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Any more thoughts on this?

Thank you Samuel for your reply as well.

Yes, what you describe is exactly what I also learned: no need to be too much "redundant" about keywords, but SEs will understand from the surrounding context... well, fact is some of our competitors are doing what I am suggesting here and they are dominating the 1st spot on Google for most of the keywords we are competing with. They also have a more clear "siloed" category-sub-category structure than us, which suggests this technique combined with the siloing technique help a great deal (also, note that for most category pages we compete with, we have much more external links than them! Hence my though that a more clear, siloed structure could help)

And of course, anything we do is with the user in mind: ALT text is always meant for users first, but I don't see harm in being a little bit redundant on that if it could help with SEO as well, don't you?

Thank you again very much, and please, any additional idea you may have is very welcome!

Thank you Rob for your extensive reply.

I see what you mean, and I am aware of that. This "link technique" suggestion is part of a bigger plan I am working on where the goal is to create a more "siloed" structure to increase topical relevancy as I have discussed on this other thread of mine:

https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues

And even though that's a minor thing, everything adds up. For example, we have recently moved from http to https and that's also is a minor thing, but adds up with all other improvements we are working on.

As for your suggestion:

"I would consider is replacing the example music videos from your specific instruments pages to your home page so visitors know what kind of quality they are getting if they subscribe."

I don't exactly understand what you mean, are you talking about our own produced Music Expert videos or the YouTube videos inside our product pages submitted by the users?

Thank you again

Hello everyone,

I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy.

Here is an example (I'll keep it simple):

Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories:

• Christmas

• Classical

• Traditional

So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like:

"christmas violin sheet music"

"classical violin sheet music"

"traditional violin sheet music"

I would be tempted to make the above links as follows:

Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music

But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs.

My questions are:

1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint?

2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do?

I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!

Great! Glad to know that. Thank you Dimitrii, I appreciated your help very much!

Thank you Dimitrii to clarifying, actually all our webpages now load images only via the https://, but since many external websites are hard-linking to many of our images via the regular http:// protocol, I was thinking to allow linking to them the "insecure" way if requested. Do you see my point? So... to better clarify my initial question, let's say Google is spidering one of those external affiliates and finds an image tag like this:

Will Google consider the image found at:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg

a duplicate of:

https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg

?? This was my original question...

In any case, I have made some testings today, and I have been able to redirect all images via .htaccess permanently (301) to https:// and looks like even if an image is requested with the http:// from the browser, it shows up correctly because the web browser handles redirects for images in the same way it handles them for the web page itself.

So... my concern should be solved this way. But in case, for any reason, I need to be able to serve the same image from both protocols (http or https) it is my understand that that shouldn't be an issue anyway. Is my assumption correct?

Thanks again.

Thank you Dimitrii for your reply.

Well, your two statements above contradicts each other, in my opinion. You see, what really concerns me is your last suggestion:

"it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https."

And hence my original concern. Why should we make sure that images are available only through one protocol if you say first that there isn't such thing as duplicate content for images? Why should we concern about that then?

Sorry for my further request for clarification. I really appreciated your help!

Hello everyone,

We have recently moved our entire website virtualsheetmusic.com from http:// to https:// and now we are facing a question about images.

Here is the deal: All webpages URLs are properly redirected to their corresponding https if they are called from former http links. Whereas, due to compatibility issues, all images URLs can be called either via http or https, so that any of the following URLs work without any redirect:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png

https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png

Please note though that all internal links are relative and not absolute.

So, my question is: Can that be a problem from the SEO stand point? In particular: We have thousands of images indexed on Google, mostly images related to our digital sheet music preview image files, and many of them are ranking pretty well in the image pack search results. Could this change be detrimental in some way? Or doesn't make any difference in the eyes of Google? As I wrote above, all internal links are relative, so an image tag like this one:

Hasn't changed at all, it is just loaded in a https context.

I'll wait for your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance!

Thank you very much Julie, I really appreciated your words. I have wondered so many times what Google think of "quality", and why before us there are always very low quality websites distributing the exact same music for free (often copyrighted music, which is illegal) and most of those sites are full of ads. Is that quality?

