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Oh remove the robots meta nofollow tags from the pages!!! Check your other pages too to make sure you're no unintentionally blocking them.
http://www.asggutter.com/gutter-connecticut/
<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noindex, nofollow</a>" />
http://www.asggutter.com/gutter-protection-system/```
<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noindex, nofollow</a>" />
6000 pages sounds like improper pages are getting indexed, unless you have 6000 articles which i doubt.
I would block the /tag/ and /category/ and /2013/ type of folders. Yoast plugin will do that for you. Then you're down to just content. If the anchor texts are overdone that could hurt you and I would disable the incontent interlinking if it's overdone for SEO. Then you're left with compliant pages that won't hurt your site, and if it's content that is unique and not spun type of junk I would just leave it on the site since extra content on the site is a good thing, even if the blog posts aren't generating much traffic or ranking. It could be linked to less prominently on the site like in the footer so that less PR is getting passed to it and users aren't visiting it as much from the main pages. Users and PR is staying focused on the main site.
correct, you 301 redirect the dead 404 pages to the most relevant related page, if there is no similar type page then redirect it to the home page. You can do that in your .htaccess file. You must explicitly code 301 in your redirect or it is 302 by default and 302 redirects won't pass link juice like 301's will.
Here's how to do it:
makes no difference either way for SEO, just be consistent with internal and external linking - choose one way and stick to it.
also. even if your site redirects to www you can still promote your site as mysite.com and not www..mysite.com so makes no difference for promoting.
https://www.moz.com/ has an invalid cert guys
This Connection is Untrusted
You have asked Firefox to connect
securely to www.moz.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.
Normally, when you try to connect securely,
sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are
going to the right place. However, this site's identity can't be verified.
What Should I Do?
If you usually connect to
this site without problems, this error could mean that someone is
trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn't continue.
www.moz.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for moz.com
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)
If you understand what's going on, you
can tell Firefox to start trusting this site's identification.
Even if you trust the site, this error could mean that someone is
tampering with your connection.
Don't add an exception unless
you know there's a good reason why this site doesn't use trusted identification.
That is called a robots nav, and it is a good SEO strategy for passing PR to MAIN pages you are targeting while not being something that draws attention to the user to click on. Strictly made to pass PR.
Look how this site is doing it in their footer. There are 6 links in that footer all perfectly targeted with anchor text, pointing to perfectly targeted pages (URL, title tag, H1, Etc)
http://www.onlinemedicaltourism.com/
Serving information to the medical tourism community, OnlineMedicalTourism.com helps you find information and services regarding medical travel, including overseas facilities that address your specific needs. We do not rate or recommend medical tourism facilities or medical travel services for quality of care, but rather act as an information clearing house so that medical tourists can locate the services they require. We recommend that you read more about medical tourism costs and the risks of medical tourism. The information on this site is posted by the facilities and medical tourism providers - OnlineMedicalTourism.com is not responsible for inaccuracies they create.
That being said, I would only do this on main targeted pages and not include dozens of links. Since this is a global footer you don't want it to be too long. It needs to be only a small percentage of the content on the page so that it does not appear to be duplicate content on all of the pages.
Hosting location is no longer important for SEO, go with a company that is reputable, has 99.9% uptime and is fast, maybe a VPS. Make sure there is no downtime when doing the switchover. Just because a server is in closer proximity to your users doesn't mean it's going to be faster. It's all about performance and reliability, and a hosting company with good support is important too.
yes, one website with subfolders is definitely best.
Hey Robert, I respectfully disagree with this theory:
"The reasoning (this is my opinion) is that they do not want the advertiser to grow and leave them so they try to prevent any juice from going to them. To, in essence, endeavor to keep them captive. "
Giving an advertiser a dofollow link is like gold, so not only will you get more advertisers, but if they do see better rankings as a result they would be less hesitant to leave because losing their links on your site could cause a drop in rankings so just the opposite is actually true regarding keeping them captive.
Also, image links do not pass PR which a lot of people don't know and also there is not anchor text so SEO benefit is minimal. If someone wants to advertise on your site and says they want their image link dofollowed I see no problem, that is of course assuming it's a clean site (which should go without saying because you only want to associate yourself with clean sites anyway)
if english is the sites main language i would put that in the root, not in a en folder
since the LI language pages are under the main root, create a /li/ folder and then 301 redirect the root domain urls to these new ones.
then create new root domain urls for the english version, they need to be different urls than the old LI root domain urls which won't be a problem.
That isn't a huge number and image links don't pass semantics like a text link does so it's probably ok because images don't push rank, but I would nofollow them anyway because Google keeps changing the rules as they go.
Relevance is important but not critical. It is better to have a footbal or sports related site link to your football site, but non relevant sites still pass PR just the same, and Google does not penalize sites because links pointing to their site are off topic. It is possible that a baby care site links to a football site because they have toddler football jerseys or something like that. Also, blogs and sites that talk about various topics are incredibly common, a site does not have to be about one topic, so no worries there.
