Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Rohit,

Just to follow up and add to what others have said: if you built links from third-party websites, pointing to your site, Google should crawl the third-party websites and see the links pointing to you within 15 days. If Google is not crawling the site more regularly than once every 15 days, the websites are probably lower in quality and not great sources of backlinks to begin with.

If you are using Moz / Ahrefs, etc. are slower in crawling and indexing than Google. Moz often updates once every 30 days, so could pick up these news links in its next crawl. Ahrefs tends to be slightly faster, but is still not instantaneous in picking up new links.

Hi Ash,

To echo what Andy has said, adding a noindex / follow meta tag to a page ensures that whilst the page is not indexed, the other pages to which it links still receive PageRank / authority. Are there reasons why it is important that the category page is indexed, e.g. does it receive a decent amount of converting traffic?

Hi Carl,

Several large publications do this sort of thing already, but they do have a lot of content of their own to back the duplicate / blocked content up. The most large-scale example of this is newspapers that syndicate content from other papers, often internationally. I was the SEO on a project like this for a large UK paper, and we blocked the duplicated content's subfolder via robots.txt so that the newspaper was not re-publishing indexable content from its international sister.

Your other option is to use the canonical tag to point back to the original version of the content.

Syndication shouldn't be harmful, and if you were doing this with a lot of content on the site to begin with, it would be normal and fine. What worries me is Google seeing a new site where there is literally no content (to begin with) and a large, blocked section. After the Panda update, it's pretty important to show a resource-heavy website, even if the site's purpose is filled without content. For instance, a property search engine I worked on saw a huge Panda penalty because all of their articles were on an artlce subdomain, not on the same subdomain as the "money" part of their site. We had to move the articles over to the main site.

It's not possible for me to say exactly what will happen if you go ahead with this, but I must advise that you should be building out your unique content both before launch, and quickly post-launch. It's vital that unique, indexable content be live on the site for it to perform well, even for commercial queries that don't rely on a site having articles.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi David,

Sorry I missed out those ones! I'd say you'd want to remove the "search engine optimisation" anchor text for sure if you're under penalty / suspicion in general. The recent furore about guest blogging has been quite focused on footer author bio links too unfortunately. I can't say for sure whether all or many footer bios are going to get nuked or considered very suspicious, but I would say that I'd be wary of the practice if you're already penalised. It seems ridiculous, but sadly you aren't the only person who's wrestling with nofollowing or removing what were otherwise considered to be good links.

Perhaps start with changing these to purely brand links, either the company name or your name. If you're still having trouble after getting rid of the links Google has cited, move on to removing or nofollowing these types of links. I agree that it's painful to consider removing links without being sure if they're hurting.

As others have said above, combating scrapers is a big reason, but you're relying on lazy scrapers not removing the tags.

Another reason is to prevent rogue content management systems from attaching unnecessary query strings to URLs, creating pages that can end up loading infinite times under different URLs. A canonical tag in the source file would mean that any number of duplicate pages point back to the original. The same reason goes for sites that have issues with redirecting www / non-www URLs to the correct version, or who deal with the same problem regarding secure / insecure URLs. In all these cases, the canonical tag is a bandaid, not a cure - it would be better to fix the underlying problem of the rogue CMS, incorrect redirection, etc. but the canonical tag (self-referencing) is there if you need it.

Google doesn't seem to have an issue with it, but if you're at all concerned about the other engines, use with care.

Hi there,

This somewhat depends on the structure of the website. These are the options, using the structural idea you have put forward:

example.com/plumber/london

example.com/plumber-london

example.com/london/plumber/

example.com/london-plumber/

The first would be a good structure if you have a parent "plumbing" page, which links to a range of locations in which you have plumbing services listed: London, Manchester, Bristol, etc. Each location would have its subfolder after /plumber/

The second example would work if you do not have a London page or a Plumbing page, but just a page about plumbers in London. This is true for the fourth example too.

The third example would work best if the parent page is a page all about services across London, them you have a page about plumbers coming off that page.

You should be able to rank any of these structures, but I would say this relates more to the hierarchy of the website than it does anything else.

The other responders here are right - that activity needs to be stopped right away. It's highly unlikely that they'll get away with it for much longer, and when they're hit it won't be pretty.

Hi there,

Yiannis makes some great points. Here are some more thoughts:

Are there other news outlets, forums, communities on Facebook, etc. in your space that you regularly communicate with? One reason the SEO community shares posts so often is that many people have been chatting to each other in a range of locations for years. They are not posting in a vacuum where they put up blog post links on their Facebook and Twitter pages and wait for shares - they have been contributing in various ways in a lot of places, Moz included, for so long that their peers share their work.

You will also find that there are a LOT of networks like email lists that deliberately share each other's content. They're all meant to be secret and they realistically are - no one who isn't on an individual mailing list knows about it - but if you watch social media closely enough within a niche like SEO, you can see the same people sharing each other's things. You can determine that they have either a mailing list or a private Facebook / Google group where members ask for shares. These deliberate shares always prompt "natural" shares if the content is good enough.

