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I didn't get the impression from this question that the old site / domain was penalised. Correct me if I'm wrong, zharriet, but I got the impression that what you're saying is that you changing domains, redirected www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com, but that at some point in the future, you want to use **www.oldsite.com **at some point in the future for another part of the business. As such, you want to know when you can "turn off" the redirect without harming the new rankings of www.newsite.com, using www.oldsite.comfor new content.

The answer to this is really hard to give: some sites don't seem to benefit much from having old domains pointed at them. Others benefit for a period before that benefit seems to disappear (meaning that you will have needed to build a good number of news links to the new domain).

It is impossible to say what the effect of removing a 301 redirect at some point in the future will be, but the safest way you can ensure that this doesn't harm the new site is by building a robust platform of good on and off site SEO for that new site so that it can withstand having any benefit of the old site's 301 taken away.

Hi Stephen,

That's part of the syntax used to transfer a site URL-by-URL - what the entire snippet of code means is that a browser or search engine will come across www.oldblog.com/post123.html and immediately be taken to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html. If you are not using the same URLs on the new blog, you won't need to or be able to use this particular function in your .htaccess file.

You say that "the new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog" which makes me think you'll need to redirect category URLs separately at least (I must have missed that line when I read the question at first; apologies).

Once you've redirected everything, you will need to keep the old domain. If you let it lapse or sell it, the redirects will no longer work unfortunately.

Hi there,

To reiterate some things that have been said here:

You want to remove / move away from Blogspot and Wordpress blogs that are hosted on .blogspot.com / .wordpress.com. Very few people would ever recommend using Blogspot even for a self-hosted blog - Wordpress is very much superior. Using a Blogspot domain does not give you a boost in Google's rankings, so do not worry about losing out because of that.

You also want to remove the duplicate content problem - as is linked to above, Google dislikes duplicate content and will filter out one "version" of the identical content. A query like this one shows that Google has indexed the content on your blogspot blog - if you click to see additional results in that results page, you will see that the way the blogspot blog is set up is absolutely terrible when it comes to duplicate content as well. Google has found 101 versions of the same sentence. The content appears to be drawn into the URL dynamically - the actual text of the post is not visible in the source code of the page, but the entire blog appears to be readable from any blog post URL - all you have to do is scroll up and down.

You really need to remove this blogspot blog and work solely on your own site, but if this blog is currently bringing you traffic, then this is going to be tough. Blogspot does not have a native method for 301 redirecting an old blog to a new location. There are a range of options for redirecting visitors at a page level, but I am relatively sure that there is no server-level redirect option yet.

The canonicalisation option would probably work, although I too wonder how necessary it is to create two totally separate websites. Unless it's really vital that the branding be very different, I would look at developing different areas on the same root domain so that you do not have to put 301 redirects in place, work on the link development for a new domain, etc. Canonicalisation is certainly a viable option though.

Definitely use the rel="alternative" tag, also referred to as the hreflang tag, if you plan on direct translations and pages that are basically the same thing in either language.

Two good resources: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en and http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool.

I too would go for the subfolder option over subdomains for similar reasons to those Kevin mentions.

Are you translating the content by hand?

Hi there,

The actual blog post title will be regarded as text on the page, just as any other text is, unless of course it also servers as an H1 or H2 tag (in which case, it'll be viewed as the heading). It won't have the significance that the text in the title has, but will still add to the overall keyword usage / targeting on the page.

Cheers,

Jane

I know Moz has talked about this internally and perhaps sought clarification on how Youmoz "should" work from Google, so hang tight for Keri to get back to this one, everyone

Hi there,

While looking at metrics like this is important, you're approaching modern link development in a slightly misguided, old-fashioned way. This is the way we used to link about link dev three or four years ago.

For one, there is little use finding an older article (anything published more than a few days or weeks ago) and trying to get a link on it. This was a very popular, effective tactic up until about 2010. However, figuring out if a link was included as an original citation or added after the fact is incredibly easy. Thus, it's easy to discount links-added-later, and you can be fairly sure that Google is suspicious of these links given how popular this link development tactic was pre-2010.

If a site has good Moz metics (DA, etc.) and no or very low toolbar PR, this can be an indication that Google finds something wrong with the site... but toolbar PR is a relatively outdated metric now, so take its figures fairly lightly. If you can potentially get a link from a site, look at all of these metrics and then look at both the backlink profile of the potential linking site and which other sites it links out to. Does it look like it sells links to unrelated, spammy websites / industries? Don't go for a link with them. Do they advertise a text-link service where anyone can buy a link on their site? Definitely stay away.

