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Yikes man. I'm not saying you're lying or an idiot. I'm saying I think you may have made the wrong conclusions from what you were told. On top of that, it seems like you are incorrectly applying them here. That advice might be fine in other situations, but it didn't seem to actually address the original question here.

You don't have to be so defensive when somebody disagrees with you. I put scare quotes around "JM" and "personally" because for one, with just initials it's not fair for me to conclude you're saying John Mueller (though that seems to be what you're implying), and secondly, with the "personally" thrown in there that seemed like kind of silly name dropping.

Also, this is up for debate but I don't think John Mueller has reached a level of recognition that we can just call him JM and assume everybody knows what we're all talking about. Even if you said RF in here I'm not sure we'd know who you're talking about.

I think, like Eric said, rather than mentioning Mueller has personally given you some inside secrets that is counter to Google's public statements on the topic, it would be nice to provide a link to a study that supports the claim, because it is counter to what most of the community believes.

Yeah, I'm with you on this Eric.

It seemed to me he was talking about their PPC efforts—in particular where they host their landing pages—affecting their rankings across all their franchises on the whole.

We could possibly factor in how PPC affects organic CTRs here, but there have been a few studies that show PPC can actually benefit organic CTRs when the ad and organic result are both on the first page... and at any rate he didn't single out overlapping paid search ads and organic listings. He specifically focused on where the landing pages were hosted. Also, to my knowledge, CTR as a signal isn't going to be so significant it would cause problems for the franchise to underperform across multiple locations.

It also sounds like Josh here may have misinterpreted what "JM" "personally" told him. Paying attention to traffic on all your channels ≠ Google takes PPC signals into account in their organic algos. Sure, PPC can affect traffic from organic. Does it directly affect your rankings? No.

Another consideration here: Is that competitive ad space, i.e., are there multiple ads on those keywords? If that's the case then why vacate that space?

And again, I can't reiterate this enough, who would really think changing the domain of PPC landing pages is going to be the magic solution for the SEO campaign?

There's absolutely no reason their PPC efforts—as described—should have a "negative effect" on your organic rankings.

Are you right about staying on brand? Almost definitely. Would it be better for visitors to know what the actual domain is so they're more likely to become repeat converters down the line? Probably. Is it easier for customers to refer your client when they know the name/actual domain? Totally.

But would sending paid search visits to an off-site landing page have a negative effect on your rankings? Nope. As long as they're out of the index, no.

Maybe those landing pages on an external domain convert better than sending them to their usual domain though. What happens if the client follows your advice and the phone stops ringing from PPC and you're still not getting rankings? Are you comfortable with that?

Do you really think that them pointing their ads to the actual domain is going to increase your rankings? There's no way.

TBH I think it's pretty fair for the PPC agency to push back on this. I would.

Cyrus Shepard went into some of the value of nofollows on a Whiteboard Friday in the past year or two. There was a fair amount of discussion about it in the comments. Scroll through those and you should get a decent idea of how everybody thinks about them.

Think about it this way: Google isn't giving you any value from the link, but they still use it for crawling, and they also value all kinds of on-page signals beyond just links. So there can be value to the signals around a link even if the link itself passes no value. And there can be value to a link even if there is no ranking value to it—though I think the whole "referral traffic" thing is wildly overblown, never seen anybody get more than like 4 visits from a comment. But they can help you build communities/relationships online.

Plus there's all kinds of things like co-occurrence that Google uses that I suppose, hypothetically, could possibly be a benefit from nofollow links in the right context, even non-editorial links. Check Bill Slawski's blog for more on that!

Tough to say without more information. You could probably get a better idea by checking for other subdomains on that domain, what need they would have for subdomains (staging versions, international versions, archived sites, etc.), and if the old subdomain is still accessible. Might be intentional, might have been a mistake. I've seen a number of sites use wildcard subdomains and then accidentally get like 500 different arbitrary subdomains indexed.

If it's a large site, it may be because there is a particular CMS or some kind of technology on that particular subdomain that doesn't exist on the rest of the site. E.g., some sites will have a wordpress blog, but the Wordpress installation is only on a particular subdirectory [www.example.com/blog/] or on a particular subdomain [blog.example.com]. You could probably use something like the Chrome extension Wappalyzer and see what they're using that starts with a P and might find something there. Might be a PMwiki or Percussion install and they simply chose to handle it in a less than ideal way.

Doesn't necessarily make sense that domain authority would drop lockstep with page authority though.

