Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks so much Ryan, I had a hunch that we should use common sense on this one. I will definitely try the nofollow approach with the website owners who are not cooperating, and I'll respond back in here with an update here with the results for the benefit of others.

Thanks again!

Hey Ryan,

Thanks so much for your detailed analysis, this confirms the gameplan we had to remove thousands of links to our site. We ended up contacting about 800 webmasters who owned ~2,500 domains total with spammy links to our domains, and we had about a 6.5% response rate.

About 42 site owners responded and removed their links easily. Then there were about 10 who responded that they would take down the links for a fee. We've paid 8 website owners for a total of about $135 but there are three more that own a ton of domains and they want another $410 total for about 75 links.

We are trying not to spend that much on link removal, do you think if we document this and send it to Google they will understand the high cost that we don't want to pay, or will they just tell us that we have to pay this off if we want the manual penalty removed?

thanks all!

What is the best way to internally link via images?

I have a website about shoes with all different brands. Let's say I'm trying to rank for "ABC sandals", and on the ABC page I have a "related brands" section with 4 logos of related sandal brands, linking to their respective page. Currently the alt text of the logos is "XYZ Logo" with the link title text "XYZ." Would it be beneficial to have change either the image alt text, or the link title text, or both to "XYZ sandals"?

We recently (2 months ago) launched RSS feeds for the category pages on our site. Last week we started seeing error pages in Webmaster Tools' Crawl Errors report pop up for feeds of old pages that have been deleted from the site, deleted from the sitemap, and not in Google's index since long before we launched the RSS feeds.

Example: www.mysite.com/super-old-page/feed/

I checked and both the URL for the feed and the URL for the actual page are returning 404 statuses.

www.mysite.com/super-old-page/ is also showing up in our Crawl Errors. Its been deleted for months but Webmaster Tools is very slow to remove the page from their Crawl Error report.

Where is Google finding these feeds that never existed?

I'm referring to the sitelinks that appear in the SERPs when searching for my brand name. 6 subpages come up- some found in my main navigation, some not. 3 of the 6 sitelinks have been demoted in Webmaster Tools under "Site Configuration > Sitelinks."

I realize that they say in their instructions: "Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but we do consider a demotion a strong hint that we'll try to honor when generating sitelinks." I am just surprised they would ignore 3 of the demotions and for so long. The pages that are demoted do not have very many internal links pointing to them (unlike other pages of my site that are targeted specifically). Also, the site has tens of thousands of pages to choose from.

Why are they ignoring my request? What else can I do to fix this?

Thanks! your logic makes sense, it is how I figured they would handle the situation. But +1 has been out for a while now (a while being relative to the fast paced field of SEO). I'm just surprised no one has done a study on this yet. (*hint SEOmoz)

Say I'm on Nike and I +1 a soccer shoe page...does the Nike root page rank higher/for more terms for my google+ followers or would just the soccer shoe page?

I have noticed for some pages of the site I am working on that I see the video that is posted on that page ranking a lot higher than the page itself or the page does not rank at all, just the video.

I'm curious to know if these two can technically be competing for rankings and if Google sees that the page does not need to rank because it chooses to put the related video into the SERPs.

Also, has anyone seen any differences in the way videos rank based on where it's hosted (youtube, wistia, etc)?

I would think this is common sense not to but still unsure, is it bad practice to keep videos hosted on multiple sites (currently I am adding videos on a new host, but have not deleted the old ones on Youtube yet)?

We are working on a site with a page that has been ranking on page one of serps for quiet some time. It all the sudden completely lost its ranking for a single term (no major changes to on page made), but still ranks on the 3rd page for a few similar terms. Those terms used to rank a bit higher. Is it possible that some old spammier link building techiniques could have caught up with this site? The page itself is still indexed, has a few terms it is ranking for - but just completely gone from index for primary term.

Google actually has a very good overview of creating XML video sitemaps.  You can create a sitemap for your videos even if they are hosted by YouTube.

From the page: "Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site."

You can add video extension tags in your existing site, or create a standalone sitemaps just for videos.  Also, you can submit the sitemap through the wonderful Webmaster Tools.

Good luck!

Is this going to be updated any time soon?

I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/

Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?