Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey G!

You can serve your sitemap in both versions, that won't be any problem and won't trigger the duplicate content issue. So you are safe both ways.

As for the second question: Yes, you should, unless you don't want your pages indexed (any HTTP or HTTPS). I think I saw your site before, and if I remember correctly you had your homepage and login script under SSL, right? Then you should definitely include your homepage in the sitemap but you can leave the login script file out as you don't need that indexed nor google will index it either.

Once you have your sitemap ready, consider including a path in the robots file, like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://[your website address here]/sitemap.xml

Hope that helps!

Have you tried looking at the headers response you get when accessing those pages? Try with http://web-sniffer.net/ to verify that your site is actually responding with a 301.

Anyway, I think Mozbot AKA Roger, scrapes sites once a week, so if you made the changes only 4 days ago, I would hold for a few more days.

Yes. Links from PRWeb are considered unnatural if not no-followed. You must nofollow all the links in your releases, and in case other sites pickup your PRs, just make sure those links are no followed.

PRWeb claimed they made several changes to comply with Google guidelines, but given the amount of people that use their services only for the SEO effect, it would be hard to believe that they actually force the nofollow to all their releases and the sites that syndicates them.

From PRWeb:

"As far as changes in links and backlinking these changes come from google and apply to all press release distribution. We have been proactive in these changes and marking all outgoing syndication as ‘no-follow’ in accordance with Googles new rules."

There's no "must" here, you can do it if you want. But as long as you are redirecting ALL non-www to the www version of it, you have nothing to worry about.

I redirect the non-www to the www but I set that up anyway, just in case

The problem is that plugin you are using, "Wordfence". It is probably picking up the crawls from Screaming Frog and Moz as DoS attacks because of the amount of requests from the same IPs.

You could either see if the plugin IP whitelisting or why don't you just remove that plugin and use CloudFlare, which is free and offer an even more robust security option + an included CDN.

They should be no-follow even on those sites that may pick the news up. Like the question says, the response from Google to the reconsideration request mentions links that were on syndicating sites, not on the actual PRWeb site.

And the statement I mentioned was a quote from PRWeb, and it says and I quote "all outgoing syndication" meaning that even those outside PRWeb site are being no-followed.

No that I know of.

You can simply send them the keywords and competitors your are tracking so they can setup the campaign under their account (keywords are downloadable from the campaign you are running).

But moving an entire campaign to another account, I guess you will need to contact Moz support for that: http://moz.com/help/pro

Hey Jason,

Did you notice that ALL the pages in your site are lacking descriptions?

Your description tag is empty. You can also see the result of that in Google doing a site search. Almost all results have the same description.

Another thing I would consider is fixing the text. Why is it all in caps? It's not only annoying to see in the site, but also in Google's search results. Just put the caps where they should be.

Other things I checked were fine.

Did you verify that subdomain in WMT?

Hi,

Yahoo directory is a paid link service, although "curated", still paid. I am sure you are not going to be penalized from a link there, however, don't expect any benefit from them other than the organic traffic they may generate. But, who uses directories nowadays?

Hey,

You can ignore the too-much links issues. That is completely normal in Today Websites (javascript, tabs, etc.).

About the too long titles, Google indexes only 70 chars, therefore, if you have longer titles, try cutting them with some script, there are a lot of options online for whatever language you are using to code.

Use that cut function on your RSS generator as well, and make sure the most important part of the title in on the front, as it is actually what users will see while searching.

Hope that helps!

Hey Christopher,

OSE only reports 4 incoming links, that not even near to what you will need to rank for the terms you are probably targeting. The competition in the real estate business is fierce,

Anyway, there are a few things that may help that you can do now:

• Move the blog to a subfolder instead of a subdomain, That makes that any link you earn on to the blog will directly affect the other areas of your site.
• Improve your Blog. There's nothing social about it now, you MUST enter the social world, and the best way to achieve that with your site is via your Blog. Start sharing what you write, start creating discussion, engagement. If no one shares your posts, how come others will be able to find them? We live in a social world, we read what others read (usually we don't "search" for posts, they are posted in front of our eyes by our own friends and influences). Take advantage of that.
• Don't take this the wrong way, but I would probably think about redesigning the site, it looks old, outdated. You probably need more images, a wider site, better and less cluttered blog, etc.

Those are just a few enhancements I can suggest...

Hope that helps!

Hey,

Those creating the links will need to pay for them, or spend a lot of time creating those links to actually hurt you. Negative SEO, although very well known, is not that common, you can't know for sure that the site is going to be hurt, the negative SEO can actually do you a favor.

