Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.

It's an interesting perspective. Looking at the pages+links, they all look trustworthy and normally I wouldn't see a reason to nofollow them, especially since they are all editorially controlled by you and your team.

Linking equity is a concern, but I honestly doubt you're saving anything by making them nofollow, especially since Google updated how they handle PageRank sculpting back in 2009.

Not that there aren't legitimate ways to preserve and flow link equity (such as including internal links withing the main body of text instead of sidebar areas/navigation) but in this case I think leaving the links follow won't hurt at all.

There are a few possible reasons Google might adjust rankings after seeing a change in your title and meta descriptions. Among them: (keep in mind these are only possibilities)

1. The algorithm determines that the page is less relevant to the target query keywords

2. The title change deviates from earlier anchor text pointing at the page, meaning the page might not be as relevant to the query

3. Over-optimization

4. After changing your title+description, you experience a lower CTR in search results. In theory this could lower your rankings. But because you describe the old title/description still showing in SERPS, this is less likely

5. The drop in rankings is temporary, or is unrelated to any changes you made.

If Google is still showing the old title/description, #5 is a strong possibility. You may want to check Google's cache of the page to see if it's picking up on the changes. Depending on the site this can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks.

If nothing else, you can always change the title/description back to the original version and test what happens.

I'm actually kinda stumped. For whatever reason, Google is ignoring the sitemap date. Here's what I would do:

1. Even though the sitemap is valid, I'm still unclear if Google is reading it. The only way to know for sure is by checking the Sitemap function in Google Search console here and verifying indexation: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list

2. You could try to put a date on the page. Something like "Last Updated" at the bottom of the page.

3. A longshot, but you could add the <lastreviewed>Schema markup to the page, and see if Google honors that.</lastreviewed>

If you try any of these, let us know if any of them worked!

How odd. I'm not sure of the answer, but before we go any further I was hoping you could verify a couple of things;

1. In Google Search console, can you verify that your sitemaps are submitted and that Google is indexing/reading them? I would think since you have a "last mod" date in your sitemap it would send a signal to Google that the page was more up to date.

2. When looking at the cache of your page in Google, it doesn't look like all the resources are loading. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:example.com

Based on this, if you perform a fetch and render in Google console, does it show that you are blocking any resources?

Turns out I wrote a post that expanded on this idea of keyword themes: https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts

Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

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 Leo,

Sounds like you were doing the right thing. Different tools will show different numbers, as all tools use different link indexes. In general, Moz is a bit more picky about the links it displays - we try to display the most important links that are likely to have an impact on your ranking. The downside of this is that our index can be smaller than some of the others (Ahrefs, Majestic) and you'll often find a bigger volume of links with those other indexes.

Also, for general help in using Open Site Explorer, here's an excellent resource: https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer

The good news is, this actually sounds pretty normal. 24 hours to reflect changes in content is better than many sites. I can't account for why it dropped from 4 to 24, but I'd say this is still in the range of "good"

Howdy,

A couple of questions:

1. Are there certain pages that aren't getting updated, or is it your entire site?
2. How often are changes in the pages reflected in Google's cache?

Is it a case where Google simply displays old/outdated information all the time? Finally, have you done a "Fetch and Render" check in Google Webmaster Tools?

Anything with "Link Exchange" in the title should be bumped to a Spam Score 100

Those are really, really horrible links. I'd probably disavow them just to be safe. On the other hand, unless you've received a manual action notice in Google Webmaster Tools, it's quite possible those links aren't hurting you at all and Google is simply ignoring them.

On the other hand, those links are just awful.

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.

Short answer: no (or at least, very unlikely)

Google publicly states they don't pull data form inside GA, and realistically they don't need to. They are only concerned about the performance of their search results, and how that traffic responds to individual results. They also have no reason to lie about not using GA data, as there are so many other sources of information that are better.

"And finally... when is google going to shut these open back doors in Analytics so that Vitaly and his ilk are shut down forever?"

Great question! Hopefully soon.

There's a 100 different ways to do this, but typically my favorite approach is to try to work the synonym into the same copy without seeming spammy.
For example, if my primary keyword is "GMO" and my very literal synonym is "Genetically Modified Organism" then I'd try to work both variations into the copy.

<title>GMO Dangers - Knowing the Risks of Genetically Modified Organisms</title>

Here's a great article that goes into depth about the advantages of incorporating multiple variants into your SEO targeting http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5370/941-traffic-increase-exploiting-the-synonyms-seo-ranking-technique/

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.