The main concern is getting links from a shady or penalized site. Use this tool to see if the site that will be linking to you is a clean site and not linking with sites that sell meds, casino or adult material.
It's bad, don't engage in buying links on paid directories if you are trying to build links. Google may or may not penalize them depending on the amount of links and the ratio of good to bad link pointing at their site.
That's perfectly fine.
if you are doing
a) one offs and engaging bloggers who have only one blog and not a network
b) aren't getting posts on pay per post blog sites
c) the blog is on topic and not reviews of general (all different not your niche) or pharma, casino or adult sites
d) is one incontent link and not sitewide like in a blogroll
e) dofollow link
f) not linking to your homepage
then i think it's one good form of link building and google will give you credit for it. it's the splogs they flag and penalize avoid all spammy blogs
Both meta title and description should be unique and also not too short or too long or Google will replace it with whatever they feel is more relevant.
The meta title is VERY important to SEO and keywords need to be well researched and crafted.
The meta description does not effect rankings, and should be written from a marketing perspective for best CTR. That might mean having one instance of the keyword in the sentence to make it appear more relevant (that is what I usually do) but it doesn't help with SEO.
The meta keywords can hurt you if you stuff it, but if you populate it with a couple of phrases, and don't repeat any you should be fine. I just wouldn't waste too much time on the keywords tag because Google ignores it.
you're lucky that is a manageable number. i would remove all crap directory links since you are saying they are the worst of the worst it can only hurt you.
check the following and make sure they are without trailing slashes
sitemap.xml link
internal linking urls
canonical tag urls
Do three things
a) add the meta noindex
b) add the search section you don't want crawled to your robots.txt file
c) request url removal in webmaster tools
doing the first two steps will ensure that the pages remain unindexed after you remove them in WMT
I would go ahead and remove them as you come across them.
The disavow tool seems like it might have a lot of implications and Google is probably thinking about the best way to go about this before implementing. In my opinion it will cause a spike in spamming when people know they can simply disavow links if they get caught.
you could 301 everything to the closest similar product page/url instead of 404ing if these are entry pages that were ranking and getting traffic in search. by 404'ing them you'll lose those rankings, 301ing them will keep that ranking position but show the new URL in it's place.it all depend on if they were getting landing page traffic or not. also if any links are pointing to those pages and if they have any PR i would 301 them all instead of throwing the page juice away.
what could you be forgetting?
update sitemap.xml files and take the old ones off of the server and resubmit in Google
internal linking is all updated, sometimes people have blogs pointing to old URLs, if you're 404'ing then you need to update them, if you're 301'ing they can be left the way they are if it will be time consuming
make sure your robots.txt is updated, and people a lot of times put their sitemap.xml paths in the robots.txt so that would need to be updated
run a broken link checker on the site once done
One site if all somewhat related, several sites if completely different. You don't want shoes, car parts and landscaping on one site. You do want car parts, van parts and motorcycle parts on one site. The single site will be stronger than several smaller stand alone sites.
I would say don't ever 302, especially cross domain. You're just throwing away any PR that those pages might have. Use the link that goes to the green widgets on the other site instead. Just make sure that you're one way linking and that the big site is not linking back to this referring site or Google could penalize both. Keep the relationship one way and not reciprocal.You can even JS the links in an obfuscated way so that Google doesn't see the relationship, and PR does not get passed from one site to another if you wanted.
you should never change your domain name unless you absolutely have to, once you choose a domain name you should consider yourself married to it since it could affect rankings.
What kind of traffic are we talking about, and how much does his business survival depend on his site ranking, these factors would make a difference in deciding if the risk is worth it.
if it's for branding only he could redirect a branded domain name to that url and have it show as an alias. and also be able to use the branded domain name in business cards etc but the site will still be indexed under the original domain name.
yes, 90% or so of PR is passed when doing a 301 redirect. Try to get links to your site to be www from now on and if you are using a trailing slash (.com/) for example as your representative homepage URL it would be better to have that in the links pointing to your homepage as well.
Don't ask me how i understand this question but somehow i do. You had someone doing link building for you and they used the wrong anchor text.
Consider yourself lucky that he made that mistake, it won't result in your main keywords getting penalized.
Stop submitting to directories and spammy places and work on your onsite optimization and content.
No it won't pass link equity. It needs to be an actual hyperlink on your site in order to do that, you are fine.
yea this is a no brainer for google to make a connection
Site A: 120.30.30.150
Site B: 120:30.30.151
Article posting to places like ezines is no longer recommended and can get you penalized, also could be onpage factors or duplicate content issues between the two sites, there could be a lot of reasons, would need to see the actual sites though in order to determine.
noindex,follow the page and you're fine - don't cross domain canonicalize.
and if it's only two pages out of your entire site don't worry about it unless you have a 5 page site hehe
also would re code the article on your site instead of linking to submityourarticle.com in a script.
Sure, you can absolutely create brand pages and from there branch to product pages. A bigger site is more effective and easier to maintain and promote and analyze than multiple small sites.
OK so you're only doing Jordan tours. And you're not doing other things that would require you to make sub folders, such as tours, hotels, flights.
