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Thank you for the replies. They give me more hope because I was thinking along similar lines.

I certainly plan on reaching out to the authors of old articles that lost link, but I am not so sure sometimes. One of the old websites specifically got its coverage from being controversial so I am not sure if they unlinked due to it being down or due to complaints from people pointing out how they were helping it by linking to it. I have been noticing articles like https://moz.com/learn/seo/backlinks and I would hate to risk losing mentions on high quality sites by drawing attention to new editors that might just delete the articles entirely.

Another question I have related to mentions is mentions in books. I have noticed a site of mine showing up in Google Books from a couple of published books discussing it. Does that help SEO like a brand mention on a high quality site?

I would think that Google would consider sites mentioned in published books to be more authoritative than ones just mentioned in blogs or news stories.

Hi,

I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory?

Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for.

The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.

I was also noticing that tag clouds are doing better in SERPS than articles. This is surprising to me because before I was forced to take a leave of absence from the online word 7 years ago, it seemed like an original article with the term in the title would do better than a tag cloud. Even if the tag cloud had links to more articles about the same topic on the site.

I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article.

I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that.

Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive.

I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.

This is not an answer, but a question. If Google already knows to discount spam links then why should webmasters have to waste their time tracking down spam links and disavowing them?

I for one will not let anyone waste my time by creating spammy links to any website I own. I never realized how many spam links I have until I signed up for a Moz Pro trial. It seems like most of the spam found by Moz did not show up in the links part of my Google Console, so I really don't feel like disavowing links that I never made. For instance I noticed a number of links to my police misconduct website from spammy looking URLs with pornographic anchor text. And some of it looks like kiddie porn keywords. I am afraid to even look at any of those linking pages. I did not make them. They were probably made by some dirty cop that gets off on that kind of stuff.

So I am wording why this man should have to waste his time disavowing links that Google would not value anyway. Is it not enough for Google to give him no credit?

Again, what do I know. I only worked in SEO before going to prison and getting banned from computers about 7 years ago for a drunken email threat.

Good Answer. I completely abandoned the banner I was thinking of using. It was from one of those directories that will list your site for free if you show their banner on your site. Their code of course had a link to them with some optimized text. I was looking for a way to display the banner without becoming a link farm for them.

Then I just decided that I did not want that kind of thing on my site even if it is in a javascript onload event if Google is going to crawl it anyway, so I just decided not to add it.

Then I started thinking about user generated links. How could I let people cite a source in a way that the user can click on without exposing my site to hosting spammy links. I originally used an ASP.Net linkbutton with a confirm button extender from the AJAX Control ToolKit that would display the url and ask the user if they wanted to go there. Then they would click the confirm button and be redirected. The problem was that the URL of the page was in the head part of the DOM.

I replaced that with a feature using a modal popup that calls a javascript function when the link button is clicked. That function then makes an ajax call to a webservice that gets the link from the database. Then the javascript writes an iframe to a div in the modal's panel. The result should be the user being able to see the source without leaving the site, but a lot of sites appear to be blocking the frame by using stuff like X-Frame-Options, so I'm probably going to use a different solution that uses the modal without the iframe. I am thinking of maybe using something like curl to grab content from the page to write to the modal panel along with a clickable link. All of this of course after the user clicks the linkbutton so none of that will be in the source code when the page loads.

What about a form action? Where instead of an a element with a href attribute you add a form element with an action attribute to what the href would be in a link.

Thanks for that answer. You obviously know a lot about this issue. I guess they would be able to tell if the .js script file creates an a element with a specific href attribute and then add that element to a specific div tag after the page loads.

It sounds like it might be easier just to nofollow those links instead of going to all the trouble to redirect the .js file whenever Google Bot crawls the page. I fear that could be considered cloaking.

Another possibility would be a an alert that requires a user interaction before grabbing a url from a database. The user would click on the link without an href, the javascript onclick fires, the javascript grabs the the url from a database, the user is asked to click a button if they want to proceed, and then the user is redirected to the external url. That should keep the external URL out of the script code.

I feel you. I once found out that I had been paying US Search for over a year. I sincerely hope they have a refund policy is you have not even been using it. US Search told me I could only get the last month back.

Hi,

I have a simple question. If I want to put an image with a link to another site like a banner ad on my page, but do not want it counted by Google. Can I simply load the link and banner using jQuery onload from a separate .js file?

The ideal result would be for Google to index a script tag instead of a link.