Also, I'm not saying this is the case here, but it's worth keeping in mind when doing competitive analysis: Just because what you saw from the outside was legitimate, doesn't mean it was all legitimate. Some companies doing spammy linkbuilding behind the scenes block Moz's, Majestic's, etc. crawlers to prevent competitive insights.

Yeah, they don't explicitly mention 301s. But similar to a 404, a 301ed page is technically also not an "existent URL with good content." It's a permanent move, i.e., that particular URL no longer exists, though the content does exist at a new URL.

Dr. Pete wrote a good post about rel=canonicals a couple years ago that's worth checking out—numbers 3, 7, 9, and 10 in particular.

As far as the lack of consistency in the results, if you're treating all the URLs the same way, it might simply be a time lag. I could see how using 302s for a long period of time would end up showing the vanity URLs in the index. The only way I think you could consistently get a particular URL to display for a result would be to establish it as the official, "canonical" version of the page, whether you do that with 301s or rel=canonical.

Okay... well that sounds like a mess.

Your example makes me think of this company powerequipmentdirect.com actually. They have sub-sites across a ton of different domains like mowersdirect.com, chippersdirect.com, etc., and they seem to do well in all of their verticals. So they took a completely different approach to that problem and appear to have had some success with it.

The wording of this has me a little confused though: "I'm hesitant on putting a canonical on a site that is a vanity though and 301 redirecting"

It sounds like you want to put a canonical on "blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble" that points to blenders.com, but then you would 301 blenders.com back to blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble. Sorry if I misunderstood you there, but is that right?

Canonicals are generally treated like 301s. So I think that would almost be like a cross-domain loop, which would probably lead G to disregard the canonical altogether. Canonicals aren't a mandatory order. If Google thinks you screwed it up they just ignore it.

In this post on the Google Webmaster Central blog they mention it's necessary "rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content."

That sounds like a bad idea to me—almost like you're approaching this inside out.  The old Wil Reynolds' concept "real company shit" is a guiding principle here.

"It’s our attempt to take an industry we love and encourage all of us to do the same things REAL COMPANIES DO!  Real companies rarely build their business on shortcuts and tricks, yet we as SEO’s were winning so often with shortcuts and tricks." http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/rcs-how-we-do-it-with-a-live-example/

I think, rather than trying to make the most of the link equity that's hitting your vanity URLs, I would question why your home page, i.e., your company/brand is not as good at attracting links as your vanity URLs are.

So if the placeholder domain you're using here -- "site.co.uk" -- is the same for both the Hubspot blog and your primary domain, this is more than likely what's going on. The only way Hubspot could serve pages on your domain and prevent you from redirecting them would be if you have CNAME records for your domain set up to point to Hubspot's servers. (Essentially this creates an alias.)

So if you want your redirects to work, you need to go into your domain name registrar and look at your CNAME records. If there's something in there for Hubspot, then remove it.

To answer your questions in order:

1. You can check the index by googling this format, not in quotes: "site:blog.site.co.uk"
2. If it's not indexed, no. Even if they are indexed, no. It just means you probably would not get much, if any traffic to them.
3. I would just make sure the old hubspot blog is down and then add them at your new location, as long as they actually got decent traffic. Then, provided you've taken care of the subdomain/CNAME stuff, write 301s from the old locations to the new ones.

This might not be the most helpful response, but this particular question has popped up in the forums a few times now. Here, here, here, and so on. Seems like it might be something that your hosting provider/your server is blocking, not your robots.txt file.

There's absolutely no reason their PPC efforts—as described—should have a "negative effect" on your organic rankings.

Are you right about staying on brand? Almost definitely. Would it be better for visitors to know what the actual domain is so they're more likely to become repeat converters down the line? Probably. Is it easier for customers to refer your client when they know the name/actual domain? Totally.

But would sending paid search visits to an off-site landing page have a negative effect on your rankings? Nope. As long as they're out of the index, no.

Maybe those landing pages on an external domain convert better than sending them to their usual domain though. What happens if the client follows your advice and the phone stops ringing from PPC and you're still not getting rankings? Are you comfortable with that?

Do you really think that them pointing their ads to the actual domain is going to increase your rankings? There's no way.

TBH I think it's pretty fair for the PPC agency to push back on this. I would.

I think the issue is you're expecting to be able to drill down from source/medium (dimension) into different goal completions, which are metrics, not dimensions. You can only drill down from dimension to dimension. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033861?hl=en

The closest solution to your problem would have to come from a custom report, where you have each conversion as its own metric column paired with source/medium as your primary dimension. http://imgur.com/Dzwvaec

Once you have a custom report, you can basically just share a template link and it should be relatively easy to move it from client to client at that point. Mildly tedious but better than building dashboards imo.

