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You just should no index the archive pages, tags, and others that may have duplicate content. Let's take a blog for example.

You let spiders index and follow all links from your homepage and the that pagination, however, then each post is filed in a category, maybe including tags.

Then you have to decide, and it's really up to you, what to let spiders index (always use follow, there's no reason to use nofollow). I, personally, will allow spiders index the homepage (including pagination), the categories (and their pagination), but I'll put a noindex in the tags and archives (specific pages that show posts within a specific date). Still, allowing all to be followed.

Well, the rel canonical is used to tell the engines "this content is actually on THIS page and THIS is the one you should index". As those canonicals are the result of a pagination, I guess the content displayed in page 3 isn't the same as the content in page 5, and therefore the canonical tags are correctly set.

Then it comes another issue, it is actually important to INDEX those pages? or would it be better to noindex,follow them as what matters is actually the pages they link to... That's something you need to rethink.

Hope that helps!

I think Yoast has an option that allows you to force the rewritten URLs. Check its entire configuration, it should be something like redirect ugly urls to... I don't remember. But it should be under Permalinks.

100 bad links is not bad at all. Unless those are ALL the links you have. If you sent the disavow file and submitted a reconsideration request, wait for their respond. They claim the respond to 100% percent of the requests, but it can take over 2 weeks (on my own experience).

Did you get a manual penalty warning? Or you just doing the disavow and reconsideration just a percussion? Because if there was no manual penalty, you shouldn't be using the reconsideration request, instead, after disavowing those bad links you should focus on creating content for the purpose of link earning (valuable links).

Hope that helps.

XML sitemaps needs some structure, is not just a plain text file with the URLs in it.

Did you build the sitemap with a script or manually? Mind sharing it here?

Panda does not affect links, penguin does.

Panda is a "quality content" related update.

Penguin penalizes both pages and/or entire domains, even to the point of completely removing the from the index.

Under your Google Webmaster Tools, "Manual Actions" you can see the type of penalty the site has (if any) and what it is impacting.

"Sitewide" means that the entire site got the hit, while "Partial Matches" means some parts or some links.

Anyhow, if you have a manual penalty, you won't recover by just creating new pages. Although penalties expire, you cannot know which ones were hit.

You have to consider if the Website is worth saving or you can just start again fresh. If you have a Website 3 years old or more, and generating income, with a client base, then you probably start working on saving it. If your Website was new, not real client base or value, you rather start fresh.

Don't make the same mistakes again!

In any of those cases, archive pages, tag pages, author pages, etc, I would go with a noindex,follow. As you want the posts they link to to be indexed, but you don't need the tag (,etc.) pages indexed, just followed to let the pagerank flow and let search engines crawl the pages they link to (actual posts).

Hope that helps!

Yes, it will carry pagerank and count as an offsite backlink. However, if you overdo it, you can get a manual penalty. Instead, I would go with a nofollow tag within those links and wait to see if you can earn quality links from external sources.

There are, but they are all PAID.

You have 2 options:

• pay per query: MaxMind https://www.maxmind.com/en/web_services
• per per database / year (infinite queries): IP2Location http://ip2location.com/

Both offer different options depending on how detailed you want the information of each IP.

Well, that's hard as I don't know your URLs and your parameters.

You need to come up with a solution that covers all, but also avoid any duplicate content issues by redirecting the parameter based URL to rewrote ones.

Let's say the file serving paintball masks and goggles is:

Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx

The parameter Manufacturer only shows the ones from that manufacturer. But does the naked URL shows all?

If yes, then you have to noindex all of those with the parameter set.

If no, then you can use some URL rewrite rules to make "static/easy to read URLs" using something like this:

RewriteRule ^Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles/(.*)$ Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx?Manufacturer=$1 [L]

This means that users accessing to /Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles/Empire will see the same page as /Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx?Manufacturer=Empire but on a friendlier way. That is if you have lots of manufacturers for paintball masks and goggles.

