/referral traffic so identifying these and getting the 301s set up would take a considerable amount of time and if done via htaccess, that's a lot of entries to be parsed on page load which isn't great for site speed. Alternatively, you might only have 5 or 6 of these pages in which case the site speed difference would be immeasurable and setting it up would take a matter of minutes.

Apologies for the somewhat vague response but hopefully it points you in the right direction.

The short answer is "nobody knows"

Whether or not it will ever show up is completely at Google's discretion. Generally speaking, the only time that carousel will display in the SERPs is if the website is highly authoritative.

If you think about it from Google's point of view, their aim is to provide the highest possible value to their searchers. If you were a local plumber who Tweets a quote or funny joke a couple of times per year, schema markup or not, displaying this in the carousel won't provide any value at all and takes up precious screen real estate.

There's no magic number (that Google is going to give us anyway) that will get it to display either. It could be a combination of Tweet volume and regularity, interaction, followers etc and is likely combined with the strength and relevance of your website in the context of your search query too.

Applying that schema is still a good idea in my opinion, it's just not as simple as "if I apply it to my site, it will definitely display in SERPs". This is true for all forms of schema markup. You're giving your site the best possible chance to display better in the SERPs but it doesn't necessarily mean it will happen.

I hope that helps!

I wouldn't say that I strictly agree with it but I do see their point.

The way I look at it is quite similar though from a slightly different angle. For any given vertical, where you rank is entirely relative to the other sites presented in that query.

For example, if you're in the car hire industry and all of your competitors have incredibile link profiles and passable onsite factors then for your industry, your link profile is going to be an important ranking factor for you.

Likewise, if you're a local plumber and the top results have 1 or 2 referring domains but great content, ranking is going to take more focus on quality onsite than the car hire example.

Now, obviously the approach to outranking another site shouldn't be to just copy what they do and you should be exploiting their weak points but no amount of great content is going to push your car hire company above a competitor with 2,000 legitimately quality referring domains!

What this all means is that while Google may not be directly measuring each vertical differently, what it takes to rank in each one will require different strengths and weaknesses. This is conjecture so take from it what you will; it's mostly just my 2c and viewpoint on the whole thing.

I completely agree with Clayton's response so I won't touch on that.

To answer your other question though of whether or not Google will see the second site as being duplicate, the short answer is that "it shouldn't".

Google will only reference the last-crawled copy of your website so the only time there could be potential for being seen as duplicate is if the new domain gets crawled before the old one is recrawled. Even then, I wouldn't expect it would have a measurable difference on the progress of a new domain.

Don't forget, you can't get penalized for duplicate content. The worst that can happen is your rankings slide somewhat but being a new domain, it'd take a few weeks/months to see any real rankings anyway so it's mostly a moot point

As genuinely interesting as this post is, the below paragraph basically sums up what I'm taking from it right now:

Earlier this year, Stone Temple Consulting released a study saying that links remain incredibly important in Google’s ranking algorithm. Searchmetrics agrees but says that importance has dropped.

Sure, if the data says there's less correlation there, maybe that's correct but to what extent? It's not like we can just start ignoring backlinks any time soon so as far as I'm concerned, it's business as usual.

We already know they're putting an emphasis on things like mobile usability, load speed, HTTPS, valuable content etc and should already be doing these things and that's not about to change.

Hi Nicola,

Sounds like a very strange one indeed. I can't say I've ever heard of Google giving a redirect when other 3rd party crawlers give you a 200.

My only suggestion to begin the troubleshooting would be to have a look at your htaccess and maybe Robots to see if there are any directives in there addressing Google specifically.

Anthony's suggestion is also a great idea. At least you'll see what Google is picking up on those pages right now rather what they saw last time it was cached.

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

Hi Jamie,

I think I'm a little confused by the situation/question. If he wants users who land on the .com domain to stay on the .com domain, this is the default behaviour of a website so he could simply remove the 301 redirect.

Doing this would double the maintenance and SEO work required so it's rarely a good idea unless he has a lot of resources to throw at it. Also, having 2 websites that are absolutely identical is dangerous; you won't get 'penalised' for it but the rankings would likely be pretty bad.

