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There are actually a couple good reasons but in short, it's "best practice" so it won't hurt by adding it in. It wont take more than a couple minutes.

I've done both but it does give better results if you have different descriptions. Sometimes, they can even rank for your terms so that's a bonus. I never had trouble with duplicates though, it's just more of an "efficient vs effective" thing for me. (I'm assuming that you won't be making hundreds/thousands of the same citations here lol)

Hi Ruben

For one, he built a lot of links to it

http://www.reflectivepractice.ca/program.htm

http://www.mymakhzenandme.com/the-director.html

http://www.sourceabc.com/alpha/T/

http://theislandpartypei.ca/news.html

http://www.besthotpick.com/alpha/T/

all from sites he probably controls.

If you are going to ask why it's not penalised, that's another long story which is probably already answered here in the QA area somewhere.

It can actually rank. I've seen it work well but I would highly suggest the onpage content be changed, especially the product and category descriptions. If new, "unique" images can be produced, the better. Local search shouldn't be that big of a problem for this but internationally, I'm not so sure as I haven't done this scenario yet outside of local.

Hi AJ,

I would compile a list of the stuff they made

I would then take a look at the sites. Odds are, some are actually good sites with good traffic.

You should be able to get a few good ones at least.  You can opt to change the content. Keep those and remove the links on the rest.

IF they had unlinked brand mentions, just remove those mentions as well. No need to take down the whole thing

If you want, you can actually replace the links and point it to one of your employees blogs, a social property or somethin' that isn't really ranking or has nothing to lose - Just being honest here because simply repurposing it instead of scrapping a whole year's worth of your "investment" is always better in my eyes.

A/B testing is always there, but I'm assuming the site is new and doesnt really have much traffic yet, I can't really say specifically answer that. So it's more of a preference as it's normally the one that brings in results for me more often than not. Then I'll test from there with the traffic/rankings/ctr.

Heck, I'll just imitate Zappos first if I need to then test from there. lol

There's really no problem with having pages on your site having content that can be seen on other sites. Since you have noindexed them already, it shouldn't be a problem.

If they aren't really getting any traffic for you or aren't really bringing in anything that helps the site overall, then just take them off.

Focus on your new and existing content.

This is subjective but yes, I almost always opt to have the company brand in there.

Hi Wendy

It's because those pages are there. You can have those deleted if you dont need them. They are possibly separate HTML files so if you are using a CMS, they won't show there.

Just to be sure, you could show us an example page and we can let you know.

We've actually seen this kind of behaviour with some of the sites from new clients.

They interlinked all their websites, usually with the same templated design.

If you didnt get any warning in webmaster tools, this is probably a purely algorithmic issue which is a whole lot harder to get out of.

I would look at the other things, technical seo, onpage, content being updated, those sorts of usual seo stuff. You competition might be different now in the SERPS as the keywords you were targeting are now showing different results.

im not seeing any problems. Have you fixed this already?

I wouldnt worry about duplicate issues too much unless its on the same domain. It would be my last thing to worry about, probably after fixing the new site. I have done it before on some projects so i understand how annoying this is.

Im wondering why he would want to put the same piece of content on SiteB on 2 separate pieces though...

You would want to put rel=canonical on the pages that have the content like the siteB content page pointing to the siteB mixed content

It's a bit vague but I hope I understood your situation correctly.

Ive seen such things bite our ecommerce clients in the arse for not following our advice. Some blog owners as well. I would suggest to just clean them up, add a canonical, disable the page or whatever that is possible just to quickly get it over with if time is lacking. If you have time, then you can change the content and turn them to good ones. Good pages that actually help your other pages rank.

Hi David,

• You might be seeing them from analytics or your site stats so they are probably from Bing or another search engine.

• Billy's point is also a possibility.

Hi Colin

You might also want to check your on-page seo and the technical seo side.

So aside from links, those might have also contributed to the drop.

Andy and Alan covered what you need to do. One more thing to keep in mind, check the traffic, you don't want to lose those spot in the SERPS. You might want to consider fixing up the subdomain if it gets you conversions and traffic.

Hi Dario,

You should prefer the account with the better reach to a responsive crowd. There are a lot of fake accounts nowadays so if you are looking for people to help you promote your brand, go with someone active and interacts, someone that can actually get you results.

So yeah, Vadim said it best. Authority is superior.

Kevin is spot on. Google can change your title tags.

Try changing your existing one to a better one, improve the length and the relevance of the content. Plus the signals pointing to that page so they would stop changing automatically

Hi Scott

Who created the website? He could help you out, with your management that is since he created the issues in the first place  The Moz reports usually let you know what the problems are specifically so they are actionable in a way.

If there are stuff that you dont understand, people here can pitch in and help you out.

Hi Peter

It's possible that they got a link on your site pointing to one of their satellite sites. They hacked those sites/inserted their links and pointed it to you. It's possible that it's an invisible link

Try using your url (the exact page they are pointing to) on google. Look at the cache. You could see it there most of the time.

If not, then it's possible that it has been removed already, through an update of your site or something.

Yes, that does happen but eventually, it works out right. Just make sure the robots are correctly configured.

Honestly, i would just hire someone. There are a lot of great designers that could make it for you as long as you provide the outline. Sometimes, you'll get someone as low as $80 for one and it looks great. I would focus on the content of the graphic and pour my suggestions over to a designer.

If you really want to, then Adobe illustrator does the best output for me. It has templates scattered around the internet as well.

Nishadha's suggestion of smushit is a good one so go for that if you are on WP

A CDN would be good for load time but I would still prefer to load it from the same domain.

Try out developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to see more suggestions that you can apply

cant believe they are still doing this till today.