Getting friendly enough with people that you're included in these sorts of lists, or setting one up yourself, is a longer process that means getting involved with a lot of peers, even competitors, where they're hanging out online - talking to them on Twitter and Facebook.

At my former agency, a post on pagination - one of SEO's most "boring" subjects - got so much attention due to being well-written and shared by a few highly-followed people within SEO (including Rand from here at Moz) that it became the second-most visited page on our site behind the home page over an extended period. If we had simply been tweeting out URLs and titles, few would have read it. However, we shared it with friends and cited it where relevant and it was picked up in a big way.

I hope this helps!

Hi,

Guest posting, or seeking PR on third party websites, is still going to work well for a high number of people, especially as Google gets better at determining what is natural and what is not. I believe the issue currently is that determining intent with guest posts is very difficult for Google, hence one reason why they have taken out a sweeping penalty on sites that have even looked sideways at My Blog Guest in the past few years.

The point about going for a piece whether you get a link or not is quite important, although be aware of some other points as well. If you get a post written about you on a site, in a newspaper or magazine:

• Does that site / newspaper offer advertorials / paid posts for other people? If so, are you going to be swept up in that and assumed to have paid for your post?
• Would you guess that any of the other posts on the site have been sought by SEOs? If you have any suspicion, best to stay clear.
• Is there an "advertising" page where you can contact the site about links (not affiliate / banner ads that go through redirects)? Check out that such advertising isn't a red flag for SEO.
• Do sites place "sponsored" disclaimers alongside posts by external authors? There is no evidence or proof that Google crawls for these types of disclaimers, but it wouldn't be hard to do.

There are plenty of awesome businesses that have built good rankings off of PR and will continue to do so. Google's primary challenge is also that many people who are doing guest posting for SEO really well are continuing to do it and it's impossible for Google to detect at present because it looks just like PR. In some ways, this is what Google kind of wants anyway - some "SEOs" are now producing content for links that is good enough to add value to the web, basically meaning that Google's stringency has made those posts no longer part of the problem.

Hi there,

A 404 certainly isn't the best way to handle a new URL / page before it is populated with content. It is good that Google isn't finding these pages yet (as you state in a later comment), but keep in mind that it could - the pages aren't linked to, but there is never any particular guarantee about what Google will and won't find. It's highly unlikely if you don't link to them, but still - it's not worth taking the risk. As you also say, there's no stopping anyone else from linking to the pages and / or for Google to go on a exploratory mission of its own.

As a note, internal 404s / 410s ("Gone") are perfectly okay if they're appropriate for the situation, i.e. a page has been removed. Not ever removed resource has to be 301ed elsewhere. This isn't the case here though.

To my mind, blocking bot access to these pages while they are empty is a better option, and noindex / follow would achieve this. I believe Er_Maqul has misunderstood what you were saying here - there is no "nofollow" in this situation.

Hi Stacey,

EGOL is right - this is an outdated technique (buying exact or partial match domains). Several sites will rank for a lot of keywords with partial / exact match domains, but they are almost universally ranking for other reasons, not solely because of their domain names. Google has worked hard to eliminate the effectiveness of this domaining technique due to how much low-quality content ranked well as a result of this being effective years ago.

Have you looked into any possible penalties? 49th is low for an otherwise well-established company, assuming that the site's on-page optimisation is good.

Hey David,

That is really infuriating - they pick off natural and scraped links way too often.

http://www.pyjamapeople.com/ certainly looks like it contains some questionable links, so whilst you had nothing to do with the placement, they're going to get snide about it. Agree with Andy that you'd be best asking for removal but if you have no luck, include it in a disavowal and explain the situation.

It's really annoying that they cite blogroll links as unnatural when linking to sites you like has been common practice in blogging since blogging began. Unfortunately, if they're calling it out, you'll need to do something about it. It could be that the site has been selling links to others and you've been caught up in the mix despite not actively seeking the link.

I'm a fan of removing links rather than just relying on disavowal, but of course you can't be sure that the webmasters will cooperate. If a link consistently brings visitors, I'd try to nofollow instead. Again, I totally sympathise here because examples 1 and 3 seem ridiculously totalitarian and pedantic (what's wrong with Google just nullifying any authority they passed?) but there's not too much we can do once they cite specific examples, even if they're wrong.

Hi there,

If you are definitely planning to go global or multi-national, go with the .com. You can rank well in Australia with just a .com - go into Webmaster Tools and geo-target the domain for Australia, changing this if and when you need to. If you want to target Australia, New Zealand and the US (for example) one day, you can have sections of the website targeting each, and you can target a specific subfolder to each nation. For example, site.com/nz/ can be added as a separate project in Webmaster Tools and set to New Zealand.

I hope this helps!