If he were to go down the route of running 2 sites, the best way to handle this is to write content that appeals to the users in each of those locations. The most obvious difference being UK English vs US but the way content is written for each country will typically contain regional differences too.

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.

Hi Fabrizo,

That's a tricky one given the sheer volume of pages/music on the site. Typically the cleanest way to handle all of this is to offer up a View All page and Canonical back to that but in your case, a View All pages would scroll on forever!

Canonical is not the answer here. It's made for handling duplicate pages like this:

www.website.com/product1.html
     www.website.com/product1.html&sid=12432

In this instance, both pages are 100% identical so the canonical tag tells Google that any variation of product1.html is actually just that page and should be counted as such. What you've got here is pagination so while the pages are mostly the same, they're not identical.

Instead, this is exactly what rel=prev/next is for which you've already looked into. It's very hard to find recent information on this topic but the traditional advice from Google has been to implement prev/next and they will infer the most important page (typically page one) from the fact that it's the only page that has a rel=next but no rel=prev (because there is no previous page). Apologies if you already knew all of this; just making sure I didn't skim over anything here. Google also says these pages will essentially be seen as a single unit from that point and so all link equity will be consolidated toward that block of pages.

Canonical and rel=next/prev do act separately so by all means if you have search filters or anything else that may alter the URL, a canonical tag can be used as well but each page here would just point back to itself, not back to page 1.

This clip from Google's Maile Ohye is quite old but the advice in here clears a few things up and is still very relevant today.

With that said, the other point you raised is very valid - what to do about crawl budget. Google also suggests just leaving them as-is since you're only linking to the first 5 pages and any links beyond that are buried so deep in the hierarchy they're seen as a low priority and will barely be looked at.

From my understanding (though I'm a little hesitant on this one) is that noindexed pages do retain their link equity. Noindex doesn't say 'don't crawl me' (also meaning it won't help your crawl budget, this would have to be done through Robots.txt), it says 'don't include me in your index'. So on this logic it would make sense that links pointing to a noindexed page would still be counted.

Hi Raymond,

Great question and I think you've summed most of it up correctly with this point:

• The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development.

To clarify that point though, it's not necessarily that search engines just inherently see the home page as being the most important (this is true to an extent but it's not a massive deal), it's moreso that home pages tend to have the most content and backlinks pointing to them. This is the real reason they tend to carry more strength.

Combine this with the fact that a lot of marketing agencies put a lower priority on getting their web design terms to rank and you've got the situation you're seeing here.

We're a perfect example of this actually. We're a digital marketing agency and rank very well for our SEO terms but until recently haven't really cared to rank for the other services we do since they were of little importance to our business model. A few months back we started pushing another of our services a bit more and those rankings came up from ~ page 5 to page 1/2 so far and climbing.

It's proof that you can rank other pages on your website but also that so many of us rank well for specifically terms because it's all we're really trying to rank for

This isn't just a single anecdote I'm basing my advice on either. We have a client volume into the triple digits and our campaigns are built to rank them for a range of products/services that they offer using specific landing pages for each and we're very successful at doing it. So long as you're not making your home page and a separate landing page target the same terms, there's absolutely no reason why a subpage can't be ranked if done correctly.

Good luck!

Apologies for the indirect answer but I would have to ask "why"?

If these pages are almost identical and you only want one of them to be indexed, in most situations the users would probably benefit from there only being that one main page. Cutting down on redundant pages is great for UX, crawl budget and general site quality.

Maybe there is a genuine reason for it but without knowing the context it's hard to give accurate info on the best way to handle it

£1000 /month for hosting? o.O

I can't say I've ever seen this before! Perhaps that's for massive traffic volumes like you'd expect to see for Reddit.com? It would make sense in the scenario to cope with the sheer volume of simultaneous sessions and interaction as well as risks like DDOS but for the average website I can't imagine there'd be any benefit beyond finding a host with a server that's fast, reliable and preferably in the same region as your target market.

The server location isn't as important as people think but it does have some influence so if you're in the market for a server change you might as well, just don't go changing for this alone.

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!

Hi Jeffrey,

These questions are always so interesting but to give an accurate answer we'd need more info like what the keyword is, if it's at all relevant to what you do etc.

