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I'm just starting my link building campaign in earnest, and received my first good quality inbound link less than an hour ago.

My initial thought was that I should go directly to google, and ask them to reindex the page that linked to me...

If I make a habit of that (getting a new link, then submitting that page directly to google), would that signify to google that this might not be a natural link building campaign?

The links are from legitimate (non-paid, non-exchange) partners, which google could probably figure out, but I'm interested to know opinions on this.

Thanks,

-Eric

Here's a MOZ staff reply to that exact question

Since the pages are mostly the same except for the feature store, your already doing the right thing with the canonical tags.  This won't be seen as any type of seo spam.

There's no reason to go the NOINDEX route, which may stop 'link juice' from flowing to the original version (marked with your canonical tags) if someone should happen to link to the special (regional) version of the site.

Nope, you've done everything right...  I don't see any potential for penalties.

By the way, most companies will change your license for you... especially if you bought it in the last 30 days.... send them an email and ask

Hi again

PlayHazel.com get's my vote.  It's very brandable, the word 'Play' is already very related to games, it's easy to remember, and it's a .com.

I can't think of a single good thing to say about babyhazelgames.land not to be overly blunt, but that just sounds terrible!

Good luck in whatever you choose

I agree that you should prioritize for the user.  But would also add that things that don't look natural in a sentence will look normal in other places.... For example, "safari lodge zambia" would be perfectly natural as a caption under an image, or as the text of a menu item.

Google also will ignore allot of 'special' characters.  and will normally register safari loge, zambia as an exact match with or without the comma.

You are correct, adding code to a page to 'adjust' the bounce rate can effect your 'average time per visitor' statistic.

This is because of how google measures the time spent on a page...

Normally, if a user opens one page, then does not visit any more pages on your site, it will count as a bounce (even if the user had remained on that page browsing for 10 minutes).  This is because there is only one call made to google analytics when the page is opened.  There is no call made to google analytics when the page is closed.

So normally, the 'time on page' is calculated by taking the time stamp of when the current page is opened, and comparing it to when the next page on your site is opened.  The difference between the two is your 'time on (previous) page'.

So what happens when a user only opens one page on your site and leaves (bounces)?  This will be counted as a 0 second visit (even if the user was on the site for 10 minutes).  Thus bringing down the average visit time for all visits.

What happens when you add the 'adjusted bounce rate' code to your page, is that a 2nd call is made after x seconds to the google server.... Allowing google to know that the user has in fact remained on the page for an extended period of time.  So now a whole bunch of these '0' second (bounced) sessions will be converted to longer sessions based on the time between the 2 time stamps.

The more 'one page only' visits you have to your site, the more this has the potential to skew your average session time.

On a side note, this will also effect the last page visited of multi-page sessions, as normally google would not know how much time was spent on the last page of the site as well.

The attachments aren't working for me.  Maybe try sharing them on Google docs.

For google rankings it's going to depend more on the update than the post-date.

For example, if you have a 10 paragraph post, and you add 1 paragraph and change the post date, I doubt you would regain the 1st position.

If you add 5 new paragraphs that add more detail or broader coverage to the subject and change the post date, you have a pretty good chance.

In both cases, you are not likely to get any kind of penalty for changing the post date.

On the other hand.... If you make a habit of REGULARLY updating post dates without providing any new value to the reader, then google will see this RECURRING behavior as spammy, and you'd probably end up on page 2 instead of position 2.

For the best ranking results I'd suggest you aim to update the article with a minimum of 20% new valuable content and update the post date.  Possibly stick the word 'Updated: ' before the original title of the post as well.

I would create new pages.

Here are the reasons to keep the old pages:

1. You probably have incoming links to these pages.
2. You probably have good content on your pages... It should stay there.  I'm guessing there will be at least some changes to the page content depending on the year of the game the user is looking for info on.
3. Changing the links you would in essence be trying to 'trick' Google.  In this particular case, I don't see much of a chance of Google figuring it out, but in general changes should be made to improve the user experience, not to gain an SEO advantage.  If for some reason google did figure it out, then you might end up with a penalty.