We could open a new discussion thread on the "What is quality to Google?" topic, I think it'd be very popular!

Thank you again.

Thank you Donna, glad to know that I am not completely mad!!

As for the fact they have done a great job with title and alt tags, anchor texts, I agree, but you know what? That's another realm where I became paranoid for, the so called "over-optimization"... We used to have perfectly optimized titles, descriptions,  H1,s ALTs, anchor text, etc... the whole enchilada perfectly optimized, then we began to lose rankings for an unknown reason (Panda? Over-optimization? Too many pages? What else?), and I began becoming paranoid about everything, so we started "de-optimizing" here and there, etc... Here is additional proof that when things are NOT clear, we all become paranoid and lose control on everything.

I may also add that some of the blame should be probably given to the SEO industry that has spread a lot of fear about all this stuff, without giving an absolute "quantification" of what means "too much optimization", or... too much duplicate content, or too much thing content, or too much bad links, etc... how much is "too much"? That's the question for which I am afraid there's not easy answer, but maybe they scared us too much about all this.

Thank you again, and please, let me know if you have any more ideas.

Hello,

I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+).

if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/

Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do?

Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Thank you in advance!

Hello everyone,

Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages?

For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page?

The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?

HI!

I haven't seen any change today on my sites, but we suspect Google is playing with some sort of content-quality algorithm since the last June, so it could still going on. Have a look at this article:

http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/

Yes, everything looks good, Webmaster Tools gave me the expected results with the following directives:

allow: /directory/$

disallow: /directory/*

Which allows this URL:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/

But doesn't allow the following one:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory2/...

This page also gives an update similar to mine:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en

I think I am good! Thanks

Thank you Julie, appreciated!! I really don't understand why most of the times our website content is buried in the search results, whereas "crappy" websites are shown prominently before us... do you call that "quality" big G??!!

Thank you again for your kind words

Yes, I think that may be definitively a possibile cause for your lower rankings.  Can't you rewrite those links in a  way to make them visible?

Hello here,

I am putting down a link building strategy according to the latest "good practices" and Google recommendations, but I find myself often confused.

For example, I'd like to implement the technique suggested by Rand on his article below:

https://moz.com/blog/headsmacking-tip-1-link-requests-in-order-confirmation-emails

But if you look at the comments, a user suggests to "ask for links in exchange of discounts", and everyone there applaud him for the idea (Rand included). But, wait a second... am I the only one realizing that now days Google discourage to ask for links for "money, services, or any other kind of 'offered' benefit"?

So.. where to draw the line here?

Here are other examples that I am not sure are "safe" in link building:

1. Ask for links in exchange of a free Membership on a site (where usually a Membership is sold for a price)

2. Ask for links in exchange of exposure (isn't this a sort of "link exchange"?)

3. Ask for link in exchange of "anything else you can think of", even if necessarily doesn't involve money (i.e. for a "certified site badge", for a free e-book, or anything else)

I'd really like to know your thoughts on this very sensitive issue.

Thank you in advance to anyone for helping me to understand.

Marie, look at the following page, it is the main (first) page of our guitar index:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

Now, if you want to browse the guitar repertoire to the second page of the index, you click the page "2" or "next" link right? And then the second page appears:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2&lpg=20

And so on... well, those subsequent pages are the ones I was talking about: they have the rel=prev and rel-next tags together with the canonical tag that refers to the main (first) index page, but many of those subsequent pages are still in the index, Shouldn't they disappear and only the first page kept in the index?

As for what you wrote about how I can expect a recover from Panda, it makes sense and I really hope this new integration of Panda into the main algorithm will gradually speed things up. Thank you for your opinion on that.

I think my approach will be to keep noindexing those pages that really don't bring any business first and in the meantime improve all the others one by one. To nonidex all pages and start releasing just the optimized ones one by one scares me too much!

Yes, I agree with ameliavargo, you could make just a single page including both keywords and potentially rank for both phrases. Boat and ferry are really similar, and I am not sure if you can really make two different pages differently relevant enough to rank both well. That could actually fireback.

I would definitively opt for a single optimized page which includes both words.

Sorry just found: it is actually setup with the domain "www.virtualsheetmusic.com" so that should be good! What do you think?