Hi there,

Basically, "www." is a subdomain like any other - it's just a subdomain named "www."  and happens to be extremely common due largely to tradition and the set-up of most content management systems. Instead of being named "uk." or "en." (like at Wikipedia), "help.", "analytics." (in analytics.moz.com), etc., it's called www.

The screenshot example would be easier to make sense of if you were comparing the domain http://yoursite.com/ and a subdomain like http://blog.yoursite.com/ - the first shows the authority pointing to your domain's root. The second shows only the blog subdomain's authority. This is the same thing, but with "blog" replacing "www".

It looks here like there is a split between how many incoming links you have to the root and the www. That is, links point to both "versions". If you try to load http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com/, do both pages load with the same content? If so, one either needs to 301 redirect to the other, or you need to place the canonical tag on the version you do not wish to be indexed and well-ranked, pointing to the other.

If you do not do this, Google finds two versions of the same page (or entire site, if ALL your pages load twice, once with www and once without). Both versions have inbound links, so Google doesn't know which one is meant to be the boss. Worst case scenario is that it ranks both versions poorly as a result, so either redirection from the non-preferred version to the preferred version, or canonicalisation, are the way to go.

You can also set your preferred domain in Webmaster Tools under Settings (see screenshot): http://i.imgur.com/sgrvPKo.png

This may be all basic to you, but hopefully it helps explain why there are two sets of numbers between the "root" and the "same" URL with www. attached. Let me know if this isn't clear.

Best,

Jane

Hi Jennifer,

I am wondering if perhaps the drop in traffic was not related to the removal of the pages. You say the drop happened just a day or two after the pages were removed. While Google works very fast with indexing new content, it should take a little longer than a day to process the removal / redirection of a large number of unpopular pages. It doesn't crawl rarely-updated / rarely-visited URLs on a regular basis (you can check on the last date a page was cached quite easily: http://i.imgur.com/NPmTF5S.png

Does analytics give you a good idea of where the missing traffic used to come from, i.e. which pages are not receiving traffic that did before?

Hi there,

I have found that very high quality content submitted to StumbleUpon can attract a huge amount of traffic in a short period of time. The traffic will never truly dry up either: you'll continue getting traffic for months or even years after the initial push (although the number of visits won't be as high as at the beginning).

Reddit.com is another place to source traffic: find the "subreddit" (section of the site) most relevant to your content and submit there. Bear in mind, however, that most Reddit users are very much against marketing, so your submission should look as natural as possible. It is advisable to take part in the communities on Reddit that deal with your topic, not to just submit articles and wait for traffic: you should become a regular contributor, commenter and submitter, and not just a submitter of your own content.

Your other ideas are also good, although I doubt you will get much traffic from directories: these are going to be for link building purposes, far more than for visibility.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Marisa,

For 50 - 60 links per page, all containing the word "patches", I'd consider cutting back. You can carry out on-page optimisation of these pages including the word "patches", but for site-wide links, or from the home page, this is going to be quite excessive. If you look at a successful site like Interflora (http://www.interflora.co.uk/), they've been careful not to over-do the internal links for terms along the lines of "[keyword] flowers." There's some relatively aggressive SEO on that page, but nowhere near 50 - 60 links.

A long time ago, Matt Cutts specified that you'd want no more than 100 links per page, but it's generally agreed that a good site can get away with more than that nowadays. The blog post about this is here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

Hi Jonathan,

Agree with Donna - these are all very good reasons.

From the perspective of what an engagement will look like without an initial audit, a consultant can be left trying to piece together small fixes, unsure of whether some issues are more important than others because they have not had the time to develop a full picture of how a website is structured and how its CMS works / is managed.

Clients tend to be less willing to implement changes if they have not received them when they expected to, i.e. in an audit process with a prioritised list of changes and reasoning behind why the changes are necessary. The process of fixing a website can get arbitrary - emails and calls here and there about random issues. Web developers usually don't like operating like this: they want to know that the next push is for SEO purposes and that a set amount of time will be dedicated to making the changes proposed or working with an external team (you) to find compromises if what you suggest isn't possible. You can schedule whole days on-site with a client to get this stuff done and worked out, rather than badgering devs or managers for months with the things you discover along the way.

Audits can also tell the consultant a lot about how the site works that they might not have been told otherwise by the client (who might not know or understand themselves), both from the manual investigation and use of tools to analyse the website. I find that as a consultant, this knowledge sticks with you - if you learned that a client's CMS performs a certain task a certain way early on, you go into every situation understanding how it works and expecting certain functionality. This increases efficiency for the rest of the engagement. You are rarely taken by surprise by an issue, and many on-site issues are much easier to avoid / solve when both you and your client have a comprehensive document outlining how the website is structured.

I hope this helps!

Jane

Hi Berner,

"So when you are looking at your sites most popular keywords, do you make the most popular keyword your homepage?"