That being said, you can take some advantage of the old, well ranking pages by putting a big box on the top of the old page: "You are currently viewing FIFA 14 tips.  Please also see our updated tips for FIFA 15. (the words 'FIFA 15' here should be a link).

Another option that I would not recommend is to use canonical tags to point the old content to the new content.  Why this might give a slight boost to searches for 'FIFA 15' tips, but it has a good chance of getting your 'FIFA 14' pages completely delisted (since google may take your word that one page is indeed a complete copy of the other).  In addition, you would again here trying to 'trick' google, which they probably won't take to kindly to if they figure it out.

Is the .tld (.new) extension your thinking of using helpful / related to your theme?

I would strongly favor the .com unless there is some real value to the extension your considering.

It also depends on your demographic.  If your targeting people < 25, they will be more used to non-standard domain names, and won't notice as much.  If you targeting > 25 group (or a group that includes both < 25 and > 25) then the .com (or one of the other 'traditional' tlds) becomes more important.

I understand your trying to maintain privacy, but it's hard to give an honest opinion with your example domains...

BabyHazelGamesPlay.com is unnatural phrasing, and would not be memorable.  I would not use this.

PlayBabyHazelGames.com is natural phrasing, and will be more easily remembered.

BabyHazelGames.new (replace 'new' with something related to your subject matter) would be better than BabyHazelGamesPlay.com, but worse than PlayBabyHazelGames.com.

If you like, feel free to message me with more exact examples and I'll try to help you out.

The domain extension does not (link) matter for seo.

That leaves your branding, domain memorability, and possibly keywords as the only important factors.

Personally, I think memorability is the most important.  If you try and brand PlayGames.new, no matter how well you do it, you are going to have people who intend to go to your site, and end up going to PlayGames.com just because they forgot the extension.

That being said, depending on what domain names are available in your field, there comes a point where you might want to trade simplicity for memorability.  For example: www.PlayGames.new would be better than www.PlayGamesOnThisTooLongDomainName.com

Using your example... PlayGamesNow.com would be very much better than PlayGames.new.

Your question needs some clarification.

Is the White Paper in HTML or PDF format on your site?

Are you (or your client) the original author / owner of the white paper?  Is the White Paper exclusive to your site, or are there other places on the internet the white paper is available?

You say that you are not the 'creator' of the duplicate pages.  Are these duplicates on you or your clients site, or on external sites?

It's not a plugin... It's available in a base wordpress install.  Use  in your posts:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-split-wordpress-posts-into-multiple-pages/

No need to delete the old one... an update will function just as well.

Once a month is rather rare.  You could do update the sitemap for everyone of your 10 updates / month and not have any problem.  I can't imagine any problem kicking in unless you regularly do multiple updates per day.  Even doing that once in a while won't be an issue.  Especially if it's 'legitimate' updates, and not an automated script submitting non-stop.

Yes, you want a redirect from the 2nd to the 1st.  It looks like your using wordpress, and wordpress will usually do this for you (no need for you to manually create a redirect).

You might want to try turning permalinks off than on again to see if that fixes it.

It looks like part of your response got cut off.  Or you meant to use a '.' not a ','

The best thing to do is a 301 from one to the other.  For a more specific answer, you need to give more information about your platform.

For example, in apache, you could put a .htaccess file in the same directory and add:

[EDIT] Pasting the code here wasn't displaying correctly, so I put it here:

http://pastebin.com/N52nHLk3

I'm running a sports supplement store in Brazil.

Brazil (Portuguese) has absorbed allot of English, even when a very similar word is already in Portuguese.