Or if you have many manufacturers but not that many products from each, you can also write a different rule like:

RewriteRule ^(.*)/Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles$ Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx?Manufacturer=$1 [L]

Which will produce the same effects, but putting the manufacturer name on the from of the URL: /Empire/Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles.

This not only involves creating some set or rewrite rules but also changing the code in your site to use the new URL structure you are creating with the rewrite rules.

If you don't have the knowledge to make this kind of changes, I suggest you contact a web developer to carry on all the necessary steps.

Feel free to private message me if you need more help.

Have you tested the "URL parameters" feature under "Crawl" in Google Webmaster Tools? It let's you set the best way Google should handle them.

Anyway, if your Website's content changes for every parameter, I'm sorry to tell, but the change you did was a bad move. To a Web that is going towards URLs without GET parameters, the way you had it before seemed MUCH better.

Parameters are usually recommended to pages that you don't need indexed, although they WILL still be indexed unless you tell Google otherwise, if the page contents changes based on that parameter (not just ordering results like in a search), then the parameter being part of the URL is a much better solution.

Don't forget that users usually read the URL of the SERPs and if the parameter is at the end of the URL, it might not even show up in the SERPs.

That's ultimately your decision. Just my 2 cents

I would start with <cite class="vurls">www.w3schools.com/php/</cite> if your website is PHP based and a little of MySQL.

Anyway, here at Moz there's a HUGE community willing to help, and many of them, such as me, are programmers and I don't bother at all helping, in fact, I love it.

So just feel free to ask! You can private message me with questions

I believe not. That won't be a good solution.

The best one I can suggest is you DO redirect all the old pages to the new version of them (if any) and the other ones, the ones that have no new match you should return a customized 404 perhaps with links to related pages you can have within the new design.

It will take time, yes. But that's the way to keep the most of your search traffic and pagerank.

Hope that helps.

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?

Probably. If you were doing guest blogging just for the purpose of a link, I'm sorry to say, you were trying to manipulate rankings.

Now, I would recommend creating excellent content. See what others don't have and do it. Say you sell sunglasses, then research others to see what they are missing that you can probably offer (more images? detailed descriptions? experts' opinions?, whatever works). Once you create that content just sit tight and keep doing it; sooner or later, links will come, but most importantly, you are offering something more valuable to your customers, and therefore earn rankings just by creating the content (even though no links were earned yet).

That's up to you. There's no guide that can tell you how many times to contact a Webmaster or how often. Just try with the available means: email (if any), social (if any), phone??.

The important thing is to document your process, responses, and actions taken (link removed, wants to charge me to remove it, no response - disavowed, etc).

The more you wait from the moment you start your analysis and the moment you request the reconsideration the worse it becomes. Sometimes, Google finds links that they were not part of the previous file you downloaded.

Recommendation: once you are done with the assessment, do it again, but really fast and only with the new links (under WMT), then send your disavow (you can wait a few days now), ask for reconsideration.

And don't feel bad if Google responds with a negatory with 2 new links that were never listed in previous exports... it happens almost every time.

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!

Yes, 301 do send the link juice to the new page, although a little is diluted as if there was a link in the old page linking to the new page, and only that link was there.

Could be both.

According to SERoundtable, there were lots of reports of a Google update between the 1st and 5th: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-nov13-update-17630.html

Anyway, is a not-confirmed update so it could also be the disavow file doing its work. If some of the links you disavowed were the reason of the ranking drop, then you actually got those rankings with artificially created links. So don't remove them from the disavow file because of the drop, just focus on getting new ones. How? Content!

Hope that helps!

Most likely using the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag, where X is not only the language but also the location. You should have something like this:

1st line tells the default page.

2nd line tells that visitors with french browsers in France should get that page.

3rd line tells that users with french browsers should get that other page.

Think the best way to apply that and you need to do it for each page that has different versions. Those lines are just for the homepage.

