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The whole idea is creating a new page altogther instead of the page that is performing poorly after the pengiun/panda update.

Hi everyone,

There's two parts to this Q, which is why the title's sort of split in half.

We wrote a guest blog post that we were really proud of, which took a good few hours of work. It went live about a month ago, but I just happened to notice recently that it had disappeared off the person's website - I now get a 404 error and I can't find it either using a 'site:' search in Google or via the site's own search tool.

I've tried getting in touch with the webmaster, but he's no longer responding to my emails. I really don't know if a) it disappeared by accident (for whatever reason), or b) they purposefully wanted to remove it and now they're avoiding me.

My two Q's:

1. Do you think it's cheeky to re-use the content, by giving it to someone else? Or would you say it goes against guest blogging etiquette? It seems a shame to waste it, for it to disappear.
2. If I were to re-use it, would there be any implications regarding Panda, given the fact that it was content that was once live (i.e. effectively 'duplicate', once upon a time), even if the 'original' content is no longer indexed by Google? Would it even be considered a duplicate if published again now?

Many thanks in advance!

We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces.

For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one.

What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had?

I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this.

Thanks

Gareth

Hi everyone,

I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back.

The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page:

www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview

However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404:

www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404]

I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include:

www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green

www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page

www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets

I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website.

• This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist.

As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering...

Many thanks!

I'm finding major discrepancies between SEOMOZ's google api exact match search volumes and Google's own keyword tool, why? For example, 'bridge loans' gets 1300 searchs according to Google's keyword tool, but SEOMOZ says it only gets 210 (both on exact match). So which one do I believe? I know one is the average over 12 months and the other is for last month alone but still that's a huge difference.