In short, it's been many moons since Google just ranked you for words and phrases that could be found on your website. They do still help, but it's absolutely possible to rank for something without mentioning it, provided the topic is similar.

For example, if you run a car hire company and only ever use the word "hire" across your site, you will definitely still rank for "car rental" as well. For several years now Google has been improving the way they "understand" the content on your site.

As these improvements continue, just how far removed those related terms can be also increases. If a human can make the logical connection between two topics, chances are so can Google and so you can rank for these connected things. I actually wrote quite a lengthy response that covered this same topic a few weeks back which might be worth a read too. Basically, the shoe company Hype DC here in Australia almost never uses the word "shoe" or "shoes" yet their rankings for those terms are excellent.

Hope that helps!

Hi there!

To answer your question directly, I'd suggest having a read through this post from Cyrus a few months back. In short, 301s should now pass all strength through... but this is Google we're talking about here so please read the whole post before taking any action.

With that out of the way, I should also point out that there seems to be a bit of a misconception here. Having backlinks point directly to your subfolder(s)/subpage(s) is exactly what you should be doing with your link building efforts, it's just something that most don't think to do or don't know they should be doing!

If you drive 100% of your links to the home page, that's great for the home page's strength but if you want to be ranking subpages as well, plenty of effort should be going into building links for that pages too. While backlinks to any page on the site will help the entire domain's strength, each page is also weighed up by it's own metrics.

My suggestion here would be to forget about the complications of buying another domain, driving links to it and redirecting them all and just build links to each of your landing pages directly instead. There's nothing awkward about linking to website.com/subfolder because nobody will ever even see that link, all the user will ever see is just the anchor text, just like the link I provided above. You see "this post from Cyrus" in blue text but the actual link is https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo"

URLs (URIs) are rarely user friendly, that's exactly why we use anchor text!

Hi Darren,

I can't say that I know of a tool that will do this for you and there's a pretty good reason for that - there's no black and white way of knowing what keywords each page targets - not since search engines stopped paying attention to the Meta Keywords element many moons ago.

There may be some tools out there that I've never come across but the best they could offer would be an arbitrary estimation of what you're looking for; certainly nothing concrete.

The closest I could offer would be SEMrush. It will give you keywords that your site ranks for but from what I understand, it's extrapolated data meaning it isn't necessarily very accurate either. It's basically a ranking report at the domain level, ie what terms does your website rank for rather than showing which page ranks for what term.

Hope that makes sense!

Moz's Spam Score is about far more than just questionable backlinks. Since we don't have a URL to dig deeper and offer specific suggestions, the best I can really off you is a couple of links to better understand what it is you're looking for - it will probably spark a few ideas for you.

Link 1 - Whiteboard Friday

Link 2 - Moz Blog

As far as using tools like OSE and Majestic goes, Chris Hickman is correct in that they're imperfect. OSE seems to have the smallest index (ie the lowest volume of sites crawled) while Majestic has the most so it's only natural that Majestic would be giving you higher numbers.

Hopefully this will at least point you in the right direction!

The real question to be asking with something like this is "if I do this, will it help or hinder the user experience?" Without seeing the website or knowing the context here, I'd be guessing it's going to hinder that experience.

As time goes on and users become more familiar with the basic mechanics of how a search engine works, keyword optimisation (or over-optimisation in this case) appears more obvious to them and is the digital equivalent of the stereotypical slimy car salesman.

I can't think of many examples where having two near-identical headings on the same page would make a whole lot of sense but either way, go with whichever genuinely works best for the user and the vast majority of the time that will result in improved rankings too.

Assuming pricing in your country (US?) is about the same as here in Aus, I'd probably do the following if I didn't have SEO knowledge myself.

