Hi Olivier,

The question that Matt is answering is quite specific - is a "coming soon" page bad for new domains as Google seems to prioritize new domains. The answer is "no" for this situation.

The situation of your friend is quite different - he has an existing site which is generating some traffic. Unless your "coming soon page" is extremely interesting & rich in content, it will not rank for any keyword - basically you're reducing your site to a one page site, so bounce rate will inevitably be very high.

If you want to proceed, you just have to put up a redirect rule that is redirecting all url's to the index page of your site (which would then be the "coming soon" page).

rgds

Dirk

I guess it's related to the keyword + location. If you do a tooth whitening site:yoursite - the tooth whitening pages appear first - if you repeat the query with the location - the homepage gets the first result. You could try to add the location on the title / metadescription / H1 / url of the detailed pages - to make it more obvious that the page is not only about tooth whitening but about tooth whitening in your city.

Also check what is more popular - you mention teeth whitening as example - the article however talk about tooth whitening - Google knows it's similar - but I would go for the more popular term.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Pete,

No need to worry about the duplicate links - to quote Matt Cutts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ)  - nothing to worry about (as long as it's not 5000 internal links with over optimised anchor)

266 links on the home is a lot - but not an amount of links that is surprisingly high for an average e-commerce site (especially with the duplicates). Regarding the number of links I would rather think about usability than SEO. If having this much links on the page is making it easier for your visitors to go through your site - keep them. If this number of links is making them confused - try to reorganise & regroup the links. A small user test with a few people not too familiar with your site can learn you a lot about the usability factor and how many people are actually using the links to navigate (vs just using the internal search function)

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

In the specific example you give it's doesn't really matter - as all the pages of the pagination have a canonical pointing to the homepage.

On top of that - the site indicates on every page that the alternate url for lang=es is the homepage as well.

If this is your site, I would correct this - make the canonical self referencing & do the same for the alternate url (or just drop the alternate url if the site is only available in Spanish)

To answer your question the link pointing to the next page is a plain html link: 2 so can be indexed by Google without major issues.

On endless scrolling & pagination with Ajax in general - there is an interesting article on Google Webmaster Central: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html

rgds,

Dirk

Why would you put a nofollow on the link to the homepage? Advice is not to use nofollow on internal links -

sources: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

To quote the last link:

Here are some cases in which you might want to consider using nofollow:

• Untrusted content: If you can't or don't want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollowattribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.
• Paid links: A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters usenofollow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word "Advertisement"). More information on Google's stance on paid links.
• Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.

=> paid liks & untrusted content are not really applicable for internal links - crawl prioritization hardly applies either.

Hope this clarifies

Dirk

The answers above remain valid - check this video of Matt Cutts: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 - interesting part is at 0:15 - summarising - having multiple links to the same page should be the least of your worries - probably you have more important SEO issues to tackle.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi

it's an attempt to combine analytics spam & being funny. In each case you're not the only one - see this discussion posted yesterday : http://moz.com/community/q/analytics-spammer-can-haz-humors-who-else (the image is a bit better - the words are not in a foreign language, but are funny faces made in symbols)

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

It will not work when you put it in the body - check mistake 5 on this page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

"When we encounter a rel=canonical designation in the , it’s disregarded. "

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

In the Search Analytics report could you put the filter on "Pages" rather than "Keywords" - and check if there are pages listed that seem suspicious to you?

Did you try "spammy keyword" site:yoursite.com in Google?

Recently there where quite some questions about wordpress sites that had been hacked - mainly caused by this vulnerability:

https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/09/slider-revolution-plugin-critical-vulnerability-being-exploited.html

or this one https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/12/revslider-vulnerability-leads-to-massive-wordpress-soaksoak-compromise.html

I guess that sucuri would normally detect this - but maybe you could doublecheck that you're not using these kind of slider on your site.

rgds,

Dirk