If you come across a less-popular site in your niche with original, quality content, don't turn a link down on that site because it has low metrics.

"2. If a site is a PR2 DA 30/ PA 32 with 14 root domains, 250 total links.... Would a link like this give me any benefit or should I skip links like this? Why?"

To answer this, you're going to need to look further than these metrics. Those numbers are good enough that if the site is otherwise a good match for yours, the link could be worthwhile.

Hi Dave,

There is a wealth of information out there about internationalisation but I'll cover some of the main points here.

The first thing to think about is the TLD of the site, e.g. .com, etc. If they are currently running on a TLD that belongs to a designated country, they will need to move to a generic TLD. In other words, you can't use site.ca to target Mexico. You will need to move to site.com, .org, .net, or similar.

You can use subdomains or subfolders on the parent site to target different countries. A good URL to target Mexico would be site.com/mx. If you have English language content from Mexico as well as Spanish, you could use site.com/mx-es/ and site.com/mx-en/. No matter how many versions of the site you create for different markets, you will need to use the rel="alternative" tag (also sometimes referred to has the "href lang tag"). This will allow you to create site.com/co for Colombia, site.com/nc for Nicaragua, site.com/mx for Mexico and site.com/ar for Argentina without being penalised for having duplicate Spanish content on different parts of the same website. If you also have the exact same content on the site in other languages, this tag allows you to show which versions are in English and are meant for the US, which versions are in English and are meant for Canada, which versions are in English and meant for the UK, etc. as well.

They can go down the route of registering domains in the countries they want to target, like site.com.mx, site.com.ar and site.com.br, but this usually requires a higher level of link development to push authority at all of these sites. For truly local content, the local domains could be best, but for many queries, .com sites rank just fine in South America.

Check out these three Moz resources for international SEO as well:

http://moz.com/blog/5-dos-and-donts-of-international-seo

http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Hi Vince,

Being publicly outed for selling links (or buying them) can result in harsh sanctions that seem to go above and beyond fair, although every case of this happening is anecdotal. Google has been known to suspend or ban people's entire networks for publicly flouting their guidelines. They're certainly not above making an example, and being publicly noticed on Twitter is a tough way to go.

If all outbound links that could be considered commercial have been nofollowed, I see no reason why you need to worry about outbound linking anymore. Andy may have a good point about ads on the page, but the ads I see are fairly nonintrusive. You may want to try serving them as banner ads with JavaScript, like the "links" created by ad networks (was this how you did it before, when it wasn't good enough for Google?).

"I still want the category pages to distribute their link authority to the individual pages, then I should leave the category pages in the site map and meta noindex them, rather than robots.txt them. Is that correct?"

This will achieve the goal, yes. You would ideally include noindex, follow (as opposed to nofollow) in the meta tag of the page you want to exclude. This means that Google crawls the page in full and allows PageRank to flow from that page to the pages it links to, but doesn't include any of the page's content or its URL in the index.

If you exclude the page via robots.txt, Google never crawls the page at all. You sometimes see URLs whose pages have been excluded via robots.txt showing up in Google's index, because robots.txt doesn't say "don't index this URL"; it simply says "don't crawl it." That's also why excluding a page in robots.txt and putting a noindex meta tag on the page would be redundant - Google would never see the noindex tag because it would never crawl the page.

Hi,

I'm with Philip on doing this selectively. Many users find content hard to digest in the manner it was intended when they have no idea if it was written in 2006 or 2014. If your industry is one where time really doesn't matter or change anything, this may be different. From an SEO point of view, Google still knows when it first crawled a piece of content, so not including a date won't fool Google into believing the content is fresh when it's not.

I agree that creating evergreen content where appropriate is also a good move - articles, case studies, etc. that can be updated where appropriate (and blogged about + linked to to spur re-indexing).

If you see a marked drop off in traffic to or engagement in a post from 2+ years ago that used to be successful for the site, I'd consider re-writing the post with a current slant, linking to the old one from the post and being upfront about the fact that you're refreshing an old article. You can move engagement to the new post. If there really isn't anything new to say about the subject, you can still cover it again "for new readers" and redirect the old post to the new one, canonicalise it or leave it as is if there are no duplicate content issues.

