Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello DogiDs,

I've used BazaarVoice and Power Reviews (now owned by BazaarVoice too) as well as a few others, but not the two you just mentioned. Their representative's reply below seems educated on the SEO-issues to look at when choosing a vendor. If all of the review content is only found in an indexable format on your product pages and they have good customer support, competitive pricing, agreeable contract terms...  then they may be worth checking out.

Maybe some others will provide some unbiased, experienced feedback on the service so this thread will be marked as a discussion question.

Hello Don,

I saw the title="follow us on Facebook" tag within the code of a rel publisher link on one of those sites. I don't remember which though. Just open source view, search for rel="publisher" and double check the href title attributes on each site. I could be wrong, but am pretty sure I saw it that way.

I noticed your rel publisher links have "follow us on Facebook" as the link title. That probably wouldn't cause the issue, but I'd fix it anyway.

I noticed on your About page on G+ for your personal author profile you link under the "links" and "other profiles" section. The link to the websites you write on should go under "Contributor To".

I noticed you put the rel author link in the header, sort of like a rel canonical tag. This is probably done by a plugin. I recommend putting the link where your name is after the post so it is an actual href link around your name instead of a header tag.

If you fix those three things and are still having sporadic success  just keep building the trust/authority of your websites and your G+ profiles. Just because you put the tags on your pages correctly doesn't guarantee a thumbnail, but building a good following and high-quality links/content should get you there eventually if the links are set up correctly.

I would continue to build up your authority as a golf writer on your sites and others. Eventually I think this will have a positive  impact on your rankings. Right now it could help your click-through rate, but I don't think it directly impacts rankings. It is worth doing, in my opinion.

Good luck!

I have to disagree that the credit goes to whichever version was found "first". I think attribution of authoritativeness and/or origination is a bit more complicated than that. For example, if page A and B both have the same content and page A is found first, but page B has 20 high-quality external links on a domain with a lot of authority and page A only has 1 link and is on my mom's blog... I doubt Google is going to think my mom is the original just because her site was crawled first.

Yes it can be a problem and yes you should do something about it if you can prove that your client wrote the content and that it isn't just the same manufacturer supplied product description that everyone gets.

First ask the offending site to remove their copied content. If that doesn't work you can file a DMCA complaint here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&&rd=1

Andrew,

I notice that this page is the only page in the footer links that uses the absolute path with https://www..., that has the https:// included in the rel canonical tag, and that doesn't redirect to the http://www. version.

For example, if I am on that invoice template page and I hover over the "How It Works" link in the header, or the "Contact Us" link in the footer, both end up redirecting me to the http://www. version of the page even though the links from the Invoice Template page go to https://www... Both of those pages also have rel canonical tags that use http instead of https, unlike the invoice template page.

If you truly need the page to be https that's one thing, but if not my guess is that updating the footer link (and other links to that page), as well as the rel canonical tag, and adding the redirect like you have on the other pages should result in the page being indexed.

I would allow Google to crawl those pages for a little while longer just to ensure that they see the rel canonical tags. Then once you feel that they have recrawled the IP address pages you can disallow them again if you want, thought that isn't entirely necessary if you have the rel canonical tag set up properly.

Another option would be to 301 redirect the IP version of the page to the corresponding www. version.

If they still don't drop from the index you can use the URL Removal Tool in GWT, but you will have to set up a GWT account for each of the IP domains.

Dana,

/blog would be ok in some circumstances, and ../blog in others. It depends on where you are linking from and to. The ".." means the page being linked to is one level up in the hierarchy defined by the path. So if you're linking to www.mysite.com/notblog/filename from www.mysite.com/blog/postname you would use .. while if you are linking to www.mysite.com/blog/filename you would not.

Your developer is probably insisting this because the security certificate doesn't validate on the development or Q&A site, or possibly because you use subdomains. I don't see why an absolute path on the same domain would cause an error.

It is ok to link to partner companies and related websites if you think the links are useful and they are relevant. I see this question all the time and the answer is always the same: Just use common sense.

If you have a site that sells bicycles online linking to a real estate site in Chicago and a law office in New York it is going to raise some flags.

If you have a site linking out to hundreds of other websites, ALL of which link to each other in some kind of 2-way, 3-way or more complicated network it is going to raise some flags.

If you have a store selling bicycles in Chicago that links to its other locations in other cities that is fine.