Technically yes, but be smart about it. One reason why the puppies query is so much more popular is not just because people want information about the puppies or want to adopt them. You're literally getting searches in there from people who just want to see cute pictures and videos of Bernese Mountain Dogs (because who wouldn't?!). If you are interested in this traffic, go for it. If you are more focused on people who may convert into customers (whatever that means for your particular website), pick home page title tags and headings that better reflect the home page's goals.

I am not sure what you mean in this instance by "more link juice". "Link juice" is a colloquial term for PageRank, or the authority that flows into and around a website from inbound links.

"When you have keywords that have parts of other keywords, is it safe to use the longer keyword because it has parts of the other phrases?"

Yes - this is pretty common. If I have a site where I sell accessories for swimming, I can have a page about "Speedo competitive racing suits" that covers the term "racing suits" and likely also "competitive suits" and to a degree, competitive swim suit terms related to the Speedo brand. I will have mentioned "swim" or "swimming" on the page, so Google is aware of what type of suits I sell.

For question three, bolding and italicising terms is absolutely not necessary anymore. It's questionable when this last worked, but I'm guessing it was before I started working in SEO in 2006 Placing your primary keywords in URLs and as H1 tags, however, is common and expected. It would be odd to have a page about Bernese Mountain Dog grooming that did not use that phrase as its H1 / main heading, and it wouldn't be at all unusual for that page's URL to be example.com/bernese-mountain-dog-grooming. The H2s, if there are any, should be used for sub-headings throughout the page. So to take the grooming example, perhaps there are there H2 tags (you can have more than one) regarding the best brushes, coat clipping it applicable and shampoo.

I hope this makes sense, let me know if you have any issues.

Best,

Jane

Hi Dusan,

I'm in agreement with Alex here - there is plenty of reason why Google would pay little attention to many web directories, but the primary reason today is going to be a lack of good content. After Panda, pages are being held to a higher standard for the quality of their content, and web directories rarely include any original content at all.

For SEO purposes, being linked to from old fashioned directories isn't a bad thing, and could either be of minimal help, or a little bit helpful. However, it's not a link building tactic that you can really rely on anymore.

The PageRank advice is true too: at best, toolbar PR is a good indication as to whether there's something really wrong with your site (i.e. you lose your toolbar PR overnight, or it drops from very high to very low). At worst, it's misleading and outdated, and no indication of how well you can rank.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Prashant,

Yes - any URLs that are different are different in Google's eyes, unless the modifier is a # symbol.

So if you have www.example.com/key#value12345 and www.example.com/key#valuexyzabc, then Google sees these as the same, i.e. www.example.com/key. They will ignore everything after the # character.

All other query strings, etc., mean that the URL has changed and if the pages on those URLs are the same, it's duplicate content.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Have you looked into the SEO guides available here on Moz? There are a lot of important on and off page factors to get right in order to gain good rankings. Have a look at the Beginner's Guide to SEO - it is not specifically about forums, but all the points included are important and count for what you're looking to do.

As Chris says, you need to look a off-page optimisation as well. It is very difficult to have a site rank well with little or no off-page work. Check out the link development category on the blog as well - there are years of great content about off-page work in there.

Cheers,

Jane

William and Gary sum it up really well here - directory listings can be useful, but they should be sought for other reasons than SEO. Noah and Eduardo are also right - the safest thing to do is to acquire these links with the nofollow tag.

If you want to take a risk or two, the highest quality directories probably won't hurt you if they're followed links. Google's stance on these things is pretty hard line though, so if you're working on behalf of a larger company or client, perhaps it's best to play it safe.

Hi Prashant,

This sounds like removal due to duplication rather than DMCA - the omission is usually noted as being because of DMCA notices if they are the reason, e.g. http://img.labnol.org/images/2008/07/googlesearchdmcacomplaint.png

Google likely sees these as duplicates, or near-dupes, as David has said,

It's generally accepted that penalties pass through redirects (this wasn't always the case - up until a couple of years ago, a 301 solved a lot of penalty issues). I have to guess that Silkstream's experience is uncommon in the long-term - a bad penalty will probably transfer over sooner or later. However, there are no set rules for this and perhaps several people who try this will get lucky.

I wouldn't rely on that though.

Hi John,

If the penalty is solely related to inbound links and you are cleaning these up, the content will suffer while your penalty exists (i.e. it won't start ranking well, as it's housed on the bad domain), but once the penalty is lifted, the content should have no trouble ranking, even though it was added when the site was under penalty. The same goes for the on-page optimisation: you'd be doing this for the future, not for the present. It won't help you in the short term, but you should still benefit from the improvements when the site is no longer suffering because of its inbound links.

Cheers,

Jane

I agree with Keri, but would add that from a purely technical perspective you'd be best to avoid getting links from pages where a lot of poor-quality links have been left already, either by the person who wrote the blog post or by other commenters. There's reason to believe that "bad neighbourhoods" are best avoided in order to not draw comparisons between your site and spam. Sometimes you'll be naturally linked to by a page or blog that also links to poor-quality content; this isn't a huge problem in an of itself, but there's no need to encourage it.