Hi there,

Although tied to the parent domain as a subdomain, this subdomain on its own has very few inbound links from third parties. OSE sees only 7 linking domains that are not Your Next Shoes. For a subdomain (which does not traditionally inherit terribly much authority from its parent domain), this is quite low. Although it does not explain a sudden drop (unless Google considered it to be ranking unfairly before, e.g. because links from the parent were counting as impartial inbound links when they should not be), general poor performance might be because of a low number of linking sites when compared to competitors.

Hi Eduardo,

If you're suffering from a Penguin issue, you may see the site's results improve over the next few days or weeks. Google confirmed last night that they are rolling out Penguin 4.0, starting yesterday. Most people have seen more movement in US results so far, but there have certainly been some international changes, and it's no longer 2011 when non-US results took a very long time to update after Google first released Panda.

If nothing changes for the site in the next few weeks, either Penguin is not the issue or you have not done enough to remove the bad links. Have you tried removing them, not just submitting a disavow report? Removal is recommended; if removal turns out to be impossible, that's when you need to use the disavow tool.

The site's issues could stem from on-site, meaning that you'll need to look through the ideas presented here and conduct a full on-site audit.

Hi there,

I would say that comments, especially of a good length and with no duplication from elsewhere (so not just people stopping by to say "great post!") would be seen as a positive signal, but not nearly enough to qualify as a ranking factor. That is, having no comments would count as a lack of a signal, not necessarily a negative factor.

It's unfortunate that the site has lost all of its comments. Anecdotally, the same thing happened to a blog of mine four or five years ago. The site did not suffer a drop in traffic and remains successful.

Hi Raymond,

Either canonicalisation to page 1 or noindexing would do the trick here if the content has been duplicated. If you noindex, use noindex, follow so links in and out of that page benefit the website.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Mohammad,

It's impossible to tell if the deindexation is the cause of your ranking drop without knowing what other activity was going on at the same time, but James is correct that canonicalisation would have been a better option than deindexing your pages. You could consider allowing crawling / indexing again and using the canonical tag.

Exactly as Anirban says. We're seeing a lot of directory SEO questions lately, and it's worrying. Both the exact anchor text and the fact that directory links are more often than not junk is why you should remove them.

If they were directories that were HIGHLY relevant to your business and frequented by people looking for your type of services, they might be fine. For instance, if you found a directory listing gardeners, plumbers, electricians and builders in Los Angeles and you happen to be a gardener in Los Angeles, there is some sense here.

However, the vast majority of directory submissions we see are made-for-SEO and should be removed ASAP.

Hi Jamie,

If the product pages are strong enough off and on-page to rank for their keywords, the home page can act as a catch-all for brand traffic - you see large corporations rank like this often. For instance, say Aviva insurance ranks with its car insurance page for [car insurance], health insurance page for [health insurance], etc., its home page ranks for the brand name and maybe for some general insurance queries that do not specify what the person wants to insure.

On the other hand, there was a time when confused.com ranked first and second in the UK for some insurance terms, once with its home page and once with its specialised insurance page. This isn't ideal and Google usually puts a stop to this pretty quickly, and it's usually only very strong sites that achieve rankings like that, albeit temporarily.

For an extremely weak site, sometimes focusing on the home page is better, but Google would prefer to rank specialised pages for specialised queries as they serve the needs of the searcher better.

Hi Joost,

I don't have hard data on this at all; this is a what-I-know plus gut feeling answer.

Gary is right - multiple links from one page to another target should be treated more like one link to the target domain, but this might not be a uniform rule. In effect, two links from one page whether those links be site-wide or individual shouldn't have much more or less effect on the target website than just one.

That said, if Google felt that site-wide link or text blocks were being used manipulatively, there is no reason why they would not discount the value of those links altogether. It's interesting that you may have seen a correlation between multiple links from site-wide areas and poorer performance. It would also be interesting to see the data - you could put together a good blog post about it with enough data, for sure.

Hi there,

Since Domain Authority is a Moz metric, it is not affected by CTR due to Moz not being able to determine or collect this sort of data.

As far as CTR and PPC influencing search rankings goes, there are good reasons why Google would not rely on either metric too intently. For one, it would be very easy to mimic a very bad bounce rate on a competitor's site: set bots to click on search results to a competitor website, click straight out.

It would be a big conflict of interest for PPC to influence SEO either positively or negatively, and although none of us are naive enough to believe that Google always does everything with the best of intentions, they would be in a world of trouble if this type of behaviour were proven.