If you have a website design company linking out to some other local businesses, clients' sites, etc... that is probably fine.

I have never heard anyone from Google come out and say "All reciprocal linking is bad". If you're doing it for SEO it's probably worth reconsidering. If you are doing it for your visitors and potential clients/shoppers it is probably ok. Common sense.

In regard to the original question, I think Dimitri gave really good advice. If someone says they'll link to you if you link to them you should probably just walk away because they've said that to everyone else too.

Hello William,

In the future it would be best to start a new thread for your own question, but this time I will answer this here since it is related to the one above.

Yes, you should use a cross domain rel canonical tag, as it could be harming BOTH sites to have that duplicate content out there. You could rewrite the titles and descriptions for one or the other, but I would not rely on Google to "know" which one you want to rank without harming the other.

Yes it could and probably would be seen as duplicate content.

You could rewrite the content, block one domain from being indexed, or use a cross-domain rel canonical tag. The first solution is the only one that will allow both domains to rank simultaneously.

CDN stands for "content delivery network" and it is very common practice to host media files in this way.

One thing you can look into is redirecting the sound file URL to the page on which the file is used (i.e. the product page), which would take care of the link equity loss you are concerned with. However, you will want to test that this doesn't break the way the file plays/displays on the product page.

It is not a "big" problem, but one solution I have recommended before is to set up the CDN as a sub-directory instead of a sub-domain. Depending on how much control you have over the DNS settings it can be doable. This would mean that the server hosting www.yourdomain.com/cdn-media/ would be different than the server hosting the rest of the site. That being said, this is something that could be a royal pain in the rear for your IT department, could cost a lot of money to implement, and may not even be possible in your particular situation. Choose your battles wisely.

One metric I'd want to see would be how many links outside of your domain are going into the CND domain.

I'm curious to see how others handle this situation so I'll leave this as a discussion for now. I hope you get some helpful answers!

It sounds like you are just moving the content to a new directory and not changing the filename, correct? If so you can handle that with a single line of code in your htaccess file assuming you are on a Linux server and have access to that file. Most content management systems will probably have some sort of plugin/module for that too.

Yes, redirect them so the pagerank earned from external links into the old URL will move on to the new URL. It is a simple thing to fix that could have a profound impact on rankings if those old pages had external links.

By the way, update all internal links so you are linking to the new URL instead of relying on the redirects to do that for you. This is just best practice and good housekeeping.

Hello Pedro and Jobu,

I will leave this question open since CRO and shopping cart abandonment rate tips are sure to generate a variety of opinions and experiences. Here are my thoughts on it...

1. If you have any up-sells, which are very common with digital products, put them after the order submission so you get the main order before potentially annoying them away with upsells.
 The logistics of this depends on how your eCommerce system works and I have no experience with Shopify in this regard.

2. If any of the abandoned cart shoppers have given you an email address you can contact them with a follow-up email reminding them that they have items left in their cart. It could be good to combine this with an offer that you plan to give to everyone:
"This is just a friendly reminder that you have 5 items in your cart on mywebsite.com. Check out before Friday to receive our 10% off Spring Savings offer on your entire order!"

3. Consider using a "Usability Testing" service. Most of them will include screencasts as the tester goes through the site and comments what they find useful, annoying, odd, etc... You can ask them to pay specific attention to the checkout process. Who knows what they'll find, but some common items are: Asking for too much information, Lack of security badges / trust symbols, browser-bases security warning pop-ups, slow loading pages, change of domain...

4. A certain level of shopping cart and checkout abandonment is normal. For example, I almost always have some stuff left over in my Amazon cart for later purchase. Adding Wishlists (which Amazon has done) could help, but will not completely eliminate the issue. Some people are just comparison shopping. Your numbers do seem rather high though.

5. Consider retargeting ads to those who have abandoned their cart. Seeing your site as they browse the web can bring them back to their purchase, and should have much better conversion rates than other types of advertising online.

7. Sticker Shock is a big issue if you don't show them their running total as they shop. The upper-right corner is a good spot for this. Be sure to include the shipping cost if possible. Finding out the shipping costs (if that is even an issue since you have digital products) during checkout is a big cause of abandonment.

8. Always provide a means to contact customer support throughout the entire process. They may have a last-minute question before placing the order. Being unable to find the contact information easily is a sure way to lose their trust.

Good luck!