Hi there,

I see you have deleted the malicious pages appearing on your website - they now return 404 server responses. Unfortunately Google still has several of these pages indexed: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cleanedison.com+%22cialis%22&oq=cleanedison.com+%22cialis%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1741j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8

It should not take long for these URLs to drop out of the index. When these spam links point to 404 pages, they should not damage your domain but if you see negative rankings movements, the disavow tool is a good option. It can also be used pre-emptively if you are particularly concerned about the volume of these pam links coming in.

With two hours a day, I would develop a weekly routine that involves some of the following, some on a daily basis and some once / twice per week depending on what sort of activity / results you are seeing:

• Daily check of Analytics and Webmaster Tools (404 errors, messages, crawl stats, etc.)
• Full set-up of Moz Analytics to take advantage of analysis and tracking here; daily / weekly checking of campaigns (Moz emails weekly updates, which are useful).
• Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks
• One or two content projects per week (more on this later)
• Regular site crawls with a tool like ScreamingFrog to complement what you're receiving through Moz, checking for on-page errors, redirects, etc.
• Short check of SEO news outlets like this one, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable to ensure you understand algo updates, interesting and relevant new ideas, and industry news, but perhaps without getting bogged down in blog posts / news that is not relevant to your business.

Regarding blog posts / content and low readership, think outside of your target market when it comes to readership. A good example of a company doing this recently was Aviva, a UK insurance company. They didn't optimise the potential links aspect of this, but they could have done so for a very good result.

They conducted a study on the over-spending of first-time parents, showing how much money is "wasted" on things parents / new babies don't really need. The mainstream press covered this pretty well: I actually read about the study in a hard-copy newspaper rather than online. Online, they did not conduct outreach well to take advantage of this study (lots of mentions from newspaper websites, etc. with no links), but the premise of the study was great.

Why was it great? Because insurance is pretty boring. But new babies are not boring to Aviva's target market, and they are not boring to a whole lot of other people besides. The baby industry is worth billions worldwide. They very effectively tapped into a subject that a lot of people would talk about, and that subject is at least somewhat related to what Aviva does (personal / family financial services).

So what about the delivery business?

Well, how about a study on the amount of money lost worldwide from delivery accidents, poor packaging and logistics, etc.? People tend to like stories about the wastage / saving of money at scale.

Or a study showing the average number of miles traveled by different types of products in international shipping, e.g. "the average piece of lamb from New Zealand travels X,000 miles from its farm to grocery stores, given that New Zealand ships lamb to Y countries worldwide. Z,000 tonnes of this is frozen whilst N,000 tonnes is chilled", etc. Tailor this to what you usually ship or leave it generic, focusing on logistics as a whole. As in the Aviva example, it doesn't have to be super tied to what you do - Aviva does not sell nor specifically insure baby products.

What you're looking to do is create content that is relevant to your potential customers and to other people besides, but is not necessarily about your subject matter if your subject matter is pretty boring. Your potential customers or "people in your industry" might not read or write a lot about the industry, but they are people with interests nonetheless, and you can tap into what DOES interest them.

Hi Flo,

I think it totally depends on the usefulness of the page and perhaps the ratio of links to supporting text / resources. A page with 150+ links certainly isn't automatically useless, and many big sites have that number of links on most of their pages due to navigational elements, long blog posts with multiple citations, outbound links from comments (albeit nofollowed), etc.

The 100 links per page limit is (hopefully) rather outdated and stems from when Google visited each page with a limit of how much data it could process. Very long, heavy pages would not be properly crawled, so their links wouldn't be properly crawled either, and PR would not pass properly out of all the links on the page. Google is now much more advanced and is used to dealing with a wide variety of page sizes.

A page with over 150 links can certainly perform well and there should not be a problem with appearing spammy or overdone if each link is contributing to the aim of the page. As I said previously, I would also try to include a fairly good amount of supporting text (or whatever type of supporting resource is appropriate - images, video, etc.) so that the page is not solely a list of links.

Hope this helps!

Jane

Just redirecting an otherwise inactive domain (no website, etc.) will not help the site you redirect it to much at all, even if it has DA / PA. Google reduced how much this tactic helped quite a long time ago. If you bought an active website, transferred its contents to your existing site or created a similar-topic area on your existing site, and redirected pages to their most relevant resource on your existing site, you should see some benefit. However, just buying and redirecting domains is highly unlikely to result in your rankings improving.

Hi John,

As the others have said, there are issues with all three types of links. Number 1 is obvious.

Number 2 comes from a site that appears to blog about absolutely anything, as long as they're paid to do so. The site has posts about buying a car in Philadelphia, passport photos, saving money on gas, business protection... and piano lessons. It's pretty obviously a source of income for the blog owner, with these posts placed in between personal updates.

Number three is from a piano website, but they even list "reciprocal links", which was an outdated link building technique in 2006

I would say that Google is well within its own guidelines to suggest that these links are bad.

