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China eh? sounds like a "particular" link network
If these Chinese links were "built" by the previous SEO company I'd ask them to remove them they'll probably have the necessary information to do that. Beyond that I would try to remove as many as possible and then go down the disavow route.
Hi Chris
As with all things SEO it depends.
If you're working for a huge brand and have the budget it might make sense to have different cc-TLD's and target those to each market.
It's a common belief that subfolders are better than subdomains and Google treat a subdomain as a separate site so in terms of maintaining domain authority you might want to take this option.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
It all will come down to budget, time and long term goals - do people in Germany prefer to see .de extensions do UK people trust .co.uk over .com?
The only advantage I have found for using sub-domains is you can host them on separate servers quite easily - but you can get similar benefits with a CDN.
It's difficult to say whether these links are helping or hindering at the moment - by the sounds of it the report the SEO agency ran was a Link Detox report and the results are purely automated, while I have a lot of faith in the tools from LRT I wouldn't be 100% confident with the results as some of the links may be giving a false positive... however you will most likely be talking about a small change ratios.
Ultimately there is a potential problem if you haven't received a warning yet, so I would look to remove as many of these links as possible - as soon as possible.
Hi Michael
Have you received a notification in Google WMT of a partial or site-wide manual penalty?
Have you seen a loss in rankings? I do offer link removal and disavow as a service so would be happy to take a look but you might find that you need to remove as many of the links as possible rather than disavow and submit a reconsideration request.
Cheers
Yes James you're referencing HTML that's incorrect
Never...
As James correctly pointed out the & (or ampersand) is not a good idea. However his explanation is a little incorrect.
You see URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, therefore the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format.
When using unsafe ASCII characters you have to replace them with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits.
Therefore an "&" is %26 and not & which is the standard HTML character set.
Personally I would look at a way to exclude the & and just have /5-star-hotel-near-beach/ for example
If you've had to noindex your products I would seriously be looking at ditching Cubecart.
Unfortunately the method method Oleg raised only works for Posts and not pages...
So you have a choice either write a PHP script and load it as a plugin or make some amendments to your .htaccess
Personally I noindex all my category and tags in WordPress as I don't think they offer the best way for people searching for information to enter my blog. That being said I always believe that i****f a page is of use to a searcher, then you should include it within the index.
I know you have said that you are getting 4% of your organic traffic via tag pages but what's the quality of these visitors, do they have a low bounce rate or better than average time on site?
It would be a good starting place for sites that are created in a similar way.
There is no set hard and fast rules so this is simply my opinion.
Google is pretty lenient if the percentage of content you have copied is low compared to the rest of your page.
Duplication issues can also be overcome if you have other good SEO trust signals i.e. good back links, established domain, unique content etc. I assume this is why Rotten Tomatoes get away with duplication issues as they have an established brand.
As long as you are citing the original source and the duplicated content is not a large percentage of your page then you should be ok.
Hit CTRL + U and now compare the 2 pages you can see that this page has just 3 products on it this means that about 90% of the content on this page i.e. the header, sidebar, footer is the same as this page.
1. Your titles are also very similar one is 1994-02 5.9L Dodge Cummins Diesel Performance Parts and the other is 1994-98 5.9L Dodge Cummins Carbon Fibre Hoods make sure your titles lead with the difference i.e.
Carbon Fibre Hoods for 1994-98 5.9L Dodge Cummins
2. Canonise your Product Pages - make sure you use the rel="canonical" on the individual product listings
3. Remove the common text - e.g. opening hours from the sidebar and consider a page specifically for that content
4. Try adding a unique paragraph to each page - this is easier said than done depending on your CMS but every little helps
Nilesh,
Quite simply:
Page Authority is measured by several metrics but is related to the quality and numbers of links pointing to a particular web page.
Domain Authority is measured by several metrics but is related to the quality and numbers of links pointing to a a web domain.
In order for you to increase these metrics you need to acquire some more good quality links to your web pages, I would look at Jon Cooper's Link Building Strategies or the SEOmoz Link Building category for some good link building tactics and advice.
Thanks
Chris
Diane
I ping numerous services at all once automatically, simply add this list to your Ping Services in your WordPress installation:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
A 301 redirect is for pages that have moved to a new location....if they didn't move somewhere and were just deleted, then they should respond with a 404 or 410. You can return a 410 with a custom navigation menu. If your home page is relevant for the content then by all means redirect your pages here, but as a visitor if I followed a link and ended up on an irrelevant page I'd bounce. You might be better editing, merging or creating new content then doing a 301 to your homepage.
Personally I noindex all my category and tags in WordPress as I don't think they offer the best way for people searching for information to enter my blog. That being said I always believe that i****f a page is of use to a searcher, then you should include it within the index.
I know you have said that you are getting 4% of your organic traffic via tag pages but what's the quality of these visitors, do they have a low bounce rate or better than average time on site?
Hi Niners
Are you referring to links in your OSE report?
Unfortunately the way in which Mozscape crawls the web means that not all web pages are added into the database.
The other reason is that your links are too new. It normally takes a good 4-6 weeks for SEOmoz to find the latest links to your website - although they are getting quicker at finding new links.
Have you access to any other link analysis packages such as MajesticSEO or ahrefs? It's better to have access to as many link reporting tools as possible to make sure all your links are being reported.
If you know the pages you have obtained links from are indexed by Google then that is a good indicator they have been discovered.
Firstly do a search online for Guest blogging opportunities. Here’s more or less complete list of phrases bloggers use to invite people to guest post:
Include your keyword in the search term i.e. "submit a guest blog" Link building
Don't always start with the people on page 1-3 they get inundated with requests everyday so jump straight to page 5 they are more likely to accept.
Hi Nick,
Broken Link building isn't just about getting a broken link replaced with your link. It's also a tactic to build a relationship with a blogger/webmaster to later pitch them a proposal for a link.
Jon Cooper (@pointblankseo) loves this technique so be sure to hop over to his blog
http://pointblankseo.com/creative-broken-link-building
He also recommends a few broken link tools too
Andrew
The Mozscape index is not Google's index.
Moz are an independent company that crawl the web and record links that they find as they go, this does not mean that Google has not found these links to your product pages.
Have you checked Google Webmaster tools to see if the links are showing?