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Hi all!

So we have a Wordpress blog that properly has pagination tags of rel="prev" and rel="next" set up for pages, but we're still getting crawl errors with MOZ for duplicate content on all of our pagination pages.

Also, we are having all of our pages indexed as well. I'm talking pages as deep as page 89 for the home page. Is this something I should ignore? Is it hurting my SEO potentially? If so, how can I start tackling it for a fix?

Would "noindex" or "nofollow" be a good idea?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Awesome answer. Thank you Thomas!

Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com).

I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile.

The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated!

Thanks for your help!

I don't understand why more spam links would be coming in though. Is it because the spam network doesn't realize that I've removed the injected pages? In other words, are they unknowingly linking to 404s?

Thank you for your response.

I also believe I was hacked through my wordpress. What exactly did you do once you realized the htaccess file was changed? Did you change it back to whatever code was there before?

I already submitted a reconsideration request to Google and it was successful. I no longer have "this site may be hacked" in the SERPs, but I still have thousands of urls pointing to 404 pages.

Ha, sorry about the initial test post. It wasn't publishing on my main computer at first.

Excuse me for posting this here, I wasn't having much luck going through GWT support.

We recently moved our eCommerce site to a new server and in the process the site was hacked. Spammy URLs were injected in, all of which were pointing outwards to some spammy eCommerce retail stores. I removed ~4,000 of these links, but more continue to pile in. As you can see, there are now over 20,000 of these links. Note that our server support team does not see these links anywhere.

I understand that Google doesn't generally view this as a problem. But is that true given my circumstance? I cannot imagine that 20,000 new, senseless 404's can be healthy for my website.

If I can't get a good response here, would anyone know of a direct Google support email or number I can use for this issue?

That is the predicament I find myself in. One of my competitors who are outranking me on short-tail terms have a bunch of paid advertisements (and followed links) on authoritative sites that I am currently not on. I have a sneaking suspicion these links are a major reason for their success.

Curious, did you pay up to join your competition?

Great. Thanks for the feedback, Erica!

I just realized that the links are actually bitly shortlinks. That wouldn't matter would it?

Any paid link though? The site in question is a very legitimate, authoritative site. Google must know that all these "company profiles" they list must be paid. Why wouldn't Google penalize the site by now?

I have a feeling that when Moz crawls this site, it finds the followed links, and reports them to have link equity. But perhaps when Google crawls the same site it will simply take away the link equity (but not penalize the website or company who has the backlink). At that point, no link juice would be passed, and it would just serve as a referral source. Is that feasible?

My company was recently approached by a website dedicated to delivering information and insights about our industry. They asked us if we wanted to pay for a "company profile" where they would summarize our company, add a followed link to our site, and promote a giveaway for us. This website is very authoritative and definitely provides helpful use to its audience.

How can this website get away with paid submissions like this? Doesn't that go against everything Google preaches? If I were to pay for a profile with them, would I request for a "nofollow" link back to my site?

I will amend what I said. It's never sudden when we get a review, there's plenty of communication between both parties first. It takes a while. These reviews/backlinks always point to inner pages as well, so it's not like one product page has a lot of review backlinks.

Thank you for your help!

That's what I thought. I believe the point of the article above was to more or less scare SEOs away from attempting to get paid links.

We're obviously targeting authoritative sites which do do reviews.

"Engineers not required" is interesting. So Google has real people just combing the web for these types of cases? No algo?

We are currently doing some outreach to bloggers to review our products and provide us with backlinks (preferably followed). The bloggers get to keep the products (usually about $30 worth). According to Google's link schemes, this is a no-no. But my question is, how would Google ever know if the blogger was paid or given freebies for their content?

This is the "best" article I could find related to the subject: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2332787/Matt-Cutts-Shares-4-Ways-Google-Evaluates-Paid-Links

The article tells us what qualifies as a paid link, but it doesn't tell us how Google identifies if links were paid or not. It also says that "loans" or okay, but "gifts" are not. How would Google know the difference? For all Google knows (maybe everything?), the blogger returned the products to us after reviewing them.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? Maybe Google watches over terms like, "this is a sponsored post" or "materials provided by 'x'". Even so, I hope that wouldn't be enough to warrant a penalty.

Thank you Moosa. I will be conducting a more thorough audit.

After more research, I realize my link audit consisted mainly of link removal for just my homepage. I will have to do more for all of my inner pages. Thank you!

Is AHREFs the best link audit software? I conducted a major link audit recently using a combination of OSE and webmaster tools but they clearly did not catch everything.

