The tag rel="dofollow" doesn't exist...

Hey Chris,

Did site A or B receive a manual penalty?

As any penalty on A, which is 301'd to B, will ultimately pass the penalty to B. I would suggest removing the 301 ASAP. Then cleanup the A domain until it's clean (if a manual action, until it's revoked) and then you can think of putting the 301 back.

Removing a manual penalty could be a long process, it took 1 year for us and 4 reconsideration requests to get the penalty revoked. We had to use the disavow as a machete as disavowed almost our entire link profile leaving aside the domains that we knew were good links, all others were disavowed using the "Domain:" to avoid any missed link.

You published an article in your blog and then in Ezine? the exact same post? Those tactics are long dead (duplicate content). You can now promote your content using several other methods:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Stumbleupon
• G+
• inbound

just to name a few.

Yup, just wait. However, I would consider switching to a better server, a 5 day downtime is a long downtime! Look for more reliable solution.

Colons are seen by search engines as what they are. You say something, a word, then a colon, and then comes an explanation or enumeration.

In your example, you did it right, perhaps you should move the colon to where they belong, right next to the last letter of the brand, so it reads: GENERAL ALTIMAX ARCTIC: 225/45R17 91Q

The idea you mentioned, building titles for users, not for engines, is the way to go. However, there are some tweaks you can make to make it easier for both.

As in your example, the title could become: GENERAL TIRE: ALTIMAX ARCTIC 225/45R17 91Q - YOURSITENAME (personally I would put the colon next to the brand, and then comes the rest of the product name + you end up with " - YOURSITENAME" to help build YOUR brand.

Hope that helps!

Well, I've removed the keyword tag from all my Websites about 2 years ago. Mainly because Google said they don't use it anymore. However, Bing said that they could still use the meta to figure out what is the page about. Still we haven't see change in terms of rankings.

I personally won't use that meta again, just to remove some clutter from the page. With all today's metas (authorship, OGs, twitter cards, etc.) you are just adding more "garbage" that actually doesn't do anything.

Hey Daniel,

The canonical should point on every possible filtering to the main page without any filter.

Check the following Q&A from Yesterday: http://moz.com/community/q/canonicalization-w-search-and-filter-operators-parameters

Hope that helps.

Joanne,

I'm afraid there's no way to know which pages are actually indexed from your Webmaster Tools. You can use a simple search in Google: site:domain.com and it will list "all" your indexed pages, however, there's no way to export that as a report.

You can create a report using some "hack". Login to your Google Drive, create a new spreadsheet and use the following command to populate rows:

=importXml("https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com&num=100&start=1"; "//cite")

This will load the first 100 results. You will need to repeat the process for every 1000 results you have, changing the last variable: "start=1" to "start=100" and then "start=200", etc (you see where I'm going). This could really be a pain in the butt for your site's size.

My recommendation is you navigate your own site, decide which pages should be removed and then create the robots.txt regardless what google has indexed. Once you complete your robots.txt, it will take a few weeks (or even a month) to have the blocked pages removed.

Hope that helps!

206 means partial content, which is what your Website/Server is delivering to Facebook's request. Have you tested the "Fetch as Googlebot" under Webmaster tools to see if Google can get the files? https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

If you get an error there, then it must be something IP related with your server, as my test returned a 200 and a test using Googlebot as the user agent also returned 200, which means that the IP wasn't blocked (nor the user agent excluded), basically telling me that if Googlebot is unable to access your site (nor facebook) it must be something IP related.

Hope that helps!

A few Webmaster videos ago, Google's Matt Cutts pointed out that that Googlebot should be treated exactly the same as if it was a regular person visiting your site, which you are currently doing.

However, you are now FORCING users to stay on "their" corresponding location, instead you should "suggest" but not force it.

Example: user access the naked domain: domain.com then you check his/her IP and redirect the the appropriate location, you must in this case, use some kind of "we already redirected him/her" method to avoid forcing the user to a specific country subdomain, you can use either sessions or cookies. Once you redirect, you create a cookie saving the option or a session variable. You now have the visitor in the location you want and you should offer an easy way to switch the location (check live examples, like logitech.com), a drop down menu for example on the footer. Now, IF a user accesses a location, say au.domain.com, you shouldn't do the automatic redirection, but instead, you could bring a lightbox pop-up suggesting the user to go to their "best match" location.

Using the above method allows Google to access any page, without forcing it to a specific location, plus, from my point of view, it is the easier and friendlier way for users too. If I type au.domain.com (while in the US) I probably want to see the AU version, if not, the page will suggest me to switch (and based on my response (closing the window or clicking a "stay here") the site should remember it and avoid re-asking).

Hope that helps!

Hey Miles,

The both are for different uses and may or may not be used in the same page depending on your situation.

If the content in the CA and COM versions is the same, then you should add a rel canonical + rel alternate, the rel alternate pointing to itself and the other version of it, and the canonical pointing to the one you consider definitive.

If the content isn't the same, then the rel canonical isn't needed (but suggested, pointing to itself in each lang/alternate), only the alternate should be in place.

You can read more on Dr. Pete's post here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Hope that helps!

The "page" you see only the image is the image file itself, there's no page there, just the file.

Wordpress does that by default but you can simply change that default to other options they offer and it is "saved" as the default, like no link, link to another page, etc.

The only benefit of having the link to the image file is that usually images are scaled to fit into posts, and therefore someone may want to see the image in its full size, hence the link to the image file. There are also other ways to deal with that like lightboxes to display images.

You could redirect the image to the page where the image is, but that requires some coding (detecting from where your image is being requested, etc.). Doing that may also carry a penalty from Google (recently announced) called "Image mismatch".

There's no "best practice" here, the best is what you consider best for each image. Take the image scaling example I mentioned, say you post an infographic, perhaps the image is much larger than the size you have available, so it makes sense linking to the image file, so the user can see the infographic in its full size.

Hope that helps!

I think you are completely correct. Making a responsive design does not mean "hiding the content that doesn't fit" rather "displaying it differently" so any user under any device is able to see the entire content without having to zoom in/out.

The example you posted about Wikipedia is the exact live example.

You could, however, remove areas of the page that have no actual value to a user browsing from a mobile device, that is acceptable, as even if you showed it they wouldn't be even able to see it (ex: flash content). This can be seen on sites that have floating social media buttons, than when on a mobile site, they usually accommodate those buttons elsewhere or completely hide them