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This is really helpful Samuel, thanks.

We don't have this in place on many websites, and this was always about building brand, but a no-follow mission seems a good course of action.

Much appreciated.

Hi there

Just picking up on something Rand said in his blog analysing his predictions for 2014.

Rand predicted that Google will publicly acknowledge algorithmic updates targeting...embeddable infographics/badges as manipulative linking practices

While this hasn't exactly materialised yet, it has got me thinking. We have a fair few partners linking to us through an embedded badge. This was done to build the brand, but the positives here wouldn't be worth being penalised in search.

Does anyone have any further evidence of websites penalised for doing this, or any views on whether removing those badges should be a priority for us?

Many thanks

Hi Ray-pp,

Thanks for this. I think we will redirect to similar pages.

Much appreciated!

Hi Mozzers,

I hope everyone is well.

I'm having a problem with my website and 403 errors shown in Google Webmaster Tools. The problem comes because we "unpublish" one of the thousands of listings on the site every few days - this then creates a link that gives a 403. At the same time we also run some code that takes away any links to these pages. So far so good.

Unfortunately Google doesn't notice that we have removed these internal links and so tries to access these pages again. This results in a 403.

These errors show up in Google Webmaster Tools and when I click on "Linked From" I can verify that that there are no links to the 403 page - it's just Google's Cache being slow.

My question is

a) How much is this hurting me?

b) Can I fix it?

All suggestions welcome and thanks for any answers!

Thanks for this. I think you're probably right - but it's very frustrating!

Hi all

We are being penalised on Webmaster Tools and Crawl Diagnostics for duplicate page titles and I'm not sure how to fix it.We recently switched from HTTP to HTTPS, but when we first switched over, we accidentally set a permanent redirect from HTTPS to HTTP for a week or so(!).We now have a permanent redirect going the other way, HTTP to HTTPS, and we also have canonical tags in place to redirect to HTTPS.Unfortunately, it seems that because of this short time with the permanent redirect the wrong way round, Google is confused as sees our http and https sites as duplicate content.Is there any way to get Google to recognise this new (correct) permanent redirect and completely forget the old (incorrect) one?Any ideas welcome!

Hi Moz Community!

I manage a site where we want to have a support phone number for certain cases, but not for it to be front and centre for all our customers.

At the moment, most of our unwanted call volume comes through the number showing up in SERPs due. We haven't included it in any of our listings, but it seems that Google has included it due to its presence on our site.

We are now considering using the "Opt out from certain Google properties" tool on Google Webmasters but are concerned that by not playing by Google's rules that we may face some sort of penalty.  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/opt-out

Does anyone have any experience of using this tool or any thoughts on potential risks to our search rankings?

Thank you!

Thank you - very helpful

Many thanks for this

It's a strange on as the pages (if not the URLs) are over a year old and this is not a new problem. That said, I'm still interested in thoughts about Moz and how it deals with 301s, sure there might be some clues there.

In the meantime I'll wait and see. Another thought was that page speed might be an issue.

Hi guys - I am struggling to understand why I have a Page Authority of 1 (!) for most of my key product landing pages.

All of them are linked to directly from the Homepage, which has PA 46 and DA 40. Many of them are also linked to from high ranking external sites.

Less valuable pages on the site, with far fewer links, seem to have much higher PA.

For some reason these just don't seem to be registering the link juice which is flowing to them. In fact, OSE doesn't seem to register any links for them - perhaps this is the biggest clue?

I am at a bit of a loss. Some of these pages still rank highly for relevant keywords on Google. But something clearly isn't quite right.

Has anyone experienced similar?

LindaLV, we were actually going to 301 from the path to the subdomain (no content at the path). Could you explain a bit more about how subdomain-to-path 301-redirects would work? Would they not just end up somewhere where there is no content?

Lesley, we use IIS so not htaccess issues as such but, yes, we were having problems in that area.

Thank you both!

There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view.

Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution?

- 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post

- And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post

Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.

Thanks so much for the responses. Agree that usability is most important. It's something we have always stuck to. Just want to make the most of internal links. But this is very helpful. Appreciated.

Hi everyone

A question about best practice when linking from pictures on our homepage - hirespace.com

We have an option of using divs with background images (nicer in terms of design) but it means that we can't use anchor text or alt text to show Google what these internal links are about.

The other option is to use images which do not allow us as much flexibility in terms of CSS but would allow us to use alt text.

There is also an opinion that we should have separate text links at the bottom of the homepage to get the anchor page in.

What is best practice in this situation - is alt text worth sacrificing some CSS flexibility for? How important is anchor/alt text for internal linking?

Thanks guys.

Thanks for all responses, extremely useful.

Thanks Andy, great help!

We are looking at redesigning our URL structure to accommodate our expansion. This gives us a  chance to change the path, but we have found conflicting advice on readability vs. keyword density.

These are our three options.

mywebsite.com/s/birmingham/restaurants  (Keep it short so that the keywords dominate the path)

or

mywebsite.com/search/birmingham/restaurants (Accurately describe the content on the page)

or

mywebsite.com/top/birmingham/restaurants  (Be a bit spammy and include a word often associated with our inbound searches)

Does anyone have any experience on what works best?

We are just about to re-jig our main category pages and have found that different leading sites have taking different views on short and sweet url structure vs. repeated keywords1. For our website we have two options.

We have two options:

mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants-in-birmingham

or

mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants

Someone like opentable have gone for short and sweet (opentable.co.uk/birmingham-restaurants) whereas people like Time Out have gone longer with multiple matches in the url (timeout.com/london/food-drink/londons-top-50-restaurants).

Is there a consensus on which is better?

Sorry should have added, the page being linked to is

http://hirespace.com/Browse/Engagement-Party-Venues-London?utm_source=London+Review&utm_medium=Blog&utm_campaign=Where+to+propose+in+London:+Our+top+5+locations

Any ideas?

A page on our site is registering as having 262 external links coming from two pages on Google+. The page it comes from is for posts related to #weddings, but I can't find the post with our link.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Linking page

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/s/%23Wedding/related?cbp=17npa447ckmq3&sview=27&cid=5&soc-app=115&soc-platform=1&sri=0&spath=/app/basic/100121179959444544221/posts&sparm=cbp%3D16tcwubxsznm%26sview%3D27%26cid%3D5%26soc-app%3D115%26soc-platform%3D1%26stct%3DCAIQgJf0-fbDugIgCigB%26spath%3D/app/basic/stream%26sparm%3Dcbp%253Dm5w9s8yrkyhx%2526sview%253D27%2526cid%253D5%2526soc-app%253D115%2526soc-platform%253D1

I had a problem with Google Places a while back, I ended up calling them and they were actually really helpful. UK number 0800 169 0409

Sounds like your problem may now be fixed, if not hope this helps!

We have just introduced targeted pages for all of our keywords, however their is lots of overlap with existing established pages. For instance for the keyword Small Meeting Rooms we have the new page, titled Small-Meeting-Rooms which is now competing with the more established Meeting-Rooms.

Its early days for both pages, about 2 weeks and 6 weeks respectively. But is it counterproductive to spread out our search juice between lost of pages? Should we just focus on a few?

Any feedback, especially feedback based on real experiences is much appreciated!?

Functionally the Google+ Brand and Business pages seem to be exactly the same, but does having one or the other have an effect on SEO? Is it better to have both?