I'm not sure what you mean by "real = author juice" since, as far as anyone knows, there is not currently any ranking boost associated with "author rank" though it is a likelyhood in the near future.

If you mean that in terms of whether you will get the author thumbnail next to the post the best way to find out is to do a Google search.

Of course I may not be understanding the question correctly. My advice first would be to reconsider the tactic of having that many closely-related sites and instead put them all, or mostly, on one site. That aside, you would have one Authorship profile and would link to that from each site, though each site could also have its own rel = publisher tag, and associated G+ profile and thumbnail image.

If each post links to the author bio page on the same domain that the post is on, and each author bio page links to your G+ profile you should be set up correctly, as you do not need to link to your G+ profile from every post so long as every post links to the author's page, which links to the G+ profile.

Is there a subdomain for each language?

Is there a "default" language that exists on the primary domain (i.e. English on www.yourwebsite.com)?

Are you using rel href lang, X-Default Hrefe Lang, rel canonical, or other "tags" or solutions for this at the moment?

If you could share the website address we wouldn't have to ask these questions, by the way. I know that is especially tough on client sites, but I just wanted to say that Dave has asked some vital questions, including the one about setting each subdomain as its own language / geographic target audience. Here is what he is asking about: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399

It is not necessary to have completely unique content for each language, as someone suggested below.

Bryan I really don't think that is what Dave is saying.

Hello Patrick,

SEOMoz / Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools are not related in any way. If you have given Google instructions on how to handle parameters via GWT then Google should be following those instructions. SEOMoz, however, will not.

If the problem is still there, and you can fix it, then you should. Google isn't the only search engine, and their parameter handling options are more of a band-aid for when you don't have other solutions at your disposal. This is why it is good that SEOMoz continues to report the issue regardless of how you have set things up in GWT.

Consider adding a rel canonical tag to fix the issue.

Hello Craig,

I've dealt with this issue on several client sites and typically opt for noindexing the search pages (sometimes even blocking in Robots.txt) as recommended by others here - especially if you can't make any of them static.

In terms of the product pages, it could be helpful to the visitor if they search for "Specific Product A" for you to just go ahead and land them on the "Specific Product A" page, either via a 301 redirect from the search result page, or by serving up the product page in the first place. This would take care of usability as well as your issue with search engines.

I would not gradually implement something here, as that could be even more confusing to search engines. Do you want the search pages indexed or not?

What I have seen is a temporary blip in traffic (a few weeks at most) followed by improvement in traffic due to an improvement in product page rankings as a result. Every situation is different though, and this assumes good implementation.

Looking at this from Google's perspective, understand that they ARE the search engine so why would they want to send the user to yet another set of search results? Google should know which page on your site to send visitors. They don't need an intermediary, which is why their guidelines say this:

"Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

Hello Darin,

Typically search engines do a very good job of figuring out this particular issue. However, you may have a problem because the rel canonical tags are "self referencing". This means that the lower case version says "I'm the canonical!" and the upper case version says "No, I'm the canonical!"

If your developers can force the rel canonical tags to be all lower case URLs (assuming that's what you want to go with as the canonical version) it should take care of any potential issues here. If they want to go ahead and update all internal links to make them lower-case as well it wouldn't hurt. Keep in mind their time and if they could be using it for more important matters that would have a better ROI.

Summary: Fix the rel canonical tag issue by choosing one case or the other for that tag. Consider fixing internal links, as you suggested, if it isn't too time intensive verse other current projects, or at least add it to their plates as something to do in the future when they have time.

Hello Tom,

Five or six years ago this may have been a problem, but I seriously doubt it is right now. The text is clearly visible to humans and bots and you are not doing anything malicious. The div with the text appears over the image and it views fine in text and full mode when looking at Google's cache of the page.

Though both Pedram and Donford have answered your initial question well, I could not officially "endorse" them because I don't advocate keyword density ranges and do not agree that a manual review of the site would result in you being subject to any kind of penalty.

Write naturally for the topic at hand, focusing content on the correct keywords and topics with the goal of being helpful to the reader. Don't worry about manual checks for this because it will be obvious to the person looking at the site that nothing fishy is going on.

Good luck!

It sounds like a manual penalty may have expired. Did you ever file a reinclusion request and get the default "There are no manual penalties against your site" message?

Either way I'd be wary of building links from client footers, no matter what the anchor text is.