Do keyword research to make sure exact match "jordan tours" is your main target and not "tours in jorden" for instance. Also feel free to mix it up
I would think that your C option is the best, since the keywords in the filename is better for SEO than in the directory
www.yoursitewithoutkeywords.com/
www.yoursitewithoutkeywords.com/jordan-bike-tours
www.yoursitewithoutkeywords.com/5-day-inclusive-tours-in-jorden
you mean how to add the code to your website? This should help you
If your name or your business name gets penalized those are two main ways people won't be able to find you.
Since those will most likely be low competition keywords they should rank on their own for their searches. I wouldn't play around with link building schemes with important domain names like personal name and company name especially if you are new to link building, I would do this on alternate domain names that won't cause too much grief if they get penalized.
"Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS."
I respectfully disagree. The golden rule is keep your domain name unless the site is completely nuked. Update URLs to be more SEO friendly, especially if they look like the ones you have.
301 redirect appropriately, and if the new pages have the same content they will simply assume the ranking positions of the old URLs. Test a category first if you're nervous.
First, do not 404 them, use a 410 error code instead as that denotes intended permanent deletion. In addition, I would also block the files/folder in robots.txt. Finally, I would use Google Search Console to remove these URLs. Good luck.
This is a dead link building strategy and can be dangerous nowadays (especially if not in the same niche) and can get both sites penalized, you should at very least nofollow one of the sites doing the linking.
Not recommended for boosting serps, might be viable for cross traffic if each site sells something the other does not for example.
Congrats, people need to realize how much free advice you offered to the SEOMoz community and all for a t-shirt. I just crossed the halfway mark today myself and I think I can get that t-shirt in 2012. LOL.
No redirect needed when changing title tags, only knowledge to optimize them well.
Regarding your 301's, I would look at what redirects the site is currently doing and see if it can be cleaned up if you think you are daisy chaining 301 redirects due to multiple site overhauls.
There is not one instance of "compare travel" on your homepage.
Doing this is the best way to assure that your site will NEVER rank for "compare travel"
http://www.comparetravel.ie/terms-of-business/
Also, it's only a 11 page site with poor SEO, it takes more to rank for a moderately competitive keyword than having it in your domain name.
FYI, pull your CSS code out of the body of your page and reference it in an include file.
it's against Googles TOS, it's not illegal. You can report them to Google and they probably won't act on it. If they keep doing this they'll find themselves a victim of penguin.
My advice is to just keep doing all you can to make your site great and keep it white hat. If they're spam link building it most likely will come back to bite them in the @$$.
Links from adult sites sound weird though because anyone link building can do better than that even if they are spamming - perhaps another one of your other competitors is trying to knock them out, you should keep a close look at your incoming link profile to make sure no one is trying to get you penalized, the higher you are in the serps the more people there are who want to knock you out of position.
"My question is... would search engines see the parent folder page as more authoritative than a child-page, even without a lot of on-site interlinking of child and parent pages, just because it is higher up in the folder structure?"
No, search engines wouldn't see it that way. An internal page can always outrank a parent page if optimized better.
That main page would be considered authoritative because of the interlinking from longer tail same keyword child pages referencing the main page you want to rank for with short tail main keyword phrase. Parent/child I call a power center, internal pages semantically supporting the parent page and passing pr and anchor texts to the parent page.
Neither. Don't buy links since you don't know how to do it safely. and definitely don't do link exchanges. Either way you will probably get penalized.
Second question is, you can have more than 100 links on a page now, Google will crawl more than they used to in the past. It was a general rule because they had more limited bandwidth to crawl back then it wasn't a matter of being smart or not, now they want to find everything on the web they possibly can.
http://thmedicalcallcenter.com/ is not redirecting to http://www.thmedicalcallcenter.com/
http://www.thmedicalcallcenter.com/ is not redirecting to http://thmedicalcallcenter.com/
so they are seen as two separate sites. you need to redirect one to the other, most people redirect the non www to the www. In your case Google sees your site as www. You should 301 redirect the non www to the www and run the tool again
If the old page has no PR and no traffic just 404 it or noindex it and you can canonical it to the other page.
if the old page has PR and you cannot 301 for some weird reason, just rewrite the content on the new page to make it unique and keep both pages 
You are 100% correct. This is how you dump links! You must remove the page and let it 404.
Won't guarantee that you will recover if you did link building to your homepage though, which is why you should never point links to your homepage.
Good luck!
Get the YOAST SEO plugin and it will canonical your site properly, noindex your tags pages and add rel prev/next tags to your paginated pages for you 
in addition to helping you with a lot of other SEO elements on your WP site.
Weird, sounds like it. Ask them if they delete the page completely in the CMS and create it again if there will only be one URL then?
You can block one of the URLs in your robots.txt file, since it's the same page and you can't add a noindex or canonical tag to one of them without it showing on the other too, and request URL removal in the Google WMT URL removal tool. But blocking in robots.txt alone doesn't guarantee it won't get indexed again.
The sites links should be updated to point to the new URL and not reference the old URL on the site or in any sitemap.xml files.