• Use a few months worth of that budget upfront to get a quality company to do a thorough audit and devise a plan for me to work through
• Work through this plan as quickly as I humanly could without cutting corners
• Return to the original company periodically (quarterly?) for advice along the way so I know I'm always on track and not wasting my effort sprinting in the wrong direction
• Buy a few helpful tools to make analysis easier and monitor results. I'd say at least Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 items) and some kind of ranking tool - we use AWR Cloud.
• Engage a contractor of some form (Fiverr?) to start producing as much quality content as the remaining budget allows

Of course, if services are much like tangible products where Australia is 50-100% more expensive (the joys) then I'd probably just take the time to find and engage a quality agency and keep a close eye on their work to make sure you're getting value. Here in Aus the value you'll get from $1,000 /month is questionable unless you're in a vertical with minimal competition.

Before the hate starts - _some _agencies and certainly freelancers can do a fantastic job for you on that budget, it's simply that the smaller your budget, the higher the likelihood of landing a dud provider. Again, $1k /month in the US may be the standard minimum for quality agencies so this wouldn't apply.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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?

I've only ever seen the demos for Hubspot but from what I've seen, they're very different tools - both excellent at what they do, but very different.

MozPro gives you access to a bunch of metrics and research tools predominantly for SEO decision making while Hubspot is essentially an advanced CRM; a way to track sales metrics and guide leads through the conversion funnel.

Granted, they do track some on-site metrics and provide some very helpful info there as well but it's still quite different to the Moz suite.

If we decide to go with HubSpot next year, it'll be as well as Moz Pro.

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.

We've noticed most of our clients moving up quite strongly in the past couple of weeks. They started moving just before the official Penguin release date - coincidence? A different update?

Whatever the change, it's been quite a positive thing for us. We're seeing ~10-20% increase in visibility including quite a number of new #1 and page 1 results.

Wow, so sorry about the slow reply here, things have been crazy the last couple of weeks!

Looking at a few of your blogs I see what you mean. They're not too bad but are probably a bit too keyword-stuff to keep as they are.

Having the keyword amongst the content isn't a problem (obviously!) but when it starts to feel unnatural, that's when you start turning users away. As an example, I had a look at this post and found the word Wyoming used 17 times in a fairly short post.

Paragraphs like this one really highlight the awkwardness:

From the moment you validate a business idea, to processing your business licensing requirements, incorporating in Wyoming, to finding the right financing, it takes up time, money, and effort.

I also noticed in that post that the first link points to the page you're already on!

Internal linking is important and for the most part appears to have been implemented quite well. If it were my website I'd be leaving the posts up but systematically working my way back through them to remove some of the keyword stuffing and fixing up any weird linking to make them read better.

As much as cutting them all and starting again would be technically correct, in the real world we need to make compromises like this to maintain existing rankings and income.

This is a tough one and a bit of a gamble either way I suppose. If the content was absolute rubbish (maybe horrible spelling and grammar or keyword-spammed) then the suggestion would be obvious - delete them and move on.

Being that it sounds like they're "ok" but just not up to your modern standards, the decision isn't quite so simple. Having them on your site isn't going to make it any slower unless they're adding redirects or something else to your site, the issue is whether or not their low quality is hurting you and it's tough to say without seeing them.

Very generally speaking, if they're free of errors, don't spam keywords or talk about dodgy subjects like online casinos or pharmaceuticals then you're probably better off leaving them there since they will be passing some relevance signals and they are bringing you traffic.

The one other thing I'd suggest checking is user engagement on those pages. Since Google is looking at this too, having an average session duration of 4 seconds for a 2,000 word post is a pretty clear red flag that whatever that page is about isn't worthy of being in their search results.

I've never personally tested this so I can't say what would happen if you just left everything to fall away over time but I prefer to be proactive with this sort of thing.

If these branches are essentially just a retail shop front then I'd lean toward closing that branch (in GMB) and having the other instances of that particular NAP removed too.

It's basically just a bit of housekeeping - you don't really want people to be coming across one of our branches that no longer exists and since you created these listings, it shouldn't be hard or time-consuming to remove them.

The only other step I'd suggest here is to Google the terms you think are likely to show that branch. Search for the company name and location and skim through the results to make sure you haven't missed anything out. You may even come across something like a genuine comment on some obscure forum referencing that branch.

Since you can't exactly have that comment deleted, you could always create an account and drop a comment in there saying that branch is unfortunately closed but there is a branch at [nearest location]. At least then anyone reading that thread in the future has an alternative.