Thank you Devanur. We are aware of our poor URL structure and are considering a site-wide change to include separators in all URLs.

"The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index" - - why does this matter? I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed.

One of my Moz campaigns tracks my main competitor. I can't get over the fact that this competitor continues to rank well despite having thousands of duplication issues while I currently have less than 10. Our websites are similar both structurally and product-wise.

The two images attached include OSE comparisons for the keyword "kraft envelopes". My competitor ranks #2 for the term, while I rank #9. I don't get why! And again, looking from a top-level perspective, MOZ shows that my competitor's website is full of duplication issues and other problems while my site is healthy as a horse. All responses are greatly appreciated.

QmSlfET.jpg 9CDny60.jpg

Thank you for your response. I will continue to my .edu crusade!

Thank you Adam, you confirmed everything I was thinking.

I recently created a scholarship with the hopes of getting .edu backlinks (as well as helping students in need, of course). So far, I have received 8 followed backlinks from very authoritative .edu sites (70+ domain authorities). The pages that link back to me are the "outside scholarships" pages. I've seen these pages range from having a page authority of 10 to 50+.

For example, I just reached out to Johnson & Wales for a link on their outside scholarships page: http://www.jwu.edu/scholarships-from-outside-agencies/

You can see this page has a PA of 1 and a DA of 73. I'm wondering if Google will see the low page authority and not give me much valuable juice (if any). Are these types of links worth it?

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/report-google-to-end-forced-g-integration-drastically-cut-division-resources/

Assuming this article is accurate, I am glad this happened. I spent little time focusing on G+ because I truly felt there were better things to focus my time on. It was never well received by the public and SEO's (for the most part). I did not agree with its usability nor its philosophy. Its forced integration was annoying to say the least and I believe by forcing it down our throats, it turned many of us off.

I hope that G+ will no longer have any impact on ranking in SERPs. I never dedicated much time to gaining more followers and I hope that was the right decision. What does everyone think about this?

Thanks for talking me out of this one Andy. It's just too risky.

On second thought, it definitely isn't a white hat technique. But the google links guide you sent is actually google link schemes, and it doesn't mention buying whole domains in there. It mentions buying individual links, but not entire domains. (Maybe I'm nitpicking here?)

I'm curious as to what you think of this recent Moz thread: http://moz.com/community/q/buying-expired-domains-with-decent-da-pa-for-seo-purposes. Do you feel that these people are totally off base?

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your response. I don't believe setting up a redirect would be classified as "misleading / deceiving" visitors because the domain is very relevant to our site and we would be able to provide appropriate redirected landing pages for all of its existing links. The research I have done suggests that this practice of "domaining" is still a white-hat, effective way of acquiring links. Here is one resource I used: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2328577/Domaining-for-Links

I don't have enough time to focus on two individual domains. I want to strengthen my primary domain.

I am considering buying and redirecting a domain that has a pretty strong, relevant link profile. However, it's very expensive. There is another option to rent the domain on a month-to-month basis. I am interested in doing this for at least a month just to see what SEO benefits are to be had and if it would ultimately be worth buying or not. Can renting a domain have any negative impacts on my primary site? Would the search engines know if I did this? Is there any harm in having those redirects appear and then disappear?

"One of my clients is using a scholarship to build links. We have a nofollow PR campaign getting ready to start and are doing some social marketing for the scholarship page on the site."

I know this is months old, but if I am reading this correctly, you want the links to your scholarship page to be nofollowed? Why is that?

Hi. We are still having an issue with this initial crawl. How can we stop the server from timing out? Is there a certain setting that could be prohibiting the moz crawl?

The site, www.cuptainers.com seems to be up and accessible with no down time.

Thank you,

Andrew

I'm doing a link audit and came across this nofollow tag:

[http://www.jampaper.com/Envelopes](<a class=)">www.jampaper.com/Envelopes

Does it matter that the nofollow tag is at the front? Shouldn't it after the URL?

Thanks for your feedback!

awesome flow chart. Thanks a lot!

I am conducting a link audit for one of my formerly high-ranking pages. But despite reading quite a bit on the issue, I am still quite confused as to how to decide whether to keep or remove a link.

Some links come from directories and social bookmarking sites. I know that generally speaking, you do not want to be on these types of sites, but what if their domain authorities, pageranks, and mozTrusts scores are good?

For example, here is one of my links for "envelopes": http://www.folkd.com/detail/www.jampaper.com%2FEnvelopes

The page itself has no MozRank, MozTrust, or links but the domain has an authority of 88, a MozRank of 6.41, a mozTrust of 6.31. Should I be looking on a page level or domain level basis? It also has over 5 million links, with over two million of those being external followed links. Is the high quantity of links a warning sign?