Thanks for sharing Jacob

You might want to look at this

http://exit.zoznamtovaru.sk/mihalko-eu/563826190/?z=5&p=12

you might have some more that have issues being passed over to you

As for your page, you can optimise it a bit more with content. Better metas. Improve your categories and internal linking.

That should be enough (of course you still need the links as well)

Like Andy said, it's hard to really say without seeing it.

From my experience, it's usually just one of these:

1. The sub page is more relevant since your internal linking structure dictates that it is relevant to that keyword (plus your brand authority helps that page, even without links)

2. Something went wrong somewhere, in HTML problems, redirects and of course, overoptimised links (like a lot of domains with blogrolls pointing to the homepage) innocent looking links but they sometimes cause problems.

Hi Stephane

I would take a look at hreflang and learn that.

To help you speed it up a little:

http://www.stateofdigital.com/hreflang-canonical-test/

Look for other posts by Aleyda as well.

There's really no way to answer that as each keyword will have different factors. Each niche will also be treated differently. Each competitor has their own way of doing things versus how you are doing it.

For me, an easy niche with good competitors but are not active, 3 months or less would be a good timeframe to get a site to rank. It's better to underestimate and overdeliver.

For mega keywords, well, some will take a year or so just to crack the front page. Some will take 6 months and if promotion is good, even less. It will depend on your experience in the niche so it's hard to say exactly.

Takeshi hit it right on. You could also look at adding more text (like a caption) that is relevant to the image. Link to it if you have to. Go into photoshop and add metas for the image. Oh, and what works for us in terms of image traffic nowadays are highly popular personalities or brands. They send a lot of traffic, but not that good of a quality

I would spend a lot of time on getting the links removed than just disavowed, at least for now. We get better results after doing disavows that had a bunch of links removed versus just relying on the disavow.

To answer your question, the link detox score is a good estimate. Since google treats each niche differently, you might want to look at that as a goal number to reach so you are within the average of the niche. But obviously, you have to still follow through with even better links. It's a pain!

I would just reach out to the former employee to transfer the whole page to you. Creating a duplicate will just lead to more problems down the road (plus an email from google themselves)

Like Takeshi said, it does affect with long tails, especially if you got a good deal of traffic from that before.

Aside from that, I wouldn't really mind too much. If it's a good site, it'll get some good comments again.

But yeah, disqus is a pretty good alternative but you probably have your reasons for going with Facebook only.

Good luck!

I would just pay for it myself instead of losing the whole account. If it's not that important of an account (low points and not much branding for you personally) then I would just create my own one

I hate it that they also removed the discussions tab. You might want to try buzzsumo.com Chenzo.

I would actually just try to mark it as fixed. 404's are not a big deal nowadays. It's just troublesome sometimes because WMT keeps bugging you about it, especially when you have links pointing to those pages.

Most likely a breach to your wordpress. If it's an old, outdated version, had vulnerable plugins or the server security was brute forced.

http://web.archive.org/web//http://www.batesmillstore.com/

filter with Buy or Cigar

You'll see that it has been there for a while.

Secure your website, server. Check your backlinks for cigarette links and don't worry about those 404's too much.

could you post an example of the URLs you are seeing?

Ubersuggest and Keyword Researcher can help with getting keywords from Google instant. You could try Adwords and see there. You could try to find competitors as well, and use Semrush.

I see what Federico is seeing. So you should be ok.

I have experienced yoast's plugin conflicting with some themes though, when it came to title and description tags. Sometimes, Google indexes the theme's built in SEO title tag together with Yoast's plugin. It's weird, but I've seen it happen before.

It's actually a pretty sweet framework, easy to use and their child themes are great. I dropped Thesis back then because of Genesis.

Don't worry about hooks, just use basic hooks for now (they have a plugin) until you learn in time, they also have great tutorials.

Best thing about a widely used framework is that most plugins are compatible plus a lot of people write tutorials about how they fixed up their own sites.

Security wise, I haven't had trouble with it. As long as your server is tight and the plugins are properly configured, you shouldn't be worried too much.

Hi Tyler,

There shouldnt be any problems with this, especially with Google+.

If that's your only option, then that subdomain is fine. There are a lot of great sites that use that kind of url structure.

Like they said, compile/export everything, combine then remove duplicates and insert to the tool of your choice, like link risk, link detox or even rmoov if you want to contact these webmasters

Be sure to still check the list since it's never 100% right. Some good, natural links can be classified within their calculations of bad urls.

there's a little "i" information button on the right. Point your cursor there.

Either way, the duplicate url, should appear within the table as well

Like Tommy above just said but you might have a reason for doing the homepage as the landing page so just noindex it, assuming they are just direct traffic landing pages

You have 5 identical sites but you want to solve the duplicate problem? Then change each site and their content?

Actually, they have such a great domain that they can get away with anything.

Normally, I would say if Zappos is doing it then just do it but internal linking too much hurts the UX in my opinion.

For my ecom sites, I also do this but I limit it to a certain number. I dont get it to link the word boots 10 times in one page to 1 category. It hasnt lost a beat so it's good.

Ill just give a practical response based from my own ecom projects

Category optimisation DOES wonders for impressions and SEO. You've seen it work.

In my case, increasing the content length DID help get more impressions but not conversions (directly)

If it helps people to make choices for products, go for it. If you are just increasing the length just for the sake of SEO, that's where you will need to make a judgement call.

Consider your traffic data and conversion funnels that you have right now and make the decision based on that.

Hell, if I was asked this personally, Id just say go for it, test it and see what happens, but like Doug mentioned, it might make you lose money if you are already converting well and that's the last thing we want to happen

Ive seen this a couple times

It does go away eventually.