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Definitely -- would still be nice to hear another opinion or two, but Todd was very specific and thorough. I've got some great, actionable takeaways from this conversation.

Really helpful thoughts all around. Sounds like we might continue to no-index the content for now (we assume that the descriptions of the programs are duplicate, since there's no way for us to efficiently check if people uploading program listings are just copy-pasting from their website -- reviews usually are the unique piece of content that allows us to move a page from noindexed to indexed).

Also, thanks for bringing the leave-a-review URLs to our attention -- I'll bring it up with my team this week!

Thanks again, Todd!

Understood -- however, 1. It provides value and matches common user queries (i.e. "University of Michigan study abroad program reviews -- just made that exact query up though) 2. It's not lean content; we only think about indexing these pages when there are enough in-depth reviews (i.e paragraphs not a line or two). 3. I totally understand that that's usually the problem with duplicate content, but our competitors are ranking for these because we're being cautious of potential future algo updates and they're not -- so regardless of the fact that we're putting the content up first, they're getting the points.

My question is more along the lines of: is review content / user generated content treated differently than you traditional duplicate blog post? Is it OK if we index this page with reviews even though our competitor has already done so?

I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?

Quick question with a hopefully easy answer (and to get away from all this Penguin 2.0 talk). Does anyone have any tips for activating Sitelinks for landing pages other than your homepage?

I've attached a screenshot to better illustrate what I'm hoping to achieve, but basically I would like our SERP to have the same extra links under our meta description as the #2 result. I haven't been able to find any direct information as to how to achieve this. Is their markup code involved? Another one of those things that Google just randomly does?

The keyword in questions is, "teaching jobs abroad" FYI

Any factors that would point me in the right direction would be very helpful!

Andrew

qmK77hq

We've taken the approach of adding rel="canonical" to all paginated content with the link pointing to the first page of results. We keep everything indexed and followed. We also help Google identify the URL parameter created for paginated content in our Webmaster Tool settings.

This has worked well for us, but another approach would be to add rel="next" and rel="prev" to the paginated links. This is openly supported by Google to handle pagination, but might be a little tricky to setup in your CMS.

Good luck!

Andrew

I snooped around in the Google Webmaster Tools help section and it seems like a lot of other people have faced the same problem with no solution offered. Shame on Google!

As much as possible, I would go back to all the sites that were linking to your old domain and ask them to update their links. 301s pass most of the link juice, but not all of it, so it's worthwhile to save as much as that as possible. It also helps Google start to ignore your old site and focus more on your new site.

This is all probably a lot of work, but I hope it works out! Good luck.

Andrew

A 301 redirect is basically telling search engines that content has moved from an old URL to a new one. In order to do this effectively the content has to no longer exist on the old domain (if a 301 redirect wasn't there, a 404 would be returned).

And yes, you should redirect each page individually. This will ensure that what PageRank the old content had is passed onto the correct new content. Redirecting everything to your homepage means that the rest of your new site is effectively starting from scratch.

If you're trying to redirect over thousands of URLs you might want to look into writing some custom Apache script to match everything together. It's a little tricky, but can potentially save you a lot of time!

Good luck,

Andrew

PS. Remember to update your Google Webmaster settings to let Google know that you moved your content to a new domain.

Thanks, guys! I'll keep this thread updated with our implementation and offer advice for would-be schema's

Cheers,

Andrew

Does anyone have much experience implementing Schema.org metadata for reviews? I run and operate a website that reviews study abroad programs and we've started the process of implementing this code to receive rich SERP snippets.

We're going to use the framework used here: http://schema.org/Review

My main question is how long does it generally take to see the results? I would also like to hear from people who implemented this code, but ran into problems, and how they overcame them.

Any other tips and advice would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

Andrew

This would seem like a no-brainer, but it's not on your list so I would add effective email writing to your list. We all know a good personal email can go a long way toward building a relationship and ultimately, high quality links. If there is a website I am really aiming to earn a link from, I usually don't even ask until the second or third email, and by then I barely even have to ask.

A 301 redirect is basically telling search engines that content has moved from an old URL to a new one. In order to do this effectively the content has to no longer exist on the old domain (if a 301 redirect wasn't there, a 404 would be returned).

And yes, you should redirect each page individually. This will ensure that what PageRank the old content had is passed onto the correct new content. Redirecting everything to your homepage means that the rest of your new site is effectively starting from scratch.

If you're trying to redirect over thousands of URLs you might want to look into writing some custom Apache script to match everything together. It's a little tricky, but can potentially save you a lot of time!

Good luck,

Andrew

PS. Remember to update your Google Webmaster settings to let Google know that you moved your content to a new domain.

What's your PageRank? I have seen evidence that websites with high PR can get away with a higher number of links on their homepage. Just look at the New York Times or similar sites. They have 100's of thinks on their front page, but Google will crawl all of them because of their authority.

But to address your question, no, nofollowing internal links has been shown to be ineffective and frowned upon by Google (see link in other reply). Follow everything and really think about the value of each link and whether it really needs to be there.

Good luck!

Andrew

I am wondering what the best options are for video hosting websites (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, etc.). Which host has the best interface that you would want to use to embed into your site? Any advice you have in regards to optimizing the videos on our site, then that would be much appreciated. Thanks!  And our YouTube channel is here http://www.youtube.com/user/gooverseas

In my experience it really depends on the user is sharing the information and their Facebook privacy settings. If the user has everything open to the world, then it stands to reason that a Google bot will see these as well. Google has stated that Facebook and other social media sites have been given more weight to their organic rankings, but it is hard to say how much. Either way, I strongly suspect that this trend will continue.

ALSO, Google does rank the influence of the user sharing the post. If a user has a lot of 'trust' then that share will be worth a lot more than say a new Facebook user. Something to keep in mind.

We noticed the same decrease on three of our websites as well, and some of the competitors we track. One of our websites also went dramatically up (with many new questionable links). I believe this latest update of the link graph had some major changes that altered the domain authorities on a lot of websites. These numbers are all relative to everyone else, so hopefully this isn't an accurate reflection of how our websites are performing.

Good luck! Happy optimizing

Andrew

Quick question with a hopefully easy answer (and to get away from all this Penguin 2.0 talk). Does anyone have any tips for activating Sitelinks for landing pages other than your homepage?

I've attached a screenshot to better illustrate what I'm hoping to achieve, but basically I would like our SERP to have the same extra links under our meta description as the #2 result. I haven't been able to find any direct information as to how to achieve this. Is their markup code involved? Another one of those things that Google just randomly does?

The keyword in questions is, "teaching jobs abroad" FYI

Any factors that would point me in the right direction would be very helpful!

Andrew

qmK77hq

Sounds to me like you haven't researched and targeted the right keywords. In my experience, long tail keywords convert better than high volume keywords. The trick is to target A LOT of long tail keywords to keep your volume and sales up.

I would setup a Google Adwords account and start testing there to see which keywords convert the best, and then target those same keywords in organic search. This way you can quickly get relevant feedback.

Rel canonical doesn't tell engines not to crawl the page (the mata tag nofollow does that), but rather just tells the engine not to index the page in place of the 1st page of your pager results. This helps reduce duplicate content penalties and consolidates your PA onto a single URL. I could be wrong, but I imagine you would also prefer organic users to go to the first page of results rather than, say, page 6.

The result is that engines will still crawl your pages and find your listings (and index those), but only index the first page of your listing page.

I hope that helps to clarify things!

Andrew

Definitely -- would still be nice to hear another opinion or two, but Todd was very specific and thorough. I've got some great, actionable takeaways from this conversation.