Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Putting up a notice on the homepage and allowing users to go in and delete their information is great. I'd definitely set a time limit on that based on how often the majority of users come to your site, say if you know your return customers come back every month than you leave it up for 30 days, if it's every 3 months, you leave it for 90.

I'd be very clear in the copy what you're doing with the customer information and insure their privacy and respect of their information. If you're migrating that information to your other site, let them know. If you're deleting it, let them know to.

Same with the email newsletter people. Send them a notice via email and let them know about the site closing, what's happening with customer accounts, and if you're moving their emails to another newsletter. If you are, you might consider having them re-opt in for that newsletter.

After the time period, I'd 301 redirect it instead of building a 404 page. This is going to be better for your SEO and the vast majority of your customers will already know that you closed the site and that they could visit your other site. 301s are permanent redirects. They are valid as long as the file that redirects them is live on the web.

We don't seem to be having any issues with this report. Have you tried running it again?

If you're worried about scraper sites--at Moz, there are a ton of sites scraping our blog content, for example--I strongly recommend implementing the rel=canonical tag on your site. Often scrapers grab the entire HTML of your page, and thus, they will grab rel=canonical, which will signal back to search engines that your content is the original content.

The first step is getting people to open it, I'd head to CopyBlogger and check out there How to Write Headlines articles.

Hey friends - We had this bug a while ago and fixed it, but likely our move to https caused it to happen again. We'll definitely get it taken care of, and in the meantime, sorry about the troubles!

301 is the best solution possible. Many people have asserted that you can see up to a 10% dip initially. (Most people only see dips from a week to a month at most.) However, over the long-term, with a better site & URL structure, you should see a rise in traffic. I have no seen anyone doing a predictive modle on this.

Seer Interactive did this test 301 Redirect Test: How Much Link Juice are YOU Losing? which saw no rankings lost, but favorable outcomes in the long-term for the better site.

I'd definitely keep the video.

Instead, I would 1) make sure your video is completely optimized (transcript, video sitemap, etc.); 2) build more links (and more legit than your competitors); and 3) freshness of page is a huge factor since Google's Freshness update.

Highly recommend against using lists like these. They are likely low-quality, bad, or spammy places to put links. This is exactly how sites get hit with Penguin penalties.

Hi Eric,

We definitely worked directly with Facebook to do these changes. They flipped both the name change and the vanity URL change on their end and did the 301 redirect from our old page.

If you go into your "admin" section on your FB page and into the "basic information" by the "name" field, you'll see a link to "request change."

Facebook's pretty invested in getting businesses on there, so they seemed to be very responsive about this.

Hope that helps!

Hi friends,

Sorry for the delay in responding. I have a great news -- as of today, this bug for Q&A forum emails has been fixed. (Any emails timestamped now 1:20pm PDT and going forward.)

Unfortunately, this bug is also happening in Blog comment emails. The blog and Q&A systems are not tied together, and the development work on it rests with another dev team. The good news is that we know the issue (half the battle). We are working on prioritizing the work, and I'm hoping that in the next couple months (at most), this will be fixed.

Thanks

Update 7/28/16 - The blog comments are also fixed. This bug is fixed!

What Justin said! And yes, 301's pass 95-99% of all link juice.

I'd be careful about hiding text. Google doesn't like that.

We've also seen links posted in G+ getting crawled more quickly. Not fool proof or guaranteed (or something you should do with a ton of links), but certainly an easy thing for a one-off page you want crawled quickly.

Oh, I should add that they requested quite a bit of information about our rebranding. We ended up sending them: our new URL and it's whois, our trademark number on our new name, an internal slide deck about the rebranding, and a pretty long statement about what we were doing. We're pretty lucky here at Moz that our name change wasn't a huge state secret, but we were pretty surprised about how much documentation they wanted.

Antonio,

For work load and ease of change, I'd edit your robots.txt. Sometimes, search engines will still show the empty page in search results with only the URL if you don't put in a nofollow meta tag, but most of them should obey the robots.txt commands.

