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Hey Mozzers, I was speaking with a friend today about a site that he has been working on that was infected when he began working on it. Here (https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:themeliorist.ca) you can see that the site has 4400 indexed pages, but if you scroll down you will see some pages such as /pfizer-viagra-samples/ or /dapoxetine-kentucky/. All of these pages are returning 404 errors, and I ran it through SEO spider just to see if any of these pages would show up, and they don't. This is not an issue for a client, but I am just curious why these pages are still hanging around in the index. Maybe others have experience this issue too. Cheers,

Hey Mozzers, I have been struggling with this issue, and I am hoping someone can help. I have a number of bad/spammy links to my site. We have never engaged in "bad SEO", but an old subdomain received a number of spammy blog comments, and everything seemed to escalate from there. We have removed a subdomain that received all of the bad links from our DNS settings (about a year ago), but these links are still there when using Ahrefs or MajesticSEO. I don't think we have been penalized for these links, but I would just like to clean them up because, well, it's the right thing to do. How does one do this when these sites seem so untouchable. Either they are from China, Russia, Denmark, abandoned in 2009, etc. If I look for someone to contact, I can't seem to find anyone to even email. Suggestions?

Hey Mozzers, I have spent some time researching proper backlink analysis, and then I have been going through some of the steps. Here are a few questions that I have had in the process. Why would backlink tools like OSE and Ahrefs return different results for (say): "www.domain.com" vs "domain.com"? I noticed that competitors have almost 6x the backlinks as I do, but when I look at where those links are coming from, they are coming from old sites with moderate DA (under 10-30), but many are not current. I also noticed that many of these sites have links placed site-wide so that there are maybe 6+ referring pages per domain. So I guess my question is, how powerful are these links? Am I better off building relationships with bloggers, even though they only offer one link per page? Ultimately it will take me a long time to build the same quantity of links, but it seems like many of these competitors' links are old fashioned, but still moderately effective. Any help is appreciated, you guys have always been so helpful!

SO I am working on a site that had a subdomain that attracted a lot of spammy links. I researched the backlinks to this subdomain, and there were no beneficial links at all. I am thinking the best thing is to 404 this subdomain. What is the best way to do this? Should I just edit the DNS settings so that this subdomain does not point to the root domain? Or is there something that should be done in webmaster tools? Thanks in advance!

Hey Mozzers, I have ran a few different backlink reports, and I noticed that one of my sites has an incredible amount of spammy backlinks. These were not done by a prior SEO, they are simmply spammy links that were scraped and inserted on terrible sites, forums, directories, etc. 100% uncontrollable. The anchor text includes anything from the domain to "live sex" and "victoria's secret coupons". There are probably close to 700 or so of these backlinks from around 150-200 domains. I have read that one should contact the webmaster, and use disavow as a last resort, but I am not sure if that advice is for spammy link building techniques, which we have no history of doing. Is this normal? What is the best way to handle this? Is it likely that these are affecting this site's ranking at the moment? The number of spammy links drastically affects the ratio of quality backlinks to spammy backlinks. This is so frustrating...

Hey Mozzers, I am working on a site that has search-friendly parameters for their faceted navigation, however this makes it difficult to identify the parameters in a robots.txt file. I know that using the robots.txt file is highly recommended and powerful, but I am not sure how to do this when facets are using common words such as sizes. For example, a filtered url may look like www.website.com/category/brand/small.html Brand and size are both facets. Brand is a great filter, and size is very relevant for shoppers, but many products include "small" in the url, so it is tough to isolate that filter in the robots.txt. (I hope that makes sense). I am able to identify problematic pages and edit the Meta Head so I can add  on any page that is causing these duplicate issues. My question is, is this a good idea? I want bots to crawl the facets, but indexing all of the facets causes duplicate issues. Thoughts?

Hey Mozzers, I have a question regarding the Open Site Explorer Recently Discovered Links. I know that I have receive follow link from a few sites that have more DA than my site. I am wondering why it is taking so long for OSE to discover these links? I double checked the sites to make sure that they don't have NOFOLLOW (sorry for the double negative), and the sites have linked to my site for over a month now. Any ideas? I'm not concerned about it because Search Engines have discovered those links. I am just curious why this is, or if it is normal. Cheers!

Hello, I have an ecommerce site that sells pond pumps. I have every pump separated because each pump has different flow rates, specs, and replacement parts. All of the content is original, and even the content on the pages are (more than) 15% different - so it isn't getting flagged by Moz as duplicate content. Essentially it is set up like this: Acme Pond Pumps Acme Pond Pump 100 Acme Pond Pump 200 Acme Pond Pump 300 I am wondering if it is best to leave all of the products as separate pages, or if I should canonicalize them to the category page? Will each of the pages pass link juice upward anyways? The difference between the products are the specs, parts, and model number. Thoughts?

I posted a similar question a while go, so I will attempt to articulate my question a little better.... I am the owner of an E-Commerce site that operates in Canada. I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by corporate American E-commerce sites. I saw  another Canadian e-commerce site try to combat this issue, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example. Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "Tide Lundry Detergent"  and include local and intent terms in their page titles. For example "Buy TideLaundry Detergent from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping". If a Canadian shopper searches for "Tide Laundry Detergent", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, Tide's website, etc.. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks and arguably serves the customer with those intentions much better. I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results? Thoughts?

Hey, I have an interesting question. I am the owner of a Canadian E-Commerce site, and I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by American E-commerce sites. I looked around at another Canadian e-commerce site, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example. Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "KONG Goodie Bone" (a dog toy) and include local and intent terms in their title. For example "Buy KONG Goodie Bone from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping". If a Canadian shopper searches for "Kong Goodie Bone", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, the Kong company website, Petco (which is not in Canada) etc. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks. I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results? I will also note that our website recently launched, we are using 100% original product page content, we are using videos, and we are really putting a lot of energy into quality content. I am just wondering if patience is the name of the game when you are dealing with sites with incredible domain authority, or if we are better off trying to find niche opportunities. Thoughts?

Hey, I own a large ecommerce site with a few thousand products. The platform we are using adds a default French, English, and German store. It is not out of the question to offer french version of our site in the future, but for the time being we have added temporary redirects on these pages back to the main (english) version. In my Moz analytics, there are 1000+ pages with temporary redirects, and Moz classifies these as medium priority. Is there a better solution to dealing with these default language pages? Thanks,