Just keep an eye on your link profile, see patterns, and if you start seeing new links (either using Moz Just-Discovered or Google's Latest Links), if you notice they are spam, just disavow the domains. Most likely, if a Website doesn't protect itself from spam you probably don't want a link from them even if it was naturally earned.

Hope that helped!

Most likely you will need to wait until the next refresh (once a week). Check your pro account to see the next refresh date.

Remember that Analytics is in beta and therefore some glitches are expected.

Hey Chad,

He will definitely loose some value, however, if there's still some juice flowing from the old domain, regaining it will get that "loss" that you were having redirecting to the new domain back.

I agree with your idea, it will be much better if he use the old domain instead and cover all the services he provides.

Remember to follow all the necessary steps when changing the domain, 301 the entire domain to the old one, changing it via GWT, etc. The loss should be minimum, it will be noticeable during the first 1 - 3 month, but in the long run it should be a win.

Hope that helps!

Site looks like a scraping engine full of crap, you probably don't want them to link to you (links are dofollow).

You can still disavow the entire domain even if not showing in WMT. Just add the full domain in the domain format: Domain:handmadearea.com to your disavow file and you are done.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Hey Moz!

A while ago, when you switched to Moz from SEOMoz, I experienced some issues staying logged in, even after selecting the "remember me" option.

Yesterday those issues started surfacing again.

Just a heads up so someone can take a look over there.

It isn't that constant as previously, but almost.

I have been using xml-sitemaps (paid version) for all my sites over 5 years and they work like a charm, scraping and indexing what it needs to be indexed ans scraped, plus it consumes really low resources. 100% recommended (they have nice plugins too for extra sitempas (video, news, images, etc).

Hope that helps!

I suffered a similar issue. Although I do recognize I bought links back in 2007 - 2010, we were still getting about 10 new links every day, probably from some negative SEO campaign.

Got a penalty as a "partial match" affecting "some incoming links". We worked over a year to clean the backlink profile and still every reconsideration request failed as Google returned some links that were actually discovered after we downloaded all the links from all the possible sources.

What we did to solve this: downloaded the domains from both GWT and OSE, and instead of going link by link and spending at least 2 month contacting AGAIN, we added domain:[domain-to-disavow] and did it for almost 90% of the profile. Even domains that were linking to us honestly, but could possibly be seen as spam (like a link for my own profile in a dev forum).

After sending the disavow file with about 1500 domains, we didn't wait and sent the reconsideration request, with all the previous reconsiderations and their outcome and the decision we made to give it a "last shot". 2 weeks later we received their response, Penalty Revoked.

We started seeing ranking increases from the next day.

Keeps logging me out too. I already raised this question (http://moz.com/community/q/problems-staying-logged-in-again) but following the suggested procedure didn't work.

Yeah, they offer free and paid hosted versions too. But I found the server side version much simpler to setup and control.

Both will actually have the same effect as long as you nofollow your affiliate links directly or the PHP script that does the redirection is disallowed via the robots.txt + makes a 302 redirect.

The downside of using nofollow is that you can't track the hits on those links from your end, but with PHP you can save that into a DB or any file.

Hope that helps!

There are a few solutions you may try.

1. Try asking for a crawl manually: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test
2. Remove the campaign and create a new one, if you have open slots, just create a new one instead of removing the current one to avoid data loss.
3. If you are still getting old data, then you should contact Moz's support at help@moz.com

Hope that helps!

Google announced about a month ago that they were going to remove some rich snippets from SERPs and they were going to start showing them only for the most trusted authors. This might be the result of that exact update.

To get the picture back you only need to keep building and creating content while you continue establishing your online reputation.

More info: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-rich-snippet-reduction-17579.html

Basically yes. Any form of payment received in return of a back link is considered a paid link and will be penalized.

You shouldn't be doing that in the first place. That's a big NO-NO. You may thing Google won't catch you as you are only following some links, but the way they control information and the fact that they have been fighting spam for years... you are just killing your site softly...

Hi Papp,

What you are asking is the million dollar question... there's no right answer. To get traffic you need basically 2 things:

A great Website. And excellent content (whatever the niche is, it could also be the "best products" if you were selling something, or the "best service").

The real question here is: do your websites have what they need to rank in the SERPs? I'm quite sure, that 10 - 30 "seo'ed" articles are not even near enough unless those articles that you published are something really extraordinary that you can't find anywhere else, say a medical research for example.

My advice? Take one of the sites first, and try to do something amazing. If you are able to monetize that first one with AdSense, then you would have learned what is needed to do it with the other sites.

Hi Ruben

I checked your page and it works well with both my useragent and googlebot's which in result it shouldn't show an error when you manually fetch it. That should be some kind of Google glitch and you can probably ask for help in the Webmaster Help forums.