I see this image in the third row: http://static.fiberscope.net/media/infoblock/default/_IGP0894-copy_1.png on Google Image Search for "boroscope" and I see your site above the fold for Google web search, same keyword.

I don't see that there is any problem.

Try exporting. And see: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-shows-you-your-most-recent-links-127903

Jim I agree with Jason and don't think you have anything to worry about. Where you run into trouble is when you are specifically trying to show Google (or any other search engine) something different. For example, if Googlebot was using an IP address from Kansas you'd want to show them the Kansas image just like you show everyone else. Don't complicate things by saying "Show Kansas.jpg to all Kansas IPs, but always show Googlebot the default.jpg file). That would be cloaking. What you are doing is simple IP delivery and it should be safe.

It is possible that this is due to multi-hop redirects and/or the redirect through an https (secure) URL. Consider changing the redirects for those pages so they go directly to the final destination. Example:

Requesting http://quiniela.elmundodeportivo.es/dnp1x2/cuatrohojas
SERVER RESPONSE: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

Redirecting to: https://quiniela.mundodeportivo.com/dnp1x2/cuatrohojas
SERVER RESPONSE: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

Redirecting to: http://quiniela.mundodeportivo.com/dnp1x2/cuatrohojas/
SERVER RESPONSE: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

If you cut out the middle redirect and go directly from http://quiniela.elmundodeportivo.es/dnp1x2/cuatrohojas to http://quiniela.mundodeportivo.com/dnp1x2/cuatrohojas/ it may help.

The example.ca ccTLD would definitely have an advantage over the example.com/ca directory.

I have not heard nor experienced that there is any benefit to the .com domain with regard to ranking in other countries just because a ccTLD for that country redirects to it. However, if the ccTLD has lots of country-specific links the 301 would be applying those links to the .com domain and in this way it could help the .com domain rank better in that country. Using cross-domain rel href lang tags should have about the same effect though (i.e. consolidating link signals).

It is not a best practice to have your home page exist in a sub directory (e.g. example.ca/canada) and I would instead put it in the root (i.e. example.ca/). However, if you are going to be 301 redirecting that domain to example.com/ca/canada/... it doesn't really matter.

Best practice would be to put the language directory first, before the file name, such as: example.ca/en-ca/filename.

Be sure to read up on recent rel href lang attribute implementation:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

For "default" pages:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Specifiying the language in sitemaps:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

There are so many things to consider when choosing whether to go with separate ccTLDs or a single site that it is difficult to give a clear answer regarding which is best. For this client, given development preferences, scalability issues, cost, consolidation of page-rank, consistent branding, etc... it may very well be the best choice to consolidate the sites. For another business my advice might be different. To reiterate what I started with though: All other things being equal I think a ccTLD would outrank a .com site with a country-specific directory in that country. But all things are NEVER equal.

Good luck!

Kenyon it is possible that you have misunderstood what an "EMD" is, as this applies to the domain (Exact Match Domain), not the page file name. If you wanted to use an EMD for new content every time you'd need to buy a new domain for every post.

I understand that you may be using the term loosely here, but wanted to clarify so other readers do not get confused.

Thanks!

I see you at #8 on Google for the first keyword phrase you mentioned. Be sure your results aren't being personalized.

I noticed in your robots.txt file all of the disallows statements are just for Googlebot. Is there a reason for that? Perhaps if you made those disallow statements for all spiders it might help.

Good luck!

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.

Rutteger,

If that forum template really removes signatures ONLY for bots, then yes that is cloaking. I wouldn't do that.

The info above was for solving the internal site search problem only, not for Google web search.

However, the additional tips I provided should help with web search. Other than that I wouldn't be too terribly worried about it.

Hello Fabrizo,

That I know of, having too many nofollow links will not harm your site - other than there being fewer followable links, and thus less pagerank.

These links have commercial intent. Someone is getting compensated for linking to you, which means they should be nofollowed if you wish to stay within Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Nobody can make the risk Vs reward decision for you, but it does seem that penalties are getting more and more difficult to come out of. It could ruin a business if the website was penalized or filtered for months - even years - as a result of an algorithm update designed to crack down on followable affiliate links.

With that being said, you could always approach your highest trusted affiliates (good website, great content, links mixed into the content in a natural way) and offer them a higher commission rate for being such good affiliates. Of course, that would be a good reason to provide them with new link code, at which point you could take Naku's excellent advice on running them (via 301) through another site that allows you to sever the redirect at any time in case you need to clean up your link profile. You would of course need to notify the affiliates if you ever decide to do that since they worked hard to produce the content and add the links, only to have them 404 some day.