When a person searches for a product on google, the chanches are about 60/25/15 in terms of if they will use English / Portuguese, or a mix.  For example:

Soy Protein / Proteina de Soja / Soy Proteina

I'm setting up the categories / bread crumbs etc in the store.  Ideally I'd like to cover all these cases, but I don't want to appear spammy.

How would you go about this?  I don't really want seperate pages for the different languages, as it's all only targeted towrds portuguese speakers.  The english just happens to show up in a portuguese language search.  The problem is exacorbated, becase about 30% of the products are imported from the U.S. and these products have more of a 60/40 percent ratio of English / Portuguese searches.

Should I just stick to Portuguese, and trust in google to be aware that 'Proteina de Soja' and 'Soy Protein' have a high correlation?

Thanks in advance,

-Eric

Thanks for the tip.  I verified that GWT has me set to brazil (was automatic because of the .br domain).

So guess it's just because I haven't done any of the needed leg-work yet.

I have some partners that are in related businesses I'm going to see about getting links from.

Right, a DNS manager could do a redirect, but that would not be visible in the web server log.  It would only be visible in whatever is managing the DNS.

The request headers will also show if any and what cookies the user may have set.  Which it looks like is how your server determines if it should provide the client the desktop or mobile version.

How detailed are your log files?  Can you see the user-agent (browser name) Maybe you could ask your IT department to log request headers?  If that will make the log files too big, they can probably do it only for the 'problem' IPs, or only for cases that the webserver returns a 301.  I'll take a look if you like.  Email is in my profile.

Best,

-Eric

The only way to make the redirects happen, is to renable SSL.  Because you can't do that with adobe catalyst, you have no option but to put a proxy in front of the requests to catalyst.

The easiest solution you will find is a CloudFlare Pro account: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans

You can set that up with your own custom SSL.  Your client will continue to use Catalyst exactly as they do today, and get all the other benefits of cloud flare.

CloudFlare of course isn't your only option for a proxy, but your not going to beat it when it comes to both Price ($20 / month), and Ease of Use.

The problem can't be related to DNS.  If the problem was related to DNS, the request would never make it to your server, and you would never see anything related to the request in your log files.

Because you can see it in your log file, it is definitely happening on your own webserver (not some external problem).

The requesting IP is probobly not the problem, but it could be if your server automatically adds to a banned list any IP that requests > X pages in Y time - your server might think this is a DOS (denial of service) attack.... But if your server was set up to do this, your IT guys would probobly know about it.  This isn't something that is normally enabled 'out of the box' someone would need to intentionally activate a behavior like that.

More likely, is that there is another common denominator besides the requester IP...  I would guess that it's the user agent string (the browser or device the user is using).

Taking a quick look at what I think is your site, you have a mobile version available.  Google of course would be interested in what your site looks like to a mobile browser, and would send a 'fake' user agent string pretending to be so (a cell phone or a tablet etc...)  If your server sees this request, and tries to automatically redirect the browser to the mobile version of the site, then you would have your 301 code (which in this case is exactly what you intended, so your all set!)

There are probably a few other cases that could cause a 301 for just some IPs, but this is the only one that comes to mind at the moment.

Good Luck!

My site has been up for about 6 months, and is visible on google (http://www.forforce.com.br/).

Even when searching for my exact brand name "For Force Suplementos", using google brazil from Curitiba (the stores physical city) I show up on page 3, so I'm obviously doing something wrong.

I just today started looking into SEO.  And we haven't done anything to earn a penalty. (There's no links actually anywhere but our facebook page to us, which I know is a problem I need to work on).

Anyway, I just signed up for a MozPro subscription, and installed the MozBar.  Looking at the On-Page elements, next to the URL, I see a U.S. flag, and am wondering if that is part of my problem.  The site is physically hosted in the U.S., so maybe that's where the flag comes from (Quality) hosting is too expensive in Brazil).  Is this something I should be worried about?

I also am using CloudFlare to help speed up the site, which I don't think has a Brazil POP.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

-Eric