I also used a free online tool (thesitevalue.com) to determine how much traffic the domain gets. Apparently it receives over 350,000 unique visits daily, so it must be useful to people. This, combined with the fact that we've received 5 visits from the link over the last year (not a lot, but something), makes me believe that the link's intent wasn't purely to "trick" Google. Despite this, I still have a feeling the link could be considered low-quality based on the domain's appearance.

Similarly, some of our links are coming from domains named linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com. Is it safe to assume these are harmful links strictly because of their names?

Thank you!

Under my MOZ account I'm getting a bunch of temporary redirect warnings. Most of them are blog post with a /feed or a /trackback . I know the trackback URL's are coming from blogs where people have commented because it brings up a Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed section. I'm not sure how to make this /trackback work. The only line of code in my editor that says trackback is

h3#postinfo,
h3#comments,
h3#respond,
h3#trackbacks,
#respond h3 {
margin: 0;
}

I have the same issue but instead of it redirecting to the parent post its just going to a 404 page.

Thanks for the response. The thing is these small product pages are too obscure for anyone to find. Many are differentiated only by product size.

For example:

If someone types in "red boxes" into google, we will rank for “red boxes”. On this category page, we have 24 different red box products such as "6x6x4 Red Foil Gift Box" and "5 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 Red Glossy Box." Sure, if somebody searched for a "6x6x4 Red Foil Gift Box," our page would show. But nobody is going to search that. There are ways to eliminate some of these extra pages, but it would be less user friendly for a customer clicking through the site.

My question is, if Google sees that these pages consistently get no organic traffic, even if they might rank for some obscure keyword, can keeping these pages have a negative effect on my rankings?

Some category pages on my website have A LOT of product pages in them. Many of these pages do not receive any sort of organic traffic. Is there a reason for Google to be crawling these pages? Should I noindex, nofollow these pages to make Google's life a little easier? Could I possibly see some benefits from this or should I leave it the way it is?

Are there any Moz reps out there who can confirm this??

Thanks William, that seems to make sense

Our business is based out of NYC. So far I've had two people test out certain keywords from the Boston area and they see what I see (confirming that the moz report is wrong). I am going to have someone from California test those keywords out in a few hours. Thanks for the suggestion!

Does anybody else notice that the Moz weekly rankings report are often inaccurate? Many times it says a keyword (or many keywords) fell out of the top 50, although when I manually check the keyword in a Google search, it still shows that those keywords are ranking in the top 10. I've done these manual searches with personalized search settings turned off, as well as from a completely unbiased computer.

Why is this happening? Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thank you!

Hello,

I just added a new subdomain as one of my campaigns on MOZ. The starter crawl report keeps coming back to me with just one page crawled (it should crawl up to 250 pages). I've deleted and added this subdomain three times and it continues to present me with this problem.I've even waited a week for the full crawl report but that also showed just one page crawled.

Does anybody know why this is happening?

Thanks!

Thank you Chris.

My links are indeed showing on Webmaster. I will be using Webmaster Tools from now on to research URLs and their external links.

Thanks again!

In our blog posts, we frequently include links to our product pages on our official site. However, the blog root domain is not showing up on Open Site Explorer for any of these product pages. In other words, why isn't Google counting our blog as a unique root domain?

If it helps, here is the link to the blog: http://jampaper.wordpress.com/

Thanks for your help!

Your example:

Wood Desks - Home Student Office Desk designs by | Furniture Store

You said that Wood Desk and Wood Desks are the first two keywords. Are you suggesting that because "Wood Desk" is within "Wood Desks", that Google counts both keywords?

I'm wondering if there is a duplication issue with having a singular AND plural version of a keyword in the Title Tag.

For example: Wood Desk - Wood Desks| Furniture Store

Would this help or hurt my ranking for this URL? I can’t find a concrete answer for this under Moz’s “Title Tag SEO Best Practices Page.”

Thanks for your help!

How do we delete labels from the pulldown in moz, that we already created, but no longer use. The function "delete labels" only deletes labels off of certain keywords. But we cant figure out how to remove unused labels completely from the list of labels.

Thanks,

Thanks,

Andrew

Hello,

I received an “F” grade on my on-page report for one of my keywords. I noticed that the URL linked with that keyword was wrong. After changing it to the correct URL, I received an “A.” However, the change was not permanent. How do I permanently change the URL? I don’t see any “Save Changes” or “Apply Changes” button anywhere.

Thank you!