You should really just add that to your disallow list in your robots.txt file. That's the easiest method.

<code>User-agent:  *  Disallow:  /customer/</code> 

More information on RogerBot.

What exactly do you mean by "bad?"

They are both undesired. You certainly won't be penalized for having a 404 specifically, but you may see a decrease in ranking if it affects your site structure or if the pages you lost were passing along page authority to other pages.

You should do everything you can to limit both. Both are equally bad.

Let me know if I understood the question correctly. Cheers!

Hi there,

I'm assuming you are trying to do pagerank sculpting (or something related..) - which was made a little more tough in recent years. I'll base my answer around this assumption, so feel free to correct me if this isn't the case.

There are several methods to make a link uncrawlable:

1. AJAX - Googlebot will not read any calls through AJAX. If you can load your link through an external call, it would be completely hidden.
2. Javascript - Obfuscate links with Javascript that masks the link. You can do any number of solutions here, including using tags with a title of your URL, which upon clicking, goes that that URL. Simple and effective.
3. Redirects - I haven't tested this last idea, and it may not work. You might be able to redirect to another page in your website, which is then set to not be indexed. Then redirect to the intended page through a query string. In theory it should work, but obviously not as good as the previous methods I described.

Let me know if you have questions. I'd be glad to help further.

Cheers!

It's not blackhat SEO, and it's very common to create separate domains for the means of SEO. You can even use the same IP address (so you don't actually need a new host or new IP) and the benefit is still there. While it does help if the domains are hosted at separate locations, it isn't necessary.

Any of the articles that do belong on your company blog should be on your company blog. Everything else can go on the secondary domains. Just be sure that you develop the domains as you would your flagship website: with quality and attention to detail. Otherwise they serve no purpose other than for your SEO (no value to visitors) and they could be considered as grey/black-hat SEO.

Your secondary domains also become guinea pigs. You can test new services or link building ideas on them, and if they lose their rank, it certainly isn't good but it's not going to hurt your main domain. It's a layer of abstraction that will both protect your main website's SEO and allow you to start building case studies.

Personally I like to get whoisguard to mask the registrant of the domain, separate them all on different servers, and try to make them as unique as possible. (Tough in a specific industry, though..) I'd recommend you did the same.

Let me know if you have questions about this! Cheers.

Ask for a link in exchange for allowing websites to embed your graphic.

Check out Creative Commons licenses and pick the one that works best for you at the following link, and make sure the websites are made aware of the license:

• Creative Commons Licensing

Make the link modest so that the websites don't mind keeping it. Also consider asking that the image links to your website instead of a caption text, or give the website an option to do either.

Crawl your infographic or widget with a GoogleBot simulator if you aren't sure if Google will pick up the link. Although, you shouldn't have a problem doing what I described.

You can hide a link behind the image, but you really shouldn't be trying to hide links. Just stick with my advice and you should be golden.

Good question! Cheers.

Take a look at the Lynx web browser to see how Google would see the website:

http://www.lynxbrowser.com/

Alternatively, check out the Google cache of your website or use a googlebot simulator. You will see that everything in your HTML, including your navigation, is read by Google.

If you are running an eCommerce operation you can safely ignore some of the warnings that SEOmoz shows. For example, many eCommerce stores will have an excess of 100 links due to a large navigation, shopping categories in the sidebar, and product images/titles. The same is true for keyword count.

As long as you aren't overdoing it you are fine. If you have a tennis website, a proper navigation might have "rackets" as the parent category, and then list child categories by color. You should not have the children listed by "Blue tennis rackets," "Yellow tennis rackets," and so on. Duplicating a keyword like this is not necessary.