CTR and bounce rate are so easily influenced / manipulated by factors outside of quality, authority and relevancy that I assume their influence on rankings is quite low. Sure, this data is valuable to Google, but it won't be a signal that has a huge amount of relevance.

Hi Damien,

There are cases where subdomains are very necessary or inevitable, usually because of technical limitations (and even then, they can usually be worked around via practices like reverse proxy). When you see subdomains in the wild and aren't sure why they're being used, they will often just be legacies - old set-ups that no one wants to change because it would require redirecting old URLs, which is inadvisable if those URLs don't need to be redirected and if they rank well.

In this case, I'd be really interested to know why the SEO was adamant that the new structure should use subdomains and not subdirectories. Google is much better at working with new subdomains now than it was in years past, but if there is no good reason to use them, subdirectories are still the safer option for SEO purposes, and the content housed on subdirectories should automatically inherit authority from the parent domain. New subdomains seem to be far less likely to inherit this authority, as other responders have said above.

Find out exactly why the SEO wanted subdomains - if their reasoning isn't solid, you may want to place this content in subdirectories and place 301 redirects from the subdomains to the subdirectories. If you are going to do these redirects, doing them sooner rather than later is advisable as redirection usually comes with a short period of lower rankings / traffic.

On that note, redirection does usually result with that short period of traffic loss, but that should happen quite quickly and be fixing itself in 2+ weeks, not getting worse.

Hi Michael,

I am not sure what you are looking for in terms of evidence, but this is a widely accepted and often implemented tactic for web design purposes, and this will not get you into trouble unless a) you are "hiding" huge amounts of text (many, many times bigger than the page itself), or b) if the text has nothing to do with the content of the page that is available on page load. An FAQ with expandable answers should always be fine, but consider providing the first sentences of the answer on page load if possible.

Hi Christopher,

The set-up you have at the moment is actually fine for SEO - http://www.fdmgroup.com/ resolves the website. http://fdmgroup.com/ employs a 301 redirect to take users and search engines to http://www.fdmgroup.com/: http://i.imgur.com/et4AKYV.png

This is correct, http://fdmgroup.com/ would be seen as a separate "version" of the home page if it was allowed to load without sending everyone on to the "www" version via the 301 redirect. Furthermore, every page within the http://fdmgroup.com/ "version" of the website would be duplicated from the "www" version of each page.

If you want to change to use http://fdmgroup.com/ instead, using that both on advertising and having that be the version of the website that resolves for both users and search engines, you will need to reverse that 301 redirect. This will mean that when people try to visit http://**www.**fdmgroup.com/, they are redirected to http://fdmgroup.com/. This is a simple process.

However, it is inadvisable to go through redirection like this unless you really, really have to. When you redirect a URL with a 301 redirect, a large portion of the URL's authority is passed on to the new URL. Not all of the authority is passed though. As a result, your rankings and traffic can take a little hit for a short while. This is not usually a big problem, and usually resolves itself quickly but it is best avoided unless the redirection really has to take place.

I am tempted to say that "it looks cleaner" is not the best reason to go through this change when your current set-up is totally fine and correct for SEO purposes.

That said, you absolutely could reference fdmgroup.com in offline advertising for stylistic purposes. When people type that URL in, they'll be redirected to the www version just as they are now. This is pretty common because of the stylistic benefits of not including www in TV / print advertising.

Hi again,

The canonical tag sounds like the right way to go for you.

Regarding the meta refresh method of redirection - this works perfectly for users... it was always the case that search engines did not honour this as a redirect though. This may have changed in the recent past (and realistically, it should have - a lot of people used this tactic for redirection and Google should understand that it shows a moved page). However, it is generally thought that the meta refresh does not pass all authority (as noted here), and this thread shows a Googler advising against it (this is a post from 2010 though).

Honestly, with the canonical tag, you don't need to do the refresh / redirection - this will take care of the issue

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Luke,

Noindex, follow will work fine for the duplicated tag pages, although you could consider canonicalising them or redirecting them to a more useful resource - if you can do this en masse in an automated way, or if you only do this manually for tags / topics of high importance.