Hi there,

May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"

By this, I mean conducting a regular download from Open Site Explorer of your links and checking to see if they have increased or decreased in number, what the quality is like and which type of links you'd like to get more of. You can also download your links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it is good to have more than one source of backlink data because different services usually show a slightly different picture due to their crawling capabilities, etc. Other services that do this include Ahrefs and MajesticSEO.

I would say that if you are going to renew, definitely use a few hours of SEO time a week to get familiar with the toolset and what it can do for you. $99 a month can go a long way if you take advantage of what's on offer, but I agree that it is a waste if you don't use it. The good thing about learning to use the tools yourself is that you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting if you can do a lot of this yourself. Understanding the tools and what they tell you also means that you will be better able to pick good external consultants in the future if you get to the stage where you can employ / contract someone to do SEO for you.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Conor,

Chris's answer here is perfect.

You definitely don't just want to link from the old site to the new; you want the old site to be "gone" and to serve a 301 redirect to tell search engines "this resource has permanently moved, and is now over here ----> [new site]".

301 redirects are vital; 302s do not pass authority from one URL to another (there is speculation that a 302 that has been in place for a very long time might be treated as a 301 by Bing, but let's go with the fact that they're next to useless in most cases for passing SEO value).

The 301 redirect should be implemented on a page by page basis, meaning that the home page at www.oldiste.com redirects to www.newsite.com. www.oldsite.com/page1.html redirects to that page's new location, e.g. www.newsite.com/page1.html, and so forth. As Chris says, you do not want www.oldsite.com/page23.html to redirect to the home page of www.newsite.com. The only case in which you'd want to do this is if /page23.html no longer exists on the new site.

How this is done depends on what type of server your site sits on. If you are using an Apache server, the web developers will do this in the site's .htaccess file. If you are using a Microsoft IIS server, this will be done in a control panel. The web development company will clearly know which server you're using and where this will be done.

Some servers and hosts still implement 302 redirects as standard and not 301s, which is very frustrating from an SEO point of view. There should be nothing more difficult about creating a 301 than a 302.

The short version is: 301 the old site to the new if you want to transfer the authority from the old site to the new one. This will ensure that you bring most of that authority with you.

Hi there,

The answer here is always very subjective. It is perfectly natural for businesses to link their sites together. Why would you not do that? Google understands this; the relationship between businesses owned by the same entity can and should be partially represented by links. Moz links to Open Site Explorer's website. Amazon.co.uk can link to Amazon.fr. If I link my blog to a website promoting consulting services, this is natural and fine.

What Google and other search engines want to figure out and discount is if you create a huge network of websites, attempt to obscure the fact that they are all owned by you, and link them together in some pattern that attempts to increase the SEO value or all or some of them. That's manipulative and you can't expect such a tactic to work in the long term. Effectively hiding a network like this is usually costly and time-consuming and barely worth the effort in the end (although some folks still do it very well).

Google likely doesn't pass the highest amount of authority between links where the linking sites are clearly owned by the same person or company, but there is nothing "wrong" with interlinking the sites you own.

Your competitor is likely ranking well due to a number of factors, not just because their websites are linked together.

I like EGOL's idea of partnering with US websites that do not ship to Canada and arranging a referral scheme. This is one way to take advantage of US sites taking up real estate in Canadian results.

I agree that "canada" is likely a common modifier - if the product is niche enough or bought in small enough quantities, large-scale keyword research tools might not be of much use. Consider other modifiers, such as "ca" as well.

Don't go overboard on the keyword usage though: stuffing "Canada" into every title is unnecessary and will start to look unnatural. Make sure you've taken advantage of localisation tools and techniques such as geo-targeting and the rel="alternative" tag for language, i.e. specifying en-ca as English language, for Canada (or French as well, if that's part of your market!).

Unfortunately if your competition, albeit irrelevant US sites, are incredibly strong, you'll need to compete with them on standard metrics such as the rate of link acquisition and the quality of the links you both build. Don't worry yourself with building the same number of links Petco has outright, but you may need to look at figuring out their rate of link building and look at their social / content activity, and devise a plan to match that as best you can in the future. You don't need to build the same historical numbers as these huge sites have, but your competitiveness needs to rise to match or better the sites you want to keep up with / pass.

I would say to redirect the internal page to the new website unless you know that the page receives a decent amount of traffic _internally _(i.e. people navigating to this page from within your existing website) and you have a decent sales funnel / conversion process in place. In other words, does the existing page have value other than just being about the subdivision?

If not, redirection is probably your best bet. Ensure internal links that exist to the individual page at the moment are updated to point to the new domain.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Assuming that http://northernheights.co.uk/ is the previous website, it's still clearly indexed / returning a 200 OK server response - no 301 redirect has been put in place.

http://**www.**northernheights.co.uk/ redirects, but you need to redirect the non-www version too. This could be halting indexation of the new site because Google can still find it in the old location.