Of course, ideally, you'd want your website not to push those "future pages" without content live, but I understand that sometimes there are things that seem easy on a website that aren't.

Hope that helps!

Erica

I'd go in and change the structure in WP and then 301 the old URLs with the redirect. Then your new posts going forward will only have the cleaned up URL structure and the old ones will be properly 301'd for all the SEO goodness.

The problem with frames is that Google has problems crawling them. Read what Google says.

Dynamically created pages can work just fine. However, not all CMSs are created equal, so make sure to research whatever one you're thinking about and make sure that its pages are crawlable, conform to web standards, and SEO best practices.

Good luck!

Yeah, Dropbox links expire. Here you go.

I definitely agree with the others that Google's going to hit them with a spam algo issue. They are getting smarter about connected sites even if they aren't on the same domain.

That said, you can report people for spam to Tumblr. I'd say use it wisely. In experience, Tumblr support's been pretty quick to help out.

Though it maybe time for your company to jump aboard Tumblr. But do it the correct manner.

Have no fear, MozCon will be recorded, and videos will be available in the coming months after MozCon.

URLs always help our community come up with more specific answers for your site!

I would start with your client's most valuable pages and make sure those are optimized. Then I would work on the other categories/product pages that your client's long-term vision for the company is reflected in. For example, when I sold outdoor clothing, the company was expanding into outerwear long-term, so I made sure to optimize my outerwear categories and product pages, especially to get into keywords that we weren't known for or even ranking for.

If they have follow links, the deal's backlink will enhance your SEO efforts as they are legitimate links that are there for a helpful to the user purpose and coming from a strong domain.

Hi Dan,

If you go through Facebook for your name change, you do not lose any of your fans. They are all transferred seamlessly. Yes, your vanity URL pointing to your page will change, but with Moz's experience, Facebook did a redirect from our old vanity URL (seomoz) to our new one (Moz), so you'll still retain any links built to your Facebook page and the resulting traffic.

Best of luck o the rebrand!

Unfortunately, I still don't have a date. To be transparent, most of our resources right now are focused on getting people into Moz Analytics, so we're a bit resourced-strained for getting this up. We've hoping soon, but that's really all I can tell you.

Though I can assure you that our speakers give really solid information and not fly-by-the-night techniques, so even if MozCon was a few months ago, the information isn't outdated.

I'd check to make sure your 301s were done correctly. If they are showing up as soft 404s, they are probably implemented wrong.

Check out this awesome post on IIS.

This won't hurt you as it's a common organic happening. Lots of sites do this, and you shouldn't worry about it.

I took a look at it, and the Facebook page is definitely indexed for both your keywords. I did a search for both of the keyword and site:facebook.com. It's just not ranking very highly for the keyword anymore. I would focus on making sure your content is solid. It also looks like Google may be biasing against Facebook pages for these keywords. Since it's a service, you're in local SEO territory, and you'll want to focus most on ranking well locally over anything else.

Awww. Thanks for your kind feedback. We're glad you dig the q&a forum here.

If I was in your shoes, even though your canonicals are working (great step #1), I'd be inclined to clean up the URLs are much as possible and 301 any duplicate pages that you can get approval for. You'll always want to have your canonicals coded in regardless. But having less actually pages will save you in other areas - content audits, Google bot and other bots crawl time, space on your server, confusion for customers, etc. Less can be more in this case.

That's awesome to hear!

Google's affiliate program is done through their custom links which then redirect, which means they're all no-follow links. With Panda, Google's basically saying that everyone's going to be no-follow from here on out for all affiliate programs, even if they have built in no-follows or redirects that are already not passing link juice.

So I couldn't find anyway to remove likes that wasn't super manual. Looks like generally Facebook notices what's up and then deletes them all as spam accounts. I'd consider starting over, especially with that few likes. Unless you really need that brand name. I did find a how-to on creating a macro in order to remove likes. Not sure how well it works, so beware.

Hi Patrick,

You also might try posting this on our MozCon Facebook Group. When you do figure out where the ticket is going, just email us at mozcon@moz.com & we'll make the name transfer.