Dzwvaec

It sounds like you're looking for these tools: http://moz.com/labs

Yikes man. I'm not saying you're lying or an idiot. I'm saying I think you may have made the wrong conclusions from what you were told. On top of that, it seems like you are incorrectly applying them here. That advice might be fine in other situations, but it didn't seem to actually address the original question here.

You don't have to be so defensive when somebody disagrees with you. I put scare quotes around "JM" and "personally" because for one, with just initials it's not fair for me to conclude you're saying John Mueller (though that seems to be what you're implying), and secondly, with the "personally" thrown in there that seemed like kind of silly name dropping.

Also, this is up for debate but I don't think John Mueller has reached a level of recognition that we can just call him JM and assume everybody knows what we're all talking about. Even if you said RF in here I'm not sure we'd know who you're talking about.

I think, like Eric said, rather than mentioning Mueller has personally given you some inside secrets that is counter to Google's public statements on the topic, it would be nice to provide a link to a study that supports the claim, because it is counter to what most of the community believes.

It's actually natural to acquire low DA/PA links over time—not all websites have high DA/PA.

I wouldn't worry about a few low quality links. Google is looking for things like an excessive number of low quality links from historically spammy areas, e.g., article marketing, link directories, or excessive social bookmarking. And they ignore nofollow links altogether (so they say).

So technically, you could have 15,000 nofollow links from DA 0 websites and— at least according to Google's search quality team—they would be ignored altogether.

Contrary to what you might think, a link profile with only high DA links would actually look unnatural as well, because it would most likely be pruned and trimmed to be that way. Here's a good Moz post from a while back illustrating that concept: http://moz.com/blog/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penalties

Keep in mind that domain authority is Moz's metric. It's intended to predict how well your site might perform in search results. You might be able to rank just fine without a high DA.

To answer your questions as they are numbered:

1. It's possible. Low quality links are probably low quality because they lack relevancy and are low on trust.

2. Not necessarily. A natural link profile will have all kinds of links: some good ones, some decent ones, and some not so great ones. But at the same time, I wouldn't actively pursue low quality links. I just don't panic if a scraper links to me and start tearing my hair out over my domain authority.

3. Perhaps. Avoiding websites in "bad neighborhoods" is generally recommended. At the same time, you could probably spend your hours more effectively than reviewing everyone's link profiles.

4. I wouldn't avoid directories "no matter what." I wouldn't avoid anything "no matter what." Consider what the benefits are against the risks and go from there. With any directory, consider if it looks like a resource people would actually use. If it's just there for links, don't bother with it.

Just think for yourself with these things. Don't fall in love with bumping up metrics.

Most people have their general process down pat, so I thought I would just add a couple things I do with keyword research that I'm not sure if other people do, or if they consider them to be an integral part of their process:

• I take large groups of keywords, upload them to adwords, and get regional search volumes using the keyword planner (E.g., Seattle or Texas or whatever is the relevant area for a client.) I then export search traffic by region from Google Analytics and compare the volume a website is getting from search compared to what the Google Keyword Planner reports the volume is... and find opportunities from there. Pic below.

• If I know there are opportunities for a client and I'm looking for pages to optimize or create or whatever, I use Screaming Frog's custom filters to gather a list of all the pages on a site that already contain a particular term. Then export, and you have your list right there.

• I also look for universal results stuffed with image boxes, local packs, videos, news results, as much as I look at rankings. Those results often provide the best opportunity for capturing the greatest share of searches.

QMeamSz.png

Those are ajax hash fragments https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

A few: Yelp is one, pretty sure CitySearch is another. FourSquare has done phone verification in the past.

You would have to use some kind of rank tracking software independent of Moz. Maybe as a feature add-on with Moz analytics they will eventually roll out that functionality (fingers crossed).

It seems like it's in poor taste to recommend competitors here... but nonetheless, Whitespark has a local rank tracker (though there is a wait list for sign ups) and Advanced Web Ranking allows you to specify rank by location. The drawback of AWR is that you'd have to configure a ton of stuff on your own and run the rank checks on your own (which means you're going to need at a bare minimum at least 5-10 proxies). That usually spooks most people off.

Last, you could actually get a very real picture by extracting the CD parameter using filters in analytics and then throw in Region or City as a secondary dimension. That wouldn't give you your average regional rank for particular keywords, though. It would give you the ranking on clickthrough from the SERPs.