As for Google fetching not existent pages, that completely normal. The most common reason is that someone linked to the page and instead wrote the URL wrong. Check in the report, click on the URL, and see form where it is linked from. You can also find that there's no page linking to that non-existent page, but still Google tries to fetch it anyways, that has been widely known as Google trying to "guess" URLs that are actually not listed anywhere.

Hope that helps!

Happy holidays!

You are doing guest blogging for the links? Then just 1 will do it to get you penalized. Forget about guest blogging for links, instead, create great content and promote it trying to get a natural link.

If you are doing guest blogging, don't do it for the links. If in one article you write it happens you have an excellent article to link to in one of your properties then link to it. But do NOT write so you can insert a link.

Subdomains are basically different domains, so if your competitor does it a lot, and they interlink all those pages, they could even get a penalty.

If you use subfolders, all the link juice you get to any page will affect the entire site, as opposed to subdomains, where each backlink affects the subdomain itself, and therefore the main domain gets less juice.

Both are possible and accepted, but if you ask me, I would go with the sub-folders instead.

That could be a problem, yes. static.domain.com is another domain that www.domain.com and therefore the sitemap should be in www.domain.com for URLs on www.domain.com.

I've seen image sitemaps in www.domain.com where all the images are on a subdomain, like static.domain.com and that wasn't an issue, but personally I'd suggest you put the sitemap in the www.domain.com.

Every time you make a redirect, 301, some of the pagerank is diluted. So following your example, from going from A to C you should redirect both A and B to C, not A -> B -> C as you double the loss.

Redirects are just fine, and in my opinion, they should say for as long as the pages being redirected still get organic traffic (backlinks, search, etc.). The moment you see no more traffic, and the links pointing to that redirected page fixed (point to the new page) you can safely remove the redirection. For as on the amount of redirects, it won't be a problem if you have lots of them, unless you do multiple redirects from A to G going from one page to the other until reaching the final, working version.

If that's not your scenario and A redirects directly to G, then you are fine. Monitor traffic on A and see if at some point you can remove the redirection, otherwise just leave is there (I personally have redirects that have been there for over 3 years as the pages are still getting organic traffic (mainly from links).

Hope that helps! And a happy new year to you too!

If only I knew who you are Egol...

Google probably does what the nofollow tag says.

Still... think positive: you got a mention on "examiner"!, probably will drive you some nice organic traffic...

(my inner jealous talking: I'd kill for one! even knowing they are nofollow :P)

Why would you redirect the naked domain to home.html? I'd personally would have that home.html renamed to the default page that your server serves as the index, probably index.html and then look if there are any canonical tags in home.html pointing to the named domain + if there are any restrictions for robots to index the page, in the file itself and in the robots.txt file.

If you can provide us with the URL, we would be able to check a little deeper.

Hope that helps.

I think the best structure would be the easier to read:

I'd personally use example.com/clothing -> example.com/dresses -> example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi (but this actually something you decide.. there's no golden rule to follow. If the content is good you can even have example.com?cat_id=5 and rank perfectly well).

In this case, there's no need to repeat "clothing" it is already understood when you say "dresses".

As for the filters, the best way is to use URL parameters, following the example above: example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi?sort-by=price&order=desc

Any possible combination of the filter should point to the page where all the options are listed "naturally". If by default example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi is sorted by date added, then the canonicals on any possible filter you offer should point to that page.

Hope that helps!

That should be an easy fix for your programmer. If your internal links point to pages with uppercase letters in them, then have the canonical tags with the uppercase. Almost always, uppercase and lowercase loads the same content as the rewrite rules use the URL to look on the products using a DB that does not distinguish uppercase & lowercase automatically (in MySQL, you can force the query to do so, but that will be actually more difficult to just change the way the programmed made the canonical tags). You should also redirect the pages that are duplicate to the original ones, if they have uppercase letters (the original) then the lowercase version should redirect to the uppercase one (once the canonical tags are properly set).

From MY OWN PERSONAL point of view, I always preferred lowercase URLs... if that's the case there's a little more coding to do, but you will end up with all URLs in lowercase (for some reason almost all CMS automatically convert uppercase letters to lowercase in a page URL, like Wordpress does).

Hope that helps!

James,

There's no such thing as "hijacking your authority".

You mistakenly typed twice your own domain, so you are seeing the same results in both columns

PS: There are a few things in your SEO that you have overlooked. Just by accessing your site I noticed the first: Title = "Home". You should really consider hiring an SEO expert to help you with your site.

There's a massive report on a new update on SERoundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17956.html

It won't make your site look spammy if the content you are publishing isn't spam. CC images require you to link back to the original source, you can even use a nofollow attribute on those links.

