Hi Evgeny,

Good question. For starters, one thing to keep in mind from the beginning is that link juice flowed to subdomians don't pass the same link juice as would links to the same domain. So while these links and/or redirects may help the individual storefronts to rank - assuming there is sufficient link juice behind them - it doesn't necessarily help your root domain.

Of course, the way around this is to link these individual storefront subdomains to your main domain, making sure to vary the anchor text and do it in a non-spammy, Penguin friendly way.

Okay, onto the main question. In my experience working with 100's of clients, the best way to get them to redirect to your site is anyway they can. Seriously, it's almost impossible to choose a single method that works for all vendors, so I think it's probably best to offer a variety of solutions, such as changes in DNS, server-side redirects, .htaccess , etc.

You may even need to offer tech support to manually make these changes for your client. Although this is a sticky area fraught with headaches. (I know from experience)

In some cases, it may pass better link juice if you merely have the vendors link to you, instead of going through the trouble of a redirect. Links can carry relevancy signals that 301's can't, and redirects can often loose much of their relevancy if the target page(s) differ too much from the original.

Regardless, if you choose to go the redirection route, you'll want all of your redirects to be 301's, no matter what method you choose. The URL in the browser will be your subdomain. (There are ways to do URL masking, but you don't want to go there)  A common practice is to have the name of the vendor in the subdomain, such as vendor.yoursite.com.

Hope this helps!  Best of luck with your SEO!

Howdy richardo24hr,

One of articles that changed my SEO life was written by Rand back in 2010:

All Links are not Created Equal

The article is still valid today, and update link Panda and Penguin have further changed the landscape of links. Here's a few important points to keep in mind:

1. Multiple links from the same domain don't always help. It's better to have 50 links from 50 domains than 10,000 links from one domain. After the first link, other links from the same domain may pass value, but that value tends to diminish.

2. Since the Penguin update, sitewide, over-optimized anchor text can lead to penalties and/or filters targeting your keywords.

For example, a sitewide footer link (or sidebar link) that pointed to your site with optimized anchor text is often seen as non-editorial (as it's placed automatically by your CMS) and this could actually hurt you.

3. Google is getting better at sniffing out site with "administrative" relationships, and tend to devalue these links. So a site that links to you from 100,000 pages is likely to broadcast a relationship between the 2 sites to Google, so Google may possibly devalue these links.

Links from this site can help! But the danger is to overdo it in a way that can actually act counter to what you're trying to achieve.

The best links from this site, from an SEO point of view, would be:

• Editorial. Meaning they are linked to in the body of a text article, and not auto-generated by a CMS
• This means the links are varied in thier anchor text, and not over-optimized
• I would avoid sitewide links
• RSS links are tricky, but in general I don't see them adding much value. Although these links are often scraped and posted on 3rd party sites. In this case it's best to use generic or branded anchor text like the full url of your site: example.com

If I had to choose, one link on the homepage may well give you more value than 100,000 RSS links. There's probably an opportunity to do more than this, but I'd do a thorough link audit to look for as many over-optimized links from this domain as possible.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hello Prime85,

Both these answers are correct in their own way, but let me clarify and add my 2 cents.

1. 404s don't hurt your rankings directly, but they can provide a poor user experience.

2. If you keep URLs "live" - then Google can keep these URLs in their index indefinitely. This means search engines may waste time and crawling resources visiting pages you don't want in the index, while ignoring your other pages. This CAN hurt your SEO.

Long story short, (like Brian says) if the page is no longer relevant, you should remove it from the index or redirect it to another URL.

3. Returning a 404 kills all link juice that may have gone to the page, and it can also send confusing signals to search engines about the structure of your site if you have a bunch of pages returning 404s at the same time you have a bunch of new, but similar, pages popping into existence.

The best policy is to set up a 301 redirect from your outdated pages to the most relevant new pages. Don't redirect everything to a single page like the homepage, but instead the redirect to the page that would be most relevant and useful for the user.

On the other hand, if it's a low-value page and there's really no need to redirect it, you should remove it from the index. There's a couple ways to do this:

1. Put a meta robots "NOINDEX" tag in the head and wait for Google to crawl the page and process the noindex. It helps if the URL is listed in your sitemap so that they can more easily "find" the url.
2. Block the URL through robots.txt, then use Google's Remove URL tool in Webmaster tools
3. Return a 404, and use the Remove URL tool

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

The reason Google likes the "first click free" method is because they want the user to have a good result. They don't want users to click on a search result, then see something else on that page entirely, such as a login form.

So technically showing one set of pages to Google and another to users is considered cloaking. It's very likely that Google will figure out what's happening - either through manual review, human search quality raters, bounce rate, etc - and take appropriate actions against your site.

Of course, there's no guarantee this will happen, and you could argue that the cloaking wasn't done to deceive users, but the risk is high enough to warrant major consideration.

Are there any other options for displaying even part of the content, other than "first-click-free"? For example, can you display a snippet or few paragraphs of the information, then require login to see the rest? This at least would give Google something to index.

Unfortunately, most other methods for getting anything indexed without actually showing it to users would likely be considered blackhat.

Cyrus

My guess: It's possible, but it would be an uphill battle. The reason being Google would likely see the page as a duplicate of all the other pages on your site with a login form. Not only does Google tend to drop duplicate pages from it's index (especially if it has a duplicate title tag - more leeway is giving the more unique elements you can place on a page) but now you face a situation where you have lots of duplicate or "thin" pages, which is juicy meat for a Panda-like penalty. Generally, you want to keep this pages out of the index, so it's a catch 22.

Can't say with 100% confidence, but sounds like it might work. You could always upload it to a server and use a robots.txt checker to validate, although sometimes the validator tools may incorporate slight differences in edge cases like this that make them moot.

Hi Darin,

Let me add my 2 cents:

If it makes sense from a usuability standpoint to have the author bio on the page, then by all means leave it there.

What's most important, from a search engine point of view, is that the unique content on the page is the most important.

This means placing the paragraphs about the print description front and center on the page. Since Panda, Google seems to treat page content using more of a Reasonable Surfer model in a similar manner as they handle links. That is, the higher up and more prominent the content, the more likely that weighs into their calculations to what the page is "about."

Matt Cutts has previously said it only takes 2-3 sentences to make a page unique, but personally I think closer to a couple hundred words is a safer number.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.