Hello Pedro,

I think you are making a very wise decision. If you have already been throttled by Panda this could be what you need to bring the site out of it. If not, this could be what you need to save you from a future update. In fact, Matt Cutts recently answered a question about this sort of thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adocBLGQoYE

Note: The question is about "no results" pages but he discusses similar scenarios as well.

These sort of "stub pages" have been a thorn in Google's side for many years, and rest assured they will continue to find ways of keeping them out of the index - including punishing the good content on sites that use them.

As Infant Raj mentioned below, be sure the URLs return a 404 status code in the http header, which will ensure more prompt removal from the index than if they were to redirect or show a 200 status code. I'd ignore the first paragraph in his answer though.

Hello Rutteger,

Regarding SiteSearch, this is from Google Support:

Exclude boilerplate content

"If your pages have regions containing boilerplate content that's not relevant to the main content of the page, you can identify it using the nocontent class attribute. When Google Custom Search sees this tag, we'll ignore any keywords it contains and won't take them into account when calculating ranking for your Custom Search engine... To use the nocontent class attribute, you'll need to tag the boilerplate content, and then modify your context file. This tells Google that you're using the nocontent class attribute."

Read the rest here:
http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2631036

I think it is a great idea for you to have members use that field to showcase their collections in this way. It keeps the signature content relevant (at least at the forum level, if not for the thread) and increases internal linking.

Additionally, I would do the following:

• Limit signature privileges to members with a certain number of posts and/or other metrics (e.g. Kudos, points...)
• Do not allow external linking from forum signatures

I will leave this question open as a discussion in case anyone else has first-hand experience with traffic / ranking changes before and after removing signatures from a forum - or with handling the situation in some other way.

Lastly, Google is pretty good at recognizing boilerplate content. They have been dealing with forum signatures for years, and since the area is highly-prone to spam I would imagine they know what the signatures are on most major forum platforms. Thus, I wouldn't fret over it too much unless it is clearly causing you problems in the SERPs.

Good luck!

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

That does answer your question, but you still have the issue of so many links on every page. In my experience you don't need to stick to the "guideline" of 100 links per page, especially on an eCommerce site with multiple sub-categories all linked to from the navigation.

However, there are many ways around this. For example, you can link to main category pages and sub-category pages from the top nav, and only show the further tertiary categories and drilldown / faceted links in the sidebar for that category if you are on of the pages within that category. Make sense? This puts some of your product pages one click further away from the home page, but that is fine. I tend to cringe when I see totally FLAT architecture on an eCommerce site that big anyway.

Use of breadcrumbs, related product links, footer links, sitemaps and good top-level and sidebar navigation will ensure your entire site gets crawled easily and pagerank distributed properly without having thousands of links in the header navigation.

Good luck!

I wouldn't use nofollow links for this purpose. The links are still going to dilute the pagerank you'd be sending on to other URLs being linked to elsewhere on the page, and if Google sees one link "nofollow" on a page they are thought to ignore subsequent, followable links to the same URL elsewhere on the page. A nofollow tag on a link isn't going to keep the page from being indexed in other ways either.

If you don't want the pages indexed there are other, better ways to achieve that, including robots meta tags and robots.txt disallows.

If you just want to optimize how pagerank flows throughout the site it would be better to focus on how and where you link to. For instance, do you really need all 100 footer links to every category from every category, or can you just link to other pages within that parent category? I would build a silo by removing links rather than nofollowing them.

Regarding the amount of pages and best architecture, it depends on the quality of those pages and whether you want them indexed. Example: If they are all unique pages with exclusive content that you want to rank Vs. a problem with duplicate content, thin content, indexable search pages, etc...

I would do both #1 and #2. If you can contact them and ask them to take the content and links down I would do that as well, documenting the request for future use in the DMCA complaint or in a disavow link request in GWT - if needed.

Are you looking to offer an affiliate program for your products, or to join other affiliate programs to sell products from other companies and get paid a commission? I have provided an answer for either situation...

Having an affiliate program for your products (i.e. becoming a merchant) should not hurt your rankings. There are many options to get started, including open-source, custom-built and affiliate network programs like Commission Junction, Share-a-Sale and Linkshare.