But still, as the images are not yours, you won't benefit from image search, as Google will list the original image posted by the author instead of yours.

There are royalty free stock photos that you can use and they aren't that expensive if you are on a subscription. Like Fotolia offers a subscription for 5 images at $25 per mo. But you can download a lower resolution one, which will deduct half a credit and then you can download 10 images. Most likely, you don't need the one that's worth 1 entire credit as the 1/2 credit one is large enough.

PS: Here's a post from Ann Smarty about how to use CC images from flickr: http://www.seosmarty.com/flickr-creative-commons/

Hope that helps!

I don't think you are taking a good approach...

Instead of noindexing the pages, or blocking those that have bad backlinks, you should fix the backlinks.

Run a complete analysis on the entire backlink profile, go over each and every link trying to remove it by contacting the Webmaster, document everything you do on the process.

Once you are left with those link that you don't want and the webmaster didn't remove, create and upload a disavow file listing all those links.

Then you can proceed to send a reconsideration request, explaining Google what happened, what you did to fix it and send the proof of your work.

If you continue with your strategy, you basically need to create several new pages to block any bad link, and wait for the penalty to expire (nobody knows how long it takes). Then if and only if you removed all those pages that have bad backlinks you won't be penalized again, so this could take months, or even years... it isn't a good strategy at all...

Hey,

I tested LinkDetox myself for removing our manual penalty. Paid for several credits as every time I used them I received a rejection from Google after sending the reconsideration request (identifying the links, sending mails to have them removed, rediscovering them to see if they were still there, disavowing). All links removed as LinkDetox suggested, still no removal of the penalty.

Then we took another approach, we downloaded our linking domains from GWT, using text editor (dreamweaver in our case) added a "domain:" in front of ALL domains. Then we went over one by one to identify the good ones and removed them from the list, we ended up disavowing about 80% of the domains, then we sent the disavow file and a few minutes later sent a reconsideration request, a week later, penalty revoked.

Now, that we finally had our penalty revoked, we can still go over those links on the disavow file, one by one and if we find that the link was in fact worth having, or not there anymore, then we remove the domain from the list. We also check for subdomains, in our case we had like 1000 links from wordpress.com blogs, from about 5 subdomains. In the first disavow (that worked) we disavowed the entire domain wordpress.com, then we went over all the blogs to see which ones were worth having, and removed the root domain (wordpress.com) and instead added each subdomain (each blog) that we wanted disavowed.

Conclusion: nobody knows the real value of a link just by looking at some metrics like linkdetox does. You know the value, so go over the links by yourself and disavow all those that you think have no value, for example, those stats, or website worth links are useless, go ahead and disavow them all.

Hope that helps!

They are already available.

https://www.name.com/domains/guru

http://www.instra.com/en/domain-names/newgtld/guru-domain-registration/guru

http://www.godaddy.com/tlds/guru

Steps you should followÑ

• Clean ALL the blogs, remove any trace of spam (document everything in the process)
• Go back to the first point and make sure you have NO SPAM left (again, if anything comes up, document the changes you make)
• Once you are completely certain that there's no spam left, you can send another reconsideration request, make sure you show them the work you have done to clean the site.
• Wait for their response, and if you still get a negatory, repeat the process as most likely you still have spam in your site.

Hope that helps!

Adding more internal links so the linkjuice isn't diluted over 1 link would be like playing black hat SEO... I'm sure it will be seen as spam. A nofollow is enough. Still, a directory of only 7 sites without the inner pages is useless.

The way to solve this is actually using both Canonical and hreflang tags in all the pages that have duplicates. I remember answering a similar question that I am sure you will find it useful here: http://moz.com/community/q/custom-hreflang-tags-in-wp-using-with-yoast

According to Google's saying on 301 redirect link dilution, you should lose some of the weight carried by those links.

However, as Google just revealed that HTTPS sites get a slight, minimal in fact, chance to do better in search results, HUNDREDS of sites are moving to SSL. Of all the pages that I've been tracking and reading, there was no change at all in rankings by switching to HTTPS, anyway is too soon to assume conclusions, the statement was released last week, so all those sites I am reading about are just "too new" in HTTPS to take conclusions.

My guts tell me that these 301 should act the same way as any other 301 does (diluting some of the link weight), or it could be yet another way to cheat Google, but will see what happens.

I myself moved my site over the weekend to HTTPS with 301, haven't see any change, but I guess what I can loose in the 301 redirects can be gained by using SSL?

No, you won't get penalized for redirecting the PDFs to HTML versions of them. In fact, Google will like it.

Here's a video that may help you out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDzq-94lcWQ