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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Take it on a site by site basis. Most of these sites have nofollowed all self-created links because of spammers and people trying to use the platform for link building. Shoot, I just did that on my own site 
I completely agree with Linda about exposure and referral traffic. If it's a targeted audience, you can definitely drive a lot of traffic from these sorts of sites. I've seen some sites where if you get mentioned, it can literally drive thousands of visits per month to your site.
Hi there. Good question and one that comes up a lot.
You need to do the following:
You both want them to a) drop out and b) then not be crawled, so the above will take care of that for you.
Hope that helps!
John
Hey there -
Great question. If that's what's happening, then someone definitely bought the old domain with links to it and redirected it. I've also seen this done TO people in order to pass an algorithmic penalty onto a competitor. Nasty stuff.
That said, while this isn't strictly whitehat, it can be super effective to buy old dead domains with links and redirect them into your own site. It actually works very well for SEO purposes! But, it comes with its risks as you have to do a lot of due diligence on the domain you want to redirect as there could have been some dodgy things going on and you don't want to risk passing along a penalty to your own site.
That said, I wouldn't undo the redirect unless you think it's hurting you. Move on and focus on other things to build new links.
The better thing to do, IMO, is to find these dead sites and pull their backlink profiles, then go and do outreach offering your site as a replacement for that site that is now dead. It's called broken link building and it works really well!
Hope that helps.
John
Came to say just this. Great answer, Anthony.
Hi there! Great question and one that has perplexed SEOs for years.
You are indeed right that one of the best ways to rank the page over the PDF is to put some of the PDF content on your page and do other best SEO practices (eg build links to the page, have a better optimized title/etc than the PDF itself). It is also possible to put the rel-canonical in the header of the PDF - https://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers
Finally, if you don't want your actual PDF showing up in the search results, consider a) blocking it in the robots.txt and then b) requesting the URL be removed from the search index via Search Console.
Good luck!
Absolutely no harm at all. Do you have an index sitemap that you list all the sub-sitemaps from? If not you should do that as well just for sanity of sitemap management.
Hi there! Good question.
First, each individual XML sitemap should only have a maximum of 50k URLs in it. At the scale of millions of pages I always recommend splitting out your sitemaps by type so that you can monitor indexation by section of the site.
If I were you I'd create a separate sitemap for landing pages and exclude the PPC landing pages unless those are the same pages you've created for SEO.
Cheers!
David -
Thanks for your question, and it's one I see often. I would say this is a much bigger question than "subdomain v subfolder", but really the ability to affect your own SEO.
In direct answer to your questions:
Point 2 brings up the bigger question of if you should host your blog on Medium. While it is indeed a beautiful platform and writing on it is a joy (I actually do a lot of blog drafting in their editor), you don't have control over a lot of things such as:
If you are concerned about the SEO implications (as you seem to be and should be), I'd definitely recommend investigating a self-hosted blog platform like WordPress instead of Medium.
Good luck!
I definitely agree with Logan. The max for an XML sitemap for Search Console is 50,000 URLs, so you won't be able to fit all of yours into one.
That being the case, divide them into different sitemaps by category or type, then list all of those in one directory sitemap and submit that. Now you can see indexation by page type on your website.
Finally, I have to ask why you are doing this with a third party tool and creating a static sitemap as opposed to creating a dynamic one that can update automatically when you publish new content? If your site is static and you're not creating new pages, then your approach might be ok, but otherwise I'd recommend investigating how you build a dynamic XML sitemap that updates with new content.
Cheers!
Hi Issa -
Great question here. Seems your client is potentially in a tough spot with this!
There is a ton to unpack here and it is hard to know specifics without the site (feel free to private message it to me), but to your specific questions:
I guess it's hard to know if Panda is still rolling out, but from everything I have heard it is. I assume this was not just a one-time drop on one day, but rather a slow leak of traffic? That makes it harder to investigate if the second.
Good luck!
John
Hey Kane -
Jumping in here because I told you I would. I've seen it work two different ways.
As you saw in my posts, I have the following configuration:
When you search "canonical delays with Googlebot" in google.es, the English ranks first and then the Spanish. Of course, with the Spanish search "etiquetta canonical retrasa con googlebot" the Spanish one ranks. This is, of course, a test with two different languages.
I've seen it work with two English-language URLs (Australia and English) where the following is what worked:
The title/meta description of the /au/ version disappeared because of the canonical but the /au/ version ranked in google.com/au instead of the regular URL.
The self-referencing HREFLANG seems to not be necessary, but I've never had an issue using it. However, your mileage may vary.
BTW, all of this testing was done by my coworker Dave Sottimano, not me. But these were the findings.
Hi Issa -
Great question here. Seems your client is potentially in a tough spot with this!