Joining affiliate programs as an affiliate shouldn't harm rankings in and of itself, but this all depends on what you do, as Jason described below.

Hello Dsmolinksi,

It is very common for sites to link to pages from the footer that they don't include in the header navigation. Typically the header navigation is reserved for the most important pages. Also, the landing page you want to show a visitor who searches for "lead tracking software" may not be the same page you want to send a visitor to if they arrived on your home page, and some sites that are designed specifically for online lead generation conversions may want to keep the visual aspect very simple so they can funnel visitors exactly where they want them to go in order to improve conversion rates. Using footer links allows them to link to their topic-specific content without adding complexity to the site's primary navigation.

I do not see that they are doing anything wrong since the content on those pages seems to be well-written, unique, not overoptimized and somewhat useful. Where you need to be careful is making thin "doorway" pages, which is similar to this tactic but taken to a level of useless absurdity where you have a page optimized for slight keyword variations or geographic areas that doesn't provide the visitor with unique, useful information but is solely designed to capture search traffic for that specific keyword variant.

The site above is making full use of keyword optimized landing pages for search engine traffic, but in my opinion I don't think they have crossed the line into "doorway" page territory.

First I suggest reading this post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/information-architecture-faceted-navigation-duplicate-content-oh-my

You may want to consider limiting the depth of your indexable facets. If these are strictly search pages, and you have an alternate form of navigation, you may consider not allowing any of them to be indexed, as Mike recommended. I couldn't say for sure without knowing more about your particular site and situation.

Your bottom line question seems to be "How should we handle these" and in my opinion I think you should focus more on the user than Google. It sounds like a pretty annoying user experience to spend time drilling down five facets deep only to reach a page that has no results. Why even allow them to drill down to that last page? Why not grey out the option? And if they do drill down that far, try showing them some alternatives.

If you want to dynamically serve a 404 status code in the http header for such pages that would be fine too, but it could cause problems if you sometimes have products on those pages and sometimes don't since that URL would be constantly coming in and out of the index. A better solution would be to make the page more useful and/or limit the depth of indexation.

Also, as Mike alludes to below, if you have another source of navigation on the site the "search result" pages probably shouldn't be indexable at all. It depends on your situation so I'm not going to say for sure that you shouldn't index them.

I love public Q&A because everyone gets to chip in, but nobody wants to share the domain in question (which is understandable) so that makes the job of answering a question really difficult.

Can you hide the actual domain name but provide some examples of URLs? For instance:

ourdomain.com/honolulu/four-seasons?rooms=4&view=0&page=1

Did you try any of Dr. Pete's suggestions? If not, I would implement one of those first, as they are still as relevant today as they were when he wrote them. Rel next/prev has received a bit more attention since then, but it only solves part of the problem if you're dealing with parameters beyond simple pagination (e.g. rooms, views, etc..).

From the information provided above I would probably go with a rel canonical tag to fix this issue.

I would not rely on a rel nofollow tag on links pointing to variants, as was suggested by Smarties, because Google is going to find those URLs regardless and a no follow tag on a link doesn't tell them not to index it.

Smarties #2 suggestion sounds good but I'd allow them to be followed. i.e. robots meta noindex,follow as opposed to noindex,nofollow. This allows pagerank from external links to flow through non-indexable URLs.

Good luck!

It can be tough to turn an exact match domain (EMD) into a branded domain sometimes. I would be careful of labeling this as any certain algorithmic filter / penalty. Back when EMDs were being devalued I'm sure there were a lot of false positives. This could be one example. It could also have to do with anchor-text over-optimization that isn't specially "penguin" related.

I guess my first question would be: Why do you think this is related to the use of the client's brand name? Is it just those keyword/s that have lost rankings? Is it limited to certain landing pages, keyword phrases, etc... ?

What is the domain / keyword? And if you can't provide that, how about a close example? For instance, is it something like:

buy-blue-widgets.com

Or more like:

bluewidgets.com

Or like:

bluewidgetsincorporated.com

or ???

The first example is difficult to turn into a brand. The second one is doable. The third shouldn't be seen as an EMD at all.

Hello James,

Why do these pages have "no SEO value"? Is it because they are AJAX pages or because you have them noindexed? Or both?