302ing to the search pages isn't good for two reasons: one, search engines traditionally don't follow or pass PR through a 302, and they also prefer you don't include your own "search pages" in their indexes. The "easy" way around this is exactly as you describe: produce quality category pages in place of what was a search results page. You can probably get away with having search pages indexed, and many companies get them to rank, but what Google wants to avoid is the indexation of hundreds or thousands of random search results pages from a website, often with complex query strings that can result in almost infinite numbers of pages being created.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Nick,

I believe there is no longer a "character count", but more a space or pixel limit - http://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/snippet-ascii-art.html

This has been played out by a few people's experiments, so looks fairly solid - the limit relates to space, not character count. You could certainly try to create something that looked good both as a regular result and a sitelink.

Hey Joost,

That's a tough one because it probably should be subjective and depend on other factors about the linking site, the site it links to and how it links. If the BBC were to link to me twice, once to a new product page on my website and once to my home page, I'm not going to be concerned that the link is only worth the first link in the HTML code, and freak out if that's not to the page I'm interested in. Same thing goes for a lesser site to the BBC, but that would be a highly authoritative example.

That said, if you're counting links from c-classes or IPs, which is a very common way to assess backlinks, that page on the BBC is going to count as one "vote".

If I see a sidebar linking out twice to the same domain, I'm not going to be all that comfortable claiming that both those links are going to be any more useful than one would have been.

I don't believe Google would be simplistic enough to treat two links from one URL on bbc.co.uk to two different pages on one website the same way as it would treat two links on a blogspot blog to two pages on another website, if that makes sense.

Hi Christoph,

It's certainly true that there's a lot of room for improvement, even given the page you're working with right now. As Martijn notes, this image includes text that could be incorporated as HTML - whether you use image replacement, HTML 5, etc., a basic like this means that Google understands nothing about what the image is about / says.

In general, creating a page with more "text" on it (or, more specifically, a page set up in a way that makes it easier for Google to understand all of its content) is beneficial. It may not make a marked, noticeable difference to traffic straight away, but the site / page has the likelihood to rank for more terms if you include all its terms as readable text.

Third vote for using the site and not redirecting it here (pending a re-brand of sorts to suit the fact that it's now owned by your company).

You have the opportunity to take up a lot more real estate in the SERPs than you do now, whereas redirection at worst removes the old site from the results. At best, you might see a small improvement in your rankings, but you're already ranking better than that site to begin with. As EGOL says, PageRank is logarithmic so if you're dealing with what is a weaker website (whether in actual PR or toolbar PR - the latter of which is a fairly outdated metric but still gets used for basic comparison purposes), it may actually be many times weaker than your stronger domain.

At best, using both site might allow you to target different sections of the same audience, appeal to different needs from the audience base (very large clients versus smaller businesses, etc.), and for results where you rank top 10 with both sites, you're about 20% of the results, not 10%

Hi Mike,

Are you saying that there is a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm, pointing to http://www.cheaptubes.com/cntmaterialsafetydatasheet.htm? This would solve the duplicate content problem, but I do not see a canonical tag on either of those pages...

This is a pretty old, annoying phenomenon called keyword cannibalisation. As DJ123 has said, Google can't work out which page it should rank for the generic term. It's incredibly frustrating when the signals are otherwise perfect to point out the right page.

I would add the "shoes" link--pointing to the main page--to all pages, not just the Sports Shoes page, e.g. from Hiking, Dancing, etc. as well, as is the case in this graphic. This graphic is from a very old blog post on keyword cannibalisation, which will read as pretty basic now but might be worth a glance.

This could be a risky idea, but if the metrics for the main shoes page are significantly stronger than the Sports page, you could consider canonicalising the Sports page to the main page for as long as it takes for Google to pick up the main sports page and "drop" the Sports page. Once that happens, remove the canonical tag and fetch as Googlebot from Webmaster Tools, waiting for the Sports page to be re-indexed. I doubt that the Sports page would take precedence over the main page again after this, but this is risky because it will force the Sports page out, and that page is currently ranking. You're taking a fairly confident gamble that the main page will take its place, but it's a gamble nonetheless.

Hi again,

Are you aware that you have a canonical tag on http://cheaptubes.com that points to a non-existent URL? i.e. http://i.imgur.com/yEd2377.png

http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html

If http://cheaptubes.com/ 301 redirected to http://www.cheaptubes.com/, this would resolve the issue.

Are you aware that the www version of your site shows for a brand search (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheaptubes.com&oq=cheaptubes.com&aqs=chrome..69i58j69i60l2j69i57j69i60j0.3367j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8) but that the canonical tags on each page point to the non-www version, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/P7Tizsv.png and http://i.imgur.com/lhTA95w.png?