Agreed with Martijn about the footer, best get rid of that

Hi Michael,

Ah - that's different yes. You would want to be doing this with CSS, with the collapsed content available in HTML. Google and other search engines don't regularly execute js so would likely not see the content. Manual investigation would let a webspam team member see that you're not hiding anything maliciously, but it's not a risk you want to take.

Can you do this with CSS?

Cheers.

Hi,

It looks like your .co.in and .com.sg domains have only two linking C-blocks, meaning that there are only two physical places (servers) on the internet that link to them. I am guessing that those two locations are your other domains.

In order for a site to accumulate authority, it needs to be linked to from a range of other websites, not just one or two. I believe this will be why Moz has calculated those domains as having very weak profiles. In contrast, 284 c-classes (unique servers, basically) are linking to your .com. I imagine these links come from a variety of sources in a variety of places and include sites owned by a very large number of different people. You need to build out the other domains' link profile as well, gaining links from a similar variety of sources. Then the sites' metrics (mozrank, moztrust etc.) will rise as well.

Hi,

Page authority is a metric largely derived from inbound links (internal and external), so very low page authority is mostly associated with very few, or very bad, links pointing to those pages. If you run an OSE report, do you see any external links pointing to those articles? Are the articles well linked-to from relevant sources within the same website?

Unless the articles are meant to serve as important landing pages, it's worth noting that they do not need extremely high PA, and it's normal for otherwise strong sites to have a lot of low-PA pages.

Hi again,

Yep - your non-www and www pages are both resolving... e.g. http://cheaptubes.com/ and http://www.cheaptubes.com/ bring up the same content. Also, http://cheaptubes.com/default.htm and http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.htm is also a duplicate of the home page.

Internally, I am seeing the same thing, e.g. http://www.cheaptubes.com/carbon-nanotubes-prices.htm and http://cheaptubes.com/carbon-nanotubes-prices.htm - same page, one on the www subdomain ("www." is a subdomain like any other, just with an extremely common name) and one just sitting on the root.

The solution here is either to 301 redirect the non-www version of the site to the www version for every page, or to use the canonical tag to point from the non-preferred versions to the "canonical" versions. More information on this is available here.

You also have a situation where upper-case URLs will resolve as well as lower case ones, e.g. http://www.cheaptubes.com/SWNTs.htm and http://www.cheaptubes.com/swnts.htm (as well as http://cheaptubes.com/swnts.htm!).

URLs should only be allowed to resolve with one case, preferably lower. The upper / mixed case should 301 redirect to the proper version.

Essentially, the "two versions of the site" issue is the biggest problem, with all pages being available on at least two URLs - one with www and one without. There are other tidiness issues like /default.htm bringing up the home page as well.

Does this make sense? Let me know if this is not clear.

Best,

Jane

Hi Ivan,

The links no longer physically exist, so Google should end up picking up on the fact that they are gone soon. It surprises me that it's been several months and they're still showing up, however. That said, if the links are from a source that Google has no reason to regularly crawl, it can take a long time before they re-visit and find that those links are gone.

If the links are causing you ranking problems, consider a disavowal / reconsideration request submission in which you say that the links are gone and that Google simply has not picked up on this yet.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Check out Wordpress's page on importing old content as well. The Wordpress information is towards the bottom of the page (there are instructions for a bunch of other blogging platforms). As jStrong said, this will be easier if you are importing to a new Wordpress installation rather than to a different CMS.

Hi Marek,

Agree with William that doing the reconsideration request in the same week is too soon, barring exceptional circumstances. By that, I mean that if you had been actively removing bad links in the weeks / months leading up to receiving the spam action notice / penalty, you could submit a reconsideration request and cite this. However, in general Google does like to see significant effort on a webmaster's part to get rid of bad links before asking for reconsideration. What this means is that your request should show the activity you've engaged in to try and remove links: how many emails you have sent to the websites hosting the bad links, how many replies you've had, how many of those links were removed as the results of your efforts and how man you feel you cannot remove due to inaction on the part of the webmaster or your inability to find a real person to contact.

It's confusing that you received a message saying that you did not in fact have manual action against your site if you were previously told that you did - this could just be a glitch, but if that first message coincided with a ranking problem that is persisting, I would say that it is necessary to remove the poor quality links pointing to the site, including those from low-quality sites, and those with overly-optimised anchor text.

Cheers,

Jane

EGOL and Samuel raise some very good points here. I feel like you're also somewhat at risk of looking like you're trying to deceive the audience if you're deliberately divorcing the community from the brand site and image, but using it to drive the community to commercial action. I am not sure how subtle they are planning on making that connection, but subtlety in that manner rarely works: it's a lot more "honest" and appreciated to cultivate a community and openly market a product, as Moz has done.

Using the Moz example, this site did not start out as a tool / analytics provider, so the community actually came first. When I was a full time employee, we were largely an SEO consultancy. The blog was a labour of love as far as Rand and the staff were concerned. In 2007 when we first introduced Premium (now Pro) accounts, we clearly used the community (which was pretty substantial, even back then) to market the service. To all but a very few negative folks, this went down fine.