PS: That won't guarantee that Google will show the specific page you want, nothing can, but it will help Google understand the structure and serve the best page to the user.

Hope that helps!

But all twitter links are shortened to t.co link. Using a custom shortener makes it easier to recognize a "better" source (CNN = cnn.it, Search Engine Land = selnd.com) while allowing you more space for the tweet.

If I would have to choose, I would definitely go with a custom shortener over a free one. Bit.ly even offers custom shorteners for free (if you have the domain).

Oh yes, sorry Luca, I thought you were serving different canonicals in each version pointing to itself. The way you have them set is right.

I don't think this is the reason you are seeing the ranking or traffic drop, as actually using the canonicals the right way (the way you are) should avoid any duplicate content issue. But you better cover all the bases and fix everything that could be the reason.

By the way, did you check the manual actions sections in WMT?

I hope not. Didn't want to say it, but I'm kinda hating analytics :S I wonder if I would remain as a member if the pro version is ever removed.

I feel the same way! Even though I am forced to access Analytics by default, I then hit the "Back to Pro" not only because I am used to it, but also I find it easier to read. I really don't want to spend 10 minutes loading for pages and graphs, and the PRO version gives me just that, the info I need instantly.

As far as I understand, having both versions of the page HTTP and HTTPS can cause duplicate content issues. Serving pages under both protocols creates 2 pages of each page for search engines, even if the content is the same.

Canonicalization here even makes it worth, as you are actually telling engines to index both as different while they are actually the same.

You need to go with one or the other. Given the common choice and your type of business, I would choose HTTPS and 301redirect ALL HTTP pages to their HTTPS. That can be done with a single PHP line of code (if you are under PHP).

My 2 cents.

Just focus on content and a little bit of outreach/PR. Do not make link building. If you have good content, links will come, "build it and they will come".

I started focusing on posting some great stuff on our blog, including the images; a few days ago we got a link for entrepreneur.com because of an image we posted, couple days later 2 links to an article from SEJ and ahrefs. No outreach or PR was done for any of those links.

So, if you ask me, just focus on content, not only the words, images, video, presentations, etc. Links will come. 1 link from a good site, an earned link, is much better than links you may get by doing guest posting for example.

It doesn't really matters. It's just the way you sign in to.

I think the way you have your tags set is perfect. While having a robots=noindex tag allows google to read the page and pass pagerank, there's no point listing them in search results as they actually don't offer any valuable content; they link to, but they don't have it.

That said, google goes over your tag pages passing pagerank, which ultimately get more juice to your articles. Sometimes, within a post, you can link to a tag page within the content, so users can read more about certain topics and you are passing more juice to that tag page, although not being indexed, that tag page passes pagerank back to the articles.

The noindex has nothing (almost) to do with pagerank, it could be a tremendously useful page (you can even earn links to it from external sources), but they are only valuable to users reading your content and interested in a particular "subject" you mention within the post/context.

An easy one here

Moz Analytics:

Go to your campaigns, then click on "Manage Campaigns to the top right of your campaigns table. In the next page you can see a "Delete Campaign" under the column named "Permanently Remove".

Moz Pro:

Go to your campaigns, click on the campaign settings and at the bottom you can find a DELETE button in red.

Hope that helps!

Each TLD has its purpose. If you are an organization, and you are under an ORG TLD excellent, but let's say you offer a consulting service for a fee, then a PRO TLD will probably look better.

In my opinion, nothing works better than a general TLD, com, net, but that ultimately depends on your targeting. Did you try variations of what you need on a .com?

What is exactly what you are going to offer?

Google has released a new penalty called "Image mismatch". Which actually penalizes sites that show images to Google than are not the same as the ones offered to users when accessing the site.

Although I agree with those sites that the image is completely different that the one shown in image search, lately I've seen lots of big sites using some king of watermark or layer that reads something like "To see the high quality of this image, click here" in order to "force" the user to visit the site hosting the image.