The canonical tag on the www.cheaptubes.com/ page also points to http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.html. Sorry to show so many errors, but it doesn't look like canonicalisation has been implemented properly here.

Hi there, glad to have been of help!

As far as how long to wait goes, it really is hard to say but if you see nothing at all in a month, I'd consider other options like canonicalisation (or coming back here, showing what you've done and seeing what people say - as I am only one opinion! ).

Cheers,

Jane

There is honestly no need to worry about having "no keywords" in a post. Google is much more sophisticated than that - and besides, a post like:

"today I went out on a 16 mile bike ride over the chilterns using my Garmin 705, After the first 8 miles I used my hydropak and then continued on up the 3 mile incline which was helped by the quickshift speedwheel, I find that with all riding my ipod helps me and when I finally reached mile point I stopped and refilled the hydropak. "

... includes a whole lot of keywords relevant to cycling, location, accessories, etc. The internet and Google's index would be a very small place if it discredited websites with small entries or entries without keyword-rich text, as well.

I can't imagine a world in which these would hurt you in the slightest.

Hi Louie,

Has there been any improvement to this? If not, could it be possible given the query and the sites that do rank in the Sydney region, that the query is particularly competitive in Sydney as compared to other cities, and that the ranking sites have put any extra effort into that location?

I understand that it isn't a city-specific query, but is the service / product something that might be considered a more profitable query to rank for in Sydney?

Google doesn't support city-specific geo-targeting so it won't be something they've set up incorrectly in Webmaster Tools.

Is there any address or contact information on the client's website that might specifically indicate that they serve areas that are not Sydney?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Unfortunately the site seems to be down right now, so I can't have a look (I'm getting a 500 unavailable error), but I would say that while copy is important to give Google an idea about the page's topic, copy for copy's sake is not necessary. In other words, as long as the page says enough to get the message across about what it's meant to convey, you don't need to add another 200 words for no reason.

That said, each page should contain a good paragraph or so of unique text in most cases. I don't love putting minimums on the number of words that should be used, but keep in mind that text presented as images, etc. should use a technique like CSS image replacement in order to show that text in a search engine readable format, i.e. HTML.

I would not be confident that this has caused your 30% drop in traffic unless the pages are now extremely void of unique content and could be seem as "duplicates" or near-dupes of each other as a result, or simply as not very useful. On the other hand, if there are SEO errors with the site already, a big drop in content will certainly not help.

Get that 500 error checked out!

Hi there,

This isn't a problem, and is quite a common way of presenting content on the "same page" as far as the source code goes without having it all appear on page load. Where this would get you into trouble is if you are presenting a lot of content behind different tabs, or if that content was vastly different to the topic of the page that appears on page load.

If you are using CSS to tab between the content, none of it is uncrawlable.

Hi Jean-Loup,

I like Gary's idea for canonicalisation as long as you are not too concerned about search traffic that is specifically dedicated to finding information about (for example), the Edinburgh Marathon 5km race. If the 5km race page is canonicalised to the main marathon page and that main marathon page doesn't mention the 5km, your ranking chances are fairly poor.

One other option to consider is presenting this additional information as tabbed content on the main page. Without seeing the actual pages, it's hard to say what this would look like, but essentially you'd have a primary page that lists all the main info about the event, then has tabs in a secondary navigation that use CSS to show content about the 10km, the 5 and the half marathon. You clearly do not have to repeat the general information about the full marathon festival event on each of these tabs, just include information about the specific races. All the HTML about each event is presented in the source code of the one Edinburgh marathon festival page.

This is not considered underhanded or "cloaking" - it's a common way to present information on the same or very similar topic on one URL. As long as the content behind each tab is highly relevant to the original topic (e.g. the marathon and other races) and is not unduly long (don't try to post a 1,000 word blog post in a tab), you will be fine.

This might be a big stylistic undertaking, but it's another option and it also means that just one URL receives the benefit of all the links people point to the event page.

Bizarrely, I just answered quite a similar question to this about five minutes ago...

Have you looked into the rel="alternate" tag option? Sometimes this is also referred to as the "href lang tag". You can place these on both the UK site and the .com, indicating that the UK site is "the same" but is targeted for UK customers only. This is basically canonicalisation with a geo-targeting twist: it negates the issue of duplicate content whilst reinforcing that the .co.uk is for UK audiences.