There is a ton to unpack here and it is hard to know specifics without the site (feel free to private message it to me), but to your specific questions:
I guess it's hard to know if Panda is still rolling out, but from everything I have heard it is. I assume this was not just a one-time drop on one day, but rather a slow leak of traffic? That makes it harder to investigate if the second.
Good luck!
John
David -
Thanks for your question, and it's one I see often. I would say this is a much bigger question than "subdomain v subfolder", but really the ability to affect your own SEO.
In direct answer to your questions:
Point 2 brings up the bigger question of if you should host your blog on Medium. While it is indeed a beautiful platform and writing on it is a joy (I actually do a lot of blog drafting in their editor), you don't have control over a lot of things such as:
If you are concerned about the SEO implications (as you seem to be and should be), I'd definitely recommend investigating a self-hosted blog platform like WordPress instead of Medium.
Good luck!
Hi there! Good question.
First, each individual XML sitemap should only have a maximum of 50k URLs in it. At the scale of millions of pages I always recommend splitting out your sitemaps by type so that you can monitor indexation by section of the site.
If I were you I'd create a separate sitemap for landing pages and exclude the PPC landing pages unless those are the same pages you've created for SEO.
Cheers!
Hi Anuj -
I think you are operating from a very false assumption that is going to hurt your organic traffic (I suspect it has already).
The XML sitemap is one of the the very best ways to tell the search engines about new content on your website. Therefore, by not putting your new coupons in the sitemap, you are not giving the search engines one of the strongest signals possible that new content is there.
Of course, you have to automate your sitemap and have it update as often as possible. Depending on the size of your site and therefore the processing time, you could do it hourly, every 4 hours, something like that. If you need recommendations for automated sitemap tools, let me know. I should also point out that you should put the frequency that the URLs are updated (you should keep static URLs for even your coupons if possible). This will be a big win for you.
Finally, if you want to make sure your static pages are always indexed, or want to keep an eye on different types of coupons, you can create separate sitemaps under your main sitemap.xml and segment by type. So static-pages-sitemap.xml, type-1-sitemap.xml, etc. This way you can monitor indexation by type.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you need an audit or something like that. Sounds like there are some easy wins!
John
Hi Nicola -
Great question here. As Malcolm said, ad networks do not pass link equity. However, a banner advertisement that is not part of an ad network is technically a paid link (unless it's an embeddable badge or something). Often these will have referrer numbers on them as well. I think that Google devalues these when they see the referral code, but that is not for sure.
But, to be safe, I would add the rel="nofollow" to these links.
Hey there -
Great question. If that's what's happening, then someone definitely bought the old domain with links to it and redirected it. I've also seen this done TO people in order to pass an algorithmic penalty onto a competitor. Nasty stuff.
That said, while this isn't strictly whitehat, it can be super effective to buy old dead domains with links and redirect them into your own site. It actually works very well for SEO purposes! But, it comes with its risks as you have to do a lot of due diligence on the domain you want to redirect as there could have been some dodgy things going on and you don't want to risk passing along a penalty to your own site.
That said, I wouldn't undo the redirect unless you think it's hurting you. Move on and focus on other things to build new links.
The better thing to do, IMO, is to find these dead sites and pull their backlink profiles, then go and do outreach offering your site as a replacement for that site that is now dead. It's called broken link building and it works really well!
Hope that helps.
John
Take it on a site by site basis. Most of these sites have nofollowed all self-created links because of spammers and people trying to use the platform for link building. Shoot, I just did that on my own site
I completely agree with Linda about exposure and referral traffic. If it's a targeted audience, you can definitely drive a lot of traffic from these sorts of sites. I've seen some sites where if you get mentioned, it can literally drive thousands of visits per month to your site.
Hi Gina -
Great questions here. Some of these you should worry about, others are just notices and not necessarily an issue.
Fix the 4XX errors if those pages have links, or have a 404 page that redirects users. 404s are not always bad, but if the user isn't supposed to end up there (ie your product page is expired), then redirect.
Don't worry about the duplicated meta descriptions on archive pages, but do think about if these pages are needed. Ayima had a good post on pagination recently - http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html
Same as above with the title tags on paginated archives.
Rel-canonicals are fine. Once again, just notices that they are there.
Did you implement those 301s? Moz notifies you of them because they might pass less link equity than straight links, but 301s are not bad.
What do you mean by "These are blog articles but only some of the posts. Don’t know why we are generating this for some and not all. And half of them are for the exact same page so there are really only 4 originals on this list. The others are dupes." It seems that this may have been implemented manually on your side, though I don't know how All In One SEO Pack handles it (I use Yoast).
Absolutely no harm at all. Do you have an index sitemap that you list all the sub-sitemaps from? If not you should do that as well just for sanity of sitemap management.
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