To answer your original question, using an on-click javascript event to send a user to a page other than the URL listed in the href tag is borderline. It goes beyond the risk level I would feel comfortable with on an eCommerce site, but a lot of affiliate sites do this. For instance, all of their links out to merchant sites may go through a directory called /outlink/ so the href tag might look like .../outlink/link1234 and appear to send the user to another page on their domain, when actually the user gets redirected to the merchant's (e.g. Amazon.com, Best Buy...) website. Sometimes the user is redirected from the /outlink/... URL and sometimes they never even get that far because the javascript sends them to the merchant's URL first.

It is not cloaking unless you are specifically treating Google differently. If Google doesn't understand your site that is their problem. If you have code that essentially says "IF Google, THEN do this. ELSE do that" it is your problem because you are cloaking. Make sense? There is a very distinct line there.

The bottom line is if you want to show users a certain page then you should be showing that page to Google as well. If the problem is the content on that page doesn't appear for Google (e.g. AJAX) then you should look into optimizing that type of content to the best of your ability. For example, look into the use of hashbangs (#!) as in:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

If you can write a regular expression to redirect only the old URLs to a new page, such as the home page, or closest category page - without redirecting every mistyped URL - then I would go ahead and do that. However, you do not want to redirect every mistyped URL because that would create a "soft 404" situation.

As Chris Menke mentioned below, if you have already redirected all of the "top pages" the rest, which probably have little or no external link authority, can just go to a 404 page, and will eventually be removed from the index.

You will want to pay close attention to the 404 reports for several months afterwards just to make sure that you haven't missed any URLs with significant external traffic or links.

If you really wanted to put in the extra effort you could redirect any page that gets more than 5 visits a day/month (you choose the threshold), and any that have at least one external link. That's what I would do, personally.

Also, if the category name is in the old URL you could make the "catch all" redirects go to the most appropriate category instead of all going to the home page. It all depends on what you have to work with. If they are truly nonsensical you will probably end up just letting all of the URLs with no traffic or links 404.

Good luck!

Hello Denny,

I am afraid I don't completely understand your question. I do not get "forced" anywhere from the footer links. I arrive at the URL I would expect to arrive at when I click on them. Were you being redirected to somewhere else? Or were you just commenting on the fact that all of these pages have a similar design with the "Sign up now" image and link on the right side of the page?

It is not uncommon for html sitemaps to only include popular pages. Also, these sitemaps may not get updated when new pages are added. It does not appear to me that they are trying to hide anything

Ergoback,

You have two sections of code on each page for Title tags and meta descriptions. You only need one. As Vancity Stacks suggested, one is probably added by Magento and the other is probably added by the theme. The theme's versions of title and meta description would probably be the easiest and safest to remove. Yes, you can delete it.

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 would handle this particular situation by putting the four-digit job number in a parameter instead of its own file or directory. Even better would be to use cookies in a way that allows you to not adjust the URL at all.

An example of using a parameter for this might be:
http://point-star.com/careers/apply/?jobid=5418

Then the rel canonical tag on that page would be:

http://point-star.com/careers/apply/5409/

Alternatively, if you are unable to change the URL structure, you could just make all of the above pages rel canonical to http://point-star.com/careers/apply/ .

If you want to rank those pages you'll have to write unique content for each job, including the job description, as advised by Lynn below.

Hello Oxfordcomma,

If you have fast page load times on the view all pages you can make those canonical. This is Google's recommendation: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html .

If those pages can be large and cause latency issues (slow loading) the better option would be rel next/prev and none of them would be "canonical" for the others, as they would each stand on their own. You may consider at that point adding a robots noindex,follow tag to the View All page, but Google generally does a very good job of figuring this out on their own and I prefer to let them do it.

In summary: If you have good View All pages with fast load times use those as canonical, regardless of how many products you have (e.g. 5 or 25) as long as no latency issues are apparent. Use this tool to test it: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights . If the View All pages are too big for most of your categories to load fast go with Rel Next Prev.

Rel Next Prev info:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

View All Canonical info:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

It can get a little more complicated if you are dealing with pagination AND faceted search or multiple URL parameters acting as filters.

Chandu I think your question is too big for someone to answer. Books and books and pages and pages of articles have been written about how to do SEO for an eCommerce site so you cannot expect anyone to provide you with an answer here. Perhaps if you tried to be more specific someone could help you.

Yes, you should definitely rewrite the content for each product instead of using the manufacturer's duplicate content.

Here are some resources for you:

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/qa-from-ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues-webinar

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-ecommerce-seo-tips-for-2013/57530/

Good luck!