More information on the tag is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

The .co.uk replacing the .com in UK SERPs won't be immediate, but this is a fairly safe option for rankings. Can you also use a javascript lightbox when a UK IP is detected on the .com site, explaining that UK customers have to purchase on the .co.uk and providing a link? It isn't good to automatically redirect based on IP, but a JS pop-up / lightbox will be ignored by search engines and will allow any remaining UK traffic to the .com to make its way to the appropriate website.

Does this help?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

Question 1):  Is the best way of doing my titles, keywords and descriptions.  Any concerns or recommendations.  I have read, do not even use keywords anymore.

Agreed on the meta keywords tag - it is no longer needed.

There is some redundancy in the two tags at the moment. The primary rule is that you should be first and foremost writing for people, not search engines. You'll naturally include the keywords search engines need to see if you write for people (check afterwards to ensure you have, but good usability very often translated to good SEO):

**Suggestion **for a page about the Chateau Alta Vista:

<title>Chateau Alta Vista Cabin, Big Bear Lake, California | Big Bear Cabin Rentals</title>

There is no need to repeat the location / site name.

Chateau Alta Vista is located on Big Bear Lake, CA and is available for weekend breaks or longer stays. Space for up to 14 guests, 4 bed, 3 bath. Internet and hot tub provided.

There is no need to use keywords in a meta description from a ranking point of view (they do not influence rankings), but users should get a good idea of what they're going to find when they click through from the meta description. Think of it as free advertising space.

The photo pages should be fine, but consider including these in a larger page about the cabin itself, i.e. adding value to the cabin pages rather than creating new pages, similarly to how property websites show 8 - 10 photos of a property they are selling or renting, e.g. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/33290790. The slide show takes precedence here whereas yours would probably not (lower on the page or in another tab), but see how they have used tabs to go between content, rather than create new URLs / pages - all the content is stored on the one URL about that one property.

If I do change the page names I will lose the history of property_detail_V.aspx which only has a Page Authority of 21,  but if I change the page name and dynamic navigation of my website will I not lose all my authorities,  if so, is it worth doing it?

If you 301 redirect between the old URL and the new one, the majority of the authority of the old page will transfer to the new one. Having said that, you only want to go through a lot of 301 redirects (NOT 302s! They pass no authority) if you really have to. Modern search engines are far better at dealing with dynamic URLs than they were years ago, so it is really hard to say if doing this would be beneficial enough to outweigh the fact that you need to go through redirects from the existing URLs.

I would say that this is absolutely not an instance where you would want to use nofollow. There is a huge difference between this and linking to a insurance company's commercial car insurance page with the anchor text "car insurance". It's sad that Google and the SEO community have jointly scared everyone to the extent that we are afraid of linking to information sources about non-commercial terms (e.g. "Brigham Young" linking to a Wiki page about Brigham Young). Nofollow is meant to indicate that you do not wish to vouch for the source of the information or that you have been paid to include the link and thus don't want to indicate that the link is purely editorial. This use is still true, eight years after nofollow's creation and it would be sad if we reached the stage where people are basically hesitant to link without it in almost every circumstance.

Put this in a commercial context and multiply the rate at which the target page or linking website receives / links out with high-value terms, and you have more of a problem. I have had clients ask me about ratios for years - "can we safely build links with 30% commercial anchor text?" - to which we'd have to say that there is no "safe ratio" for any particular keyword, niche or industry.

Google looks at far more than the anchor text when deciding on what is natural and what should be penalised / filtered. A page about a person or a product might use that person's or product's name nearly 100% of the time and be perfectly natural. I have also personally seen pages with 80%+ brand anchor text be penalised (not by Penguin but manually) because the links were clearly part of a sophisticated but fairly uniform paid link scheme, despite using anchor text links "Brand.com" and "visit their website". A high ratio of commercial anchor text is the icing on the cake for some of these penalties but there is no need to nofollow every link or even a selection of links just because it happens to be exact-match in terms of its destination.

Google just rolled out a big Panda update and a couple of smaller updates besides, so there's a possibility that this was just a glitch. We generally say that if you see something bizarre happen around big updates, wait it out a few days and see if things go back to normal. If you don't see this happen again, I'd but it down to a fluke...

I would say that obsessing over nofollows or no nofollows is over-complicating things much more than simply linking to more information about a subject. The vast majority of content on the internet that links to informational resources, such as the example you've given (even though you own both resources) is not written or linked to with nofollow / SEO in mind. This is what I mean by it being sad if no one can create content and link between properties, whether they belong to one or more parties, without considering Google, SEO and nofollow.