From what I understand, it sounds like your CMS creates a bunch of 404 pages that then auto-bounce back to their parent folder. But that these are phantom pages that don't exist? My recommendation is to use robots.txt to no follow, no index. If they are blank pages, you can also add that to the blank page's meta data. Canonical tags are always a good idea.

301s will not pass all the link juice. But they will pass most of it.

Hi Gareth,

Most email companies function on a monthly fee, which then is factored in how many emails you send per month through them. Many companies choose to separate out their transactional emails and their marketing emails to keep costs down.

Some great ESPs out there: MailChimp, My Emma, Blue Hornet, StrongView, and Marketo, just to name a few.

You are correct that our tools will report the link and the link equity from it. We don't discard or discount paid links. Google has taken major effort to do this -- much of it very manual, human reviewed -- and we don't have that kind of bandwidth.

That said, we do have something exciting in the works, hopefully, releasing no later than early Q1 to more comprehensively look at the quality of that link. Stay tuned.

I would suggest not worrying about them. You can block and report them, but that probably won't do much. I took a quick look at the accounts, and I didn't see them copy anything recently. I would suggest focusing on metrics that are more impactful than followers, such as relative engagement rates. You have 1 million followers, but on you're only getting a few replies and 20-40 retweets, which means for every 1,000 followers your amplification rate is only 0.04. You can read more about this here.

The first thing to do is familiarize yourself with Google's rules and restrictions around adults sites. The second thing to consider is that Amazon is the biggest seller of sex toys. But before you have a panic attack at trying to take on the giant in e-commerce, I'd do a bunch of competitor research and see what they are doing. Adult sites that distinguish themselves do it in ways just like non-adult sites, and largely by being different. PornHub wrote this article on our site about what they did, which was essentially something their competitors weren't doing. Additionally, if you have a retail location, make sure your local game is on.

Yes, if you have a site under 5k pages, it's considered a small site and you should optimize each page. Obviously, you want to start with the most highly trafficked ones and work from there. But especially in e-commerce, working on your product pages can really distinguish you from your competitors.

They should be roughly equal, unless one has a drastically higher domain authority and amount of backlinks.

In order to have check-ins on Facebook, you must have the category of your page listed as a "local business." Currently, it's set at "Travel & Transportation." I'm not sure how long it takes once you switch it over to get back the check-in ability.

Usually, the reason is because category pages tend to be light on content and thus, not as indexable. And sometimes category pages are noindex due to this. Google is likely looking at your product page and finding it more relevant, based on content, than the category page for people who are looking for "sleeping bags."

Moz's index isn't a complete view of the web, but we try to crawl quality sites out there. Our index is always growing. But to be frank, no one -- not even Google -- crawls the entire web. There are just too many pages out there and computing power is expensive. Google crawls the most links simply because Google is a bigger company with more money and more servers and more engineers and who's business depends on serving web pages to everyone.

At Moz, we focus on quality sites because we believe (and hope) our customers and community are focusing on high quality links that are still active, which are going to give them the best SEO results. (Also a huge part of the web is just spam nonsense.) Many SEOs -- and I include myself here -- will use multiple sources of link indexing for the broadest view of the web and their sites. I use Moz's OSE and Google Webmaster Tools (free and big, but includes lots of spam, which can be great if you're fighting a Penguin penalty). Others will use OSE, GWT, and OSE competitors like Majestic and Ahrefs, especially if link building is huge for them and they want to account for every penny. Every index is a bit different.

That's a great place to dig in.

@Mark - One of our staffers will get to your question soon! It's his birthday today, so we told him to answer when he's recovered from celebrating.

So I'm still seeing your category as "Travel & Transportation" not "Local Business." I've attached a screenshot of where you need to make it a "Local Business" in the categories in settings in order to enable check-in functionality.

qdVOii6

It'd be great if you can share what your site is so people can check it out and see if they can figure out what's going on. Thanks!

@Architechs - You'll need to follow up with help@moz.com as I'm no longer a staff member.