Considering the latest changes to Google's image search, which made lots of sites lose their "image search traffic", are these techniques considered part of the new penalty Google is applying? Or does it only apply to the first scenario when the image is completely different?

You can read more on this new penalty here.

All the methods you mention are valid as long as you nofollow them.

And if having one domain to redirect simplifies your work, then go for it.

Remember to always nofollow those links.

With every site redesign and restructure comes a little drawback in search engines. 2 weeks is too soon to judge, but the fact that the new URLs are being indexed,, rich snippets are showing, etc is a good sign.

There's no such thing as a penalty for a site restructure, you just need to wait while Google catches up.

Now you should be focusing in conversions/leads. Is the new site appealing to your customers? are you selling more? are you collecting some kind of feedback? That's what really matters, users.

Hope that helps!

2 ways to do it with different effects:

1. Robots.txt in each subdomain. This will entirely block any search engine to even access those pages, so they won't know what they have inside.

   User-Agent:*

   Disallow: /

2. noindex tags in those pages. This method allows crawlers to read the page and maybe index (if you set a "follow") the pages to which you link to.or "nofollow" if you don't want the linked pages to be indexed either.

Hope that helps!

If I were going to disallow something I would go with noindex tags. The robots file is perfect with just those 2 lines.

Then, there are some plugins that will help you avoid any SEO issue like SEO by Yoast. Personally I like to noindex,follow tags, categories, and archive pages, that's it. But again, noindex, follow with a robots tag on the page, not using the robots.txt. SEO by Yoast will make that as easy as it can ever be with just a small configuration steps.

Give it a try, you can always disable plugins

Wish you the best!

Hmm think I got it.

Authors listed in the www subdomain are not indexed, while authors listed in specific categories (coding, mobile, etc) are.

I guess at some point they decided to deindex authors but forgot about those, or the other way around...

Ohhh, this was an easy one

Look at the page HTML, they have a robots no index tag on author pages so search engines won't index ANY author page but they do index your articles.

Have you tried filtering?

2Hird0X

If you MUST http all pages then a simple rewrite rule will do (if using apache).

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP} !=on
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) http://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R=301,L]

Users won't get warnings as that only happens when you are POSTING data from an HTTPS page to an HTTP. Just make sure any sensitive info is transmitted over HTTPS to prevent any eavesdropping.

You can deindex the image using a robots.txt rule, however, any extra traffic you can get from it is better than nothing right? Why bother?

Why would you remove the HTTPS if it was working good?

Pages under HTTPS may be slower if you are using a low end certificate, but it you are using a good provider, HTTPS gives a little more confidence to users.

I will consider having all the pages under HTTPS if the speed isn't affected. Run some tests and check for loading speeds.

Keri, I am still having the same issues in the weirdest ways.

IE: I go to Q&A (logged in), click on a question to post an answer, BAM, logged out.

IE2: Logged in in Moz, go to OSE, BAM, logged out, return to moz, logged out too.

I already signed off and back on, still no luck.

Thanks for the help!

Hey Bastiaan,

You really can't control what Google shows, however, you are missing some basic on multilingual sites, and the most important is: rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

Try implementing all the correct meta tags to all your pages and then hold for a while to see what Google does.

Here's more info on rel="alternate" hreflang="x": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope that helps!

Then perhaps improving the design might solve the problem. You could use a treeview...

Example: http://www.programmingsolution.net/useful-js/jquery-treeview.php

You are welcome.

Hmmmm.. don't know about Yelp, I've seen others using 303 too, but still 302 seems to be the way to go.

Thank Keri, just did. Hope it's fixed now.

I didn't fully understand the question, however, what you need to ask yourself is:

Is this change going to improve user experience? Or it is intended just as part of a SEO strategy, while not providing any benefit to the user?

If you answer yes to the first question, GO FOR IT. If you answer is yes to the second question, then no, leave it as it is, or try to come up with another "solution" that gives a "yes" for the first question.