The javascript you shared would allow Google to fairly easily access the page ending in dtc_inventory_ajax.php?id=29935291. If that's the page you want them to not be able to access, perhaps you'd be better off referencing just the id portion of the URL, which should be enough for the database to take the user to the right page.

Regardless, you "should" be OK with just the robots.txt block, though all of the href tags are sort of diluting the amount of pagerank you can send to other pages from whatever page you're on.

The robots.txt disallow statement you provided might be improved upon.

Disallow: /*?

The one above seems to me like it would only work on URLs that were in the root directory. Try this one instead of, or in addition to, the one above:

Disallow: /?id=*

Also I'd add this one to any Wordpress site, which in itself should take care of the issue if the URL in your script is an example of those that you're concerned about:

Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/

You can use the URL Removal Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to get the ones that have already been crawled out of the index. You can do it at the URL level, or at the directory level.

Lastly, if you're blocking Google and the SERP says unable to display because of the robots.txt file I don't think you need to worry about the content on those pages affecting your site with regard to a Panda penalty or anything like that. However, if Google had already indexed the content on those pages you will want to remove the URLs via Webmaster Tools as described above.

I would imagine it would affect sales. There's probably no way around that. If they do this make sure call tracking is implemented so they can see what it does to their conversion rates.

As for rankings, Nakul Goyal gave the best answer so far with a first-hand account. He said they didn't change. But I would also imagine that you'd lose some sales from other channels that you can no longer participate in without pricing, such as Google Shopping, Amazon, and price-based comparison shopping engines.

There are other ways to block people from scraping your site for pricing besides requiring customers to call, so I wouldn't say that issue justifies this strategy on its own.

Good luck!

Everett

Hello Texture Media Inc,

It's tough to keep up on what the various parts of different SERPs are these days. They're constantly expanding and changing. The only person I know who can keep up is Dr. Pete, and that's just barely.

I think what you're wanting to do is get content in the Answers Box, as opposed to the Knowledge Graph. This should answer your questions: http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/6121/total-serp-domination-using-the-new-google-answer-box-technique/

SameAs should be used for connecting various pages about the entity, including social but also Wikipedia pages and other official "About" pages. It's a good idea to use this tag, but isn't going to help with what you're trying to do, specifically.

You need to do both.

The reverse proxy isn't about SEO so much as the ability to use subdirectories instead of subdomains, even though the subdirectories are hosted on different servers. You have to use a reverse proxy for the technological requirements of using a subdirectory (folder) instead of a subdomain when you're hosting sites on different servers but want to combine them on the same domain.

The 301 Redirects will ensure the users (including search engines) that visit the old URL on the subdomain get forwarded on to the new URL in the subdirectory. This is what preserves pagerank, and provides a good user experience. Do not keep the content available at the old URLs; Do not allow those URLs to return a 404 Status. 301 Redirect them.

I hope that clarifies your situation.

Hello PFX111,

I checked the source code of the page, as well as the text-only version, and source code of the cached page in Google/Bing/Yahoo serps. I did not see any questionable content. If they are hacking and cloaking they're doing a darn good job of it, but I don't think that's it. Like everyone else, my first reaction was to say you were hacked, but the site appears in the SERPs without any message from Google about it being harmful to your computer, and I see no evidence that this spammy content appears on the page even when Google views the site.

Here are my two thoughts at this point:

1. It could be referral spam.

2. Someone else could be using your Google Analytics account code (it looks like UA-######-#) on their site.

In both cases you would see the keywords in Google Analytics but not Google Webmaster Tools. You can set up a new profile in Google Analtics and set it to track the domain (instead of just the relative path), which could bring up other domains if they are using your Analytics code. See this page for details on how to do that:

http://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012243?hl=en

PFX111,

Please provide the domain if you could. This will make it much easier for us to help you.

I seriously doubt this is a result of someone doing "negative SEO" but could not say for sure unless I can look at it myself. One thing I'd like to know is the landing page URL where these terms are sending visitors on your site from the SERPs.

I like the idea of sending affiliate links through a redirect on a subdomain because you can kill off all of those links at once by removing the redirects so they don't affect the final destination page should you need to clean up your link profile of page-rank-passing affiliate links. Whereas, if you had those links go straight to the destination page you'd have to ask the affiliates to remove each and every link, and/or use the disavow tool on them. I have heard of people sending those though a URL shortening service instead of a subdomain, which should work just as well since they are 301s.

I'm not sure how much sway keywords in the redirecting URL have, but it isn't a bad idea to keep them contextual as you described above. That just seems to make sense anyway.

Since the affiliate.subdomain URL is going to 301 redirect it won't have a canonical tag. You could put a self-referencing canonical tag on the final destination page if you wanted to.

The number in the URL is fine.

This seems like a good topic for discussion so I will leave it open for you.

PS: My answers assume you know the risks of passing pagerank through affiliate links and are willing to take them.

Hello James,

Having a ccTLD definitely provides some ranking benefit in the target country. If the .ca domain is doing well for them I don't think I would consolidate it. Contrary to the other response, it is perfectly fine to have a separate ccTLD/domain for other countries.

However you might want to look into geotargeting each domain in Webmaster Tools (setting the .com version to US geotargeting may take care of the 2nd place brand search issue).

Of course this is just my opinion based on my own experiences. I will leave the question open for awhile so you can get more input from others.