It's shortsighted to claim that links between owned properties should be nofollowed. This is far from a set rule. Google does not consider linking to your own properties to be spam in and of itself. It would consider deliberate link manipulation via link networks to be spam, but is it spam if amazon.com links to amazon.co.uk? If Moz.com links to Opensiteexplorer.org? If Virgin corporation links to its health club chain? Or if I link from my blog to my consulting site? Hell no, it's not. It would be manipulative of me to create 800 websites promoting SEO consulting and link them all to my own website, however, just as it would be spammy for Virgin to write a new blog post every other day on sites they own, linking to their health clubs with the anchor text "gyms in London".

It's very subjective whether nofollow should be used, but I really do not agree that there is a hard-and-fast rule that any link using "optimised" (i.e. descriptive) anchor text should be nofollowed, just as much as I disagree that links to things you own need to be automatically nofollowed. At which point is a link natural if every link on the internet that meets these criteria is "unnatural"?

I agree that if the link does not add value, it should not be there, but in your example, you mention a person and link to more information about that person. Since a quote from that person is the crux of the page's subject, it absolutely adds value to link to more information about that person, no matter how well-known that person might be to the website's audience. I find it hard to argue that the link does not add value.

Hi Joanne,

The "fewer than 100 links" quote is a little bit outdated in terms of what Google can actually handle. This article from late last year makes clear that the limit is long gone. The guideline is an okay benchmark when it comes to ensuring that you aren't overloading a page with useless or irrelevant content and links, but it's definitely not a requirement for crawling / indexing / ranking success anymore.

Your drop-down looks pretty standard to me. Some sites choose to present menus like this using JavaScript to call lower-level URLs (e.g. Hair, Face & Body + Natural Skin Care might be links in the HTML but then a JS call is required to bring up Certified Organic Skin Care, Cleansers, etc. - Google and other search engines do not traditionally execute JavaScript and thus won't see the links) but this is an increasingly unnecessary tactic, and could be detrimental if those URLs are not linked to in a crawlable manner elsewhere within the website.

Having a lot of links on a page has one "detriment" - a page does not "leak" PageRank / authority if it links out a lot, but it does mean that less PageRank passes through each link if there are hundreds of links, as opposed to 50 or 100 links. The total amount of PR that can be passed on is divided amongst more links. Again, it's important that links to all your pages be crawled so that those pages are indexed and receive authority, so I don't think you have to worry about this.

Further example: http://www.marksandspencer.com/ uses a JS-powered navigation, http://www.debenhams.com/ does not.

Hi Alan,

I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:

My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.

This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.

Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.

Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.

Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).

If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Joanne,

Sorry for not totally expanding on what I meant as the outcome using javascript! Yes, you're "hiding" portions of the mega menu. There is speculation that search engines might execute JS commands to find out if there is content behind them, but at the moment this still seems a valid way to "remove" links from Google's total link count. Keep and eye on whether this changes though (and acknowledge that it might not be totally reliable, even now).

Perhaps check out this tutorial for JS menus: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/menu/javascript.htm

Cheers,

Jane

As Devanur says, this will achieve your goal. It's worth reiterating that there is nothing inherently wrong with /index.php URLs as long as you cannot access the same content without /index.php. For instance, if www.site.com/page1/index.php exists as well as www.site.com/page1/, then this is duplicate content and should be fixed. I imagine this is your current situation because this is most common when /index.php is being added to URLs.

However, if only one version of every page loads and that version has the /index.php extension, this is not automatically bad. It's preferable for the extension not to be there for the sake of URL tidiness and because this does move the content one folder-level away from the root (not a huge issue, but probably best avoided) however.

If you go through 301 redirects to shift the old URLs to the new ones without /index.php, your rankings should not suffer. There might be a little bit of ranking fluctuation as Google indexes the new URLs and acknowledges the redirects, but nothing permanent. It's worth noting that this is not an absolute rule, however, and that there is always a risk of lowered rankings or rankings not returning to what they were before after a 301 redirect though.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Daniel,

You can get a long way with a good free tool like this. My former agency got a lot of good press and social love for a redirect checker they developed last year: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/redirect-checker.html

This operates as a Chrome plug-in, which I would highly recommend, seeing the reaction the tool got. It's super easy to use, which people absolutely love.

By the way, the redirect tool I mention in my other response is throwing a 500 for that page right now!

http://i.imgur.com/mrpd4lK.png