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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hard to say what is meant by that video. Often, Google is purposely vague.
If the content is truly no longer relevant, I would 301 it to more relevant URLs on a page by page basis. This will remove low performing pages from Google's index, and potentially improve your rankings.
On the other hand, if the content still has value but doesn't need to be front and center, a clearly organized archive based on date or some other organizational method should work fine.
This is not the definition of cloaking and I wouldn't worry too much about any penalty.
That said, anytime you redirect googlebot to a different experience than users it's a situation you want to be very careful with, and in most situations avoid. Often this is solved by serving different experiences via javascript. Even though Google is pretty darn good at parsing javascript, they will often interpret the default version of a page as if the javascript is turned off.
Regardless, I'd keep an eye on search results, Google Webmaster Tools, cached versions of your site and make ample use of "Fetch and Render" in GWT to ensure Google interprets your site they way you think it should.
Sounds like you've got a good handle on your strategy, which to me seems sound.
Couple points of advice:
1. Make sure the microsites have a clean backlink profile. Use OSE or another tool to check for paid links, spammy article submissions, etc. You want to make sure not to transfer any bad links to your main site.
2. Do your best to 301 redirect individual URLs to specific URLs on your new site, keeping care to maintain the subject matter, content, structure, title tags etc. If these change too much, Google will interpret this as a change of subject, and you may lose any transferred authority.
3. Follow best practices for migrating domains.
Hope this helps. Sounds like your on the right track. Best of luck with your SEO!
Good question.
On one hand, I'm a fan of linking out with, link equity. There's a good correlation with linking out and higher rankings (though I don't believe we've ever studied the difference between followed and nofollowed in this regard) I hate to see links "nofollowed" simply to protect against Google actions, but it is a reality of doing business.
To me, it comes down to how many of the sites are actual spam. "Low quality" is certainly different than spam. If it's a handful of sites out of thousands, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Generally, tourism websites are a much more trustworthy quality than sites in the gambling/adult/pharmaceutical verticals.
Now, on the other hand, if you do choose to nofollow the links, you probably won't see too many negative consequences.
In the end, I think you have to guage how bad the sites are that you're linking to, and make your judgement from there.
It can be tricky blocking parameters with robots.txt. The first thing you want to do is make sure your are actually blocking the URLs. There are a few good robots.txt checkers out there that can help:
You're file is probably going to look something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?nocrawl=1
... but this could vary depending on exactly you don't want crawled
+1 to Igal's suggestion of handling these via parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687
Finally, if your goal is to keep search results out of the index (it probably should be) then you should also highly consider using a meta robots NOINDEX tag on all search results pages. You can also slap a nofollow on links pointing to search results as this might also help Google steer clear of those pages.
Best of luck!
Edit: Here's what John Wu of Google Webmaster has to say...
"We show this warning when we find a high number of URLs on a site -- even before we attempt to crawl them. If you are blocking them with a robots.txt file, that's generally fine. If you really do have a high number of URLs on your site, you can generally ignore this message. If your site is otherwise small and we find a high number of URLs, then this kind of message can help you to fix any issues (or disallow access) before we start to access your server to check gazillions of URLs :-)."
Complex question 
Caveat: I don't work for Google and the precise workings of the canonical element in Google's algorithm is mostly educated speculation.
The answer is somewhere in-between yes and no. That's because the canonical element means that URL B is treated as URL A. In that sense it really shouldn't pass any direct link authority.
But(!) now let's complicate things. Let's point some links at URL B. (and not at URL A) In theory, those links are then canonicalized to URL A, and that equity passes to your site (yeah!)
So it's not a direct influence, but you can in theory gain link equity from canonicalized versions of URLs that point to your site.
Hi Marie!
Sadly, I don't use Xenu anymore either. Most of the solutions to find orphaned pages are either hit-and-miss manual methods (search OSE, search your server files). Or you could use a method like Agents of Value describes here.
Couple of posts that may help:
1. Find Orphaned Pages From Your Sitemap.xml File with Excel and IIS Toolkit
Requires IIS toolkit, which unless your installing on an external machine, isn't mac friendly
Ian has some great tips here, including:
3. Supposedly, Webseo has an automated option to find orphaned files, but I haven't used it nor can I vouch for it:http://www.webseo.com/
Hope this helps! Let us know what works.
I agree with Shane - this sounds like a bad idea all around. It's fine to generate the title tag dynamically, but it should generate on the backend or your CMS, before the page renders in a browser.
Google does try to parse javascript for links and content, but it's inconsistent and I'm almost certain they would either see your non-scripted title, or get really confusing signals that could cause trouble later.
The best solution may be to explain to your Devs that Google most likely wont parse the javascript, and see if they can come up with another solution.
Best of luck.
Howdy nyc-seo,
This is a really good question with lots of implications. Although there's no single "right" answer, there are a few things you might want to consider:
Some additional resources that may help:
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
The PR is legitamate. But the site itself is bad, bad news.
If you check whois, you can see the registration is only a few months old. So how did they achieve such high PR in such a short period of time?
A very smart (and un-named) colleague of mine suggested using spyonweb to check the Google Analytics and Adsense code of this site to see what other sites it was connected to. Looks like it's part of a huge link network all owned or managed by the same people.
(hint - use spyonweb to search for the Google Adsense code "pub-xxxxxxxxx")
Regardless, the site is obviously selling links at the bottom of the page. Although Google doesn't catch all paid links, these are so obvious that anyone who buys them is at huge risk of a penalty. A smart webmaster would be wise to stay away from paid link offers like this.
Hi Logan,
I've read through this entire thread, and both Alan and Jeremy have some good points, but after reading your last comment I'd strongly opt for directories instead of subdomains.
As far as the display URL goes, Google will allow up to 35 characters, so you could possibly use
EmergencyDental.com/Omaha
I think what you propose...
Take:
And make it:
...is diluting your domain authority amoung too many subdomains. As Alan said, you want to be careful about inter-linking all of these subdomain. Whereas if they are all on the same subdomain (but in different folders) than interlinking is less of a problem.
Aside from preserving Domain Authority, I think you have the opportunity to create a stronger brand voice using "Emergency Dental" than all the subdomains which emphasize the city first.
Ultimately, there are few instances where subdomains make sense, and I could be wrong based on the information presented, but the circumstances would have to be pretty convincing for me to create a subdomain structure like you propose.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
To be honest, using Web 2.0 links in this way is viewed as a low quality activity. Many of these types of links were targeted by multiple Penguin updates, and too many of them could cause you a penalty.
I'm not saying that all 2.0 links are bad - they certainly aren't. But spammers try to build 100's of 1000's of these types of links on throw-away blogger and WordPress blogs that add very little value to the web. These are the links Google tries to sniff out, so it's best to avoid them. A network of these types of links is Google's very definition of "unnatural" and could quickly lead to a loss of rankings and traffic.
Put simply, Google wants you to earn your links.
To answer your question more directly, the first link from any domain tends to count more than other links. So 100's of links from the same domain don't add as much value after the first links. And yes, this can start to look fishy.
It's best to use 2.0 links in moderation, and make sure you are targeting high authority, well trusted sites. I recommend building profiles on good sites and earning links through adding value.
Hi Daniel,
To add to what David said....
Look at the URL of this page that we are on now: http://www.seomoz.org/q/adding-keyword-to-your-url
Our CMS automatically generates the URL from the title of the question. Additionally, this also becomes part of the title tag. Many blogging platforms like Wordpress allow you to customize the URLs of your posts.