Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Does anyone know if there are any URL shortners that track when googlebot visits them? I want to know when googlebot visits a shortened link that does NOT got to a URL I control. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks

I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having. I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY. What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS. My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail. At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name. I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time. i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords. So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May. I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail. I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation. Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.

Does anyone know a way to get Google to re-crawl a webpage that does not belong to me. There are a bunch of pages that I have had links removed on and I want Google to re-crawl those pages to see the links have been removed. (current wait time is way way too long) Can anyone suggest some ways to get the page re-crawled. (I am unable to get the website owners to use WMT to do anything). Suggestions like good ping services and various other techniques would be very much appreciated. Thanks

Can anyone help me understand a specific process of a 301 redirecting a domain. Here is what I would like to know.... When you 301 redirect a site, most if not all the links follow to your new site. But how does this process happen? 1.When Google sees the new domain does it simply apply the backlink profile of the old site to the new one? 2. Does it have to re-crawl all the links one by one and apply them to the new domain? 3. or something else?

I have lost all internal PR on my site when using the browser toolbar, only my homepage has PR now, the rest are unranked. It has been like this for a few months now. Can anyone confirm this for me please? The site is yourcityoffice.com If you have any other interesting ways to check PR that do not involve a toolbar or tool bar equivalent. Please let me know.