If Rand had started a separate company and website hosting and selling SEO tools and subscriptions, and had dropped hints and posts every now and again here to promote it, it would not have been met with nearly as much favour.

The SEO points about two sites being twice as hard to maintain, market and rank than one also apply, but I would question whether a smaller brand can build a totally separate community that is a) big enough, and b) independent enough not to annoy users if they figure out the commercial intent behind it. If there's one thing that's slightly worse than no community, it's an empty one.

Hi Damien,

So if I'm reading this correctly, the consultant is saying that due to the size of the site (tens of thousands of pages), and the need to categorise its content, that subdomains are the best choice.

I would say that there are far bigger websites using categories within subfolders, notably big retailers, e.g.

http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/beauty, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/food-and-wine, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/mands-bank

http://www.waitrose.com/home/inspiration.html, http://www.waitrose.com/home/wine.html, http://www.waitrose.com/content/waitrose/en/home/tv/highlights.html (<-- the last one being a crappy version, but a subdomain nonetheless)

and so do websites that deal with providing content for very different audiences:

http://www.ncaa.com/schools/tampa, http://www.ncaa.com/championships/lacrosse-men/d1/tickets, http://www.ncaa.com/news/swimming-men/article/2014-03-29/golden-bears-and-coach-david-durden-earn-third-national-title, http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/fbs

Has the consultant provided examples of other websites doing this that would take on the same structure?

There are hundreds of examples of websites whose structure / categories are properly understood despite existing in subdirectories, so I'm still sceptical that this is a necessity.

This is not to say that a subdomain approach wouldn't work and is definitively bad or anything, I'm just not really convinced that the reasoning is strong enough to move content away from the root domain.

I disagree about user experience - from a user's perspective, the only difference between subfolders and subdomains is the URL they can see in the address bar. The rest is aesthetic. You can do or not do everything you'd do with the design of a website using subdirectories that you'd do with a website(s) employing subdomains. For example, just because content sits on www.icy-veins.com/wow/, its navigation wouldn't have to link to www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/ or mention the other brand in any way if you don't want to. You can still have separate conversion funnels, newsletter sign-ups, advertising pages, etc.

Hi Israr,

Since your site is properly targeted to Pakistan in Webmaster Tools, don't worry about having a .com domain as opposed to .com.pk. The WMT configuration does that job perfectly.

I would be tempted to guess that one of a number of things is happening: It could very well be that the US results are being affected by recent updates and those updates haven't rolled out to the rest of the world yet (the US usually sees updates first; in the first Panda roll-out, it took Google a long time to extend the roll-out past the US. I remember being at a search conference in Poland over a month after Panda was released in the US and people kept bugging the Google rep about when it would come to Europe!). In this case, you might be in for a good ranking improvement in Pakistan soon.

It also might be the case that there is more competition for the term you want to rank for in Pakistan than there is in the US. If the query pertains especially to Pakistani audiences (mentions location, is about a product or service only available in Pakistan, etc.) then other competitors might have fared better in providing adequate localised signals, whereas your site might be appealing to a more general audience (as far as the signals it gives Google are concerned).

Is your website hosted in Pakistan? The location of a website's hosting should not be a major factor at all, but it can make a small difference if Google has trouble figuring out what the intended target country is. Your WMT geo-location should have taken care of this though, even if the site is hosted in the US or elsewhere.

Also, do you have a good number of links from other Pakistani websites, whether they be .com.pk domains, sites hosted in Pakistan, and sites with a lot of Pakistani links themselves? Again, not a massive ranking factor, but if most of your links come from the US or other foreign countries, this isn't as good of a location signal as if you have a lot of links from other local websites.

To be honest, I think that the first scenario is more likely and that a movement upwards in the US results is a good sign...

Depending on how extensive your quoting of the government content is, you might just be able to link, or you might be better off canonicalising. A simple quote on an otherwise unique page is not reason to canonicalise, just as if you had quoted from a newspaper website in an article about a subject. There is no way you'd need to canonicalise your own article to that subject.

An entire page, lifted and republished for legitimate reasons, you could canonicalise to avoid any duplication confusion (even though a link was the proper way to go about identifying the original source of the content in the past).

To add to what Cyrus has said, Google will "choose" a version of content it finds duplicated to favour, so has clearly chosen the local. subdomain. The main website would likely fall back into favour if you were to consolidate the subdomain and redirect it to the main site, but I would definitely find out if the third party agency who developed the subdomain has done some promotion of the subdomain that you aren't aware of.

There is no real problem using subdomains or subfolders for specific local rankings / campaigns. I wouldn't say you are gaming or abusing it here - you have a dupe content problem that needs fixing though.

If you were to use subfolders, the duplicate content problem would remain as long as there are multiple versions of the same content, but if you were to consolidate the main site and subdomain's strength, then any subfolders you added to the one remaining site (assuming all content was unique) should inherit authority.