Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Tabea,

Google is certainly attempting to crawl JS links, and it's plausible that they'll pass PageRank through those links. However, I'm reluctant to say that these are close to passing authority in the same way as regular <a href="">links - there is a possibility that as of right now, these links are being crawled for discovery purposes. What's definitely true, of course, is that JS shouldn't be used to "hide" links anymore, since it's highly possible that they'll get crawled.</a>

<a href="">Cheers,

Jane</a>

Hi Gemma,

I hope this response will be useful to you: it's not quite the same as forcing Google to index the mobile site, but it is highly likely to be the future of mobile SEO.

Have you read about HTML5? Basically, HTML5 means that you can present the same content (i.e. the www site) to all users, no matter which devices or browsers they're using, and use style sheets to provide mobile-friendly content. Although this post is about how this could mean the end of "apps" on mobile phones (because web-browsers will be able to deal with the content), this also shows how there is increasingly no need for "mobile versions" of a website, because the one site can handle all browsers: http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/01/html5-is-great-for-mobile.php

Hi Pano,

Just to clarify, are you saying that the site ranks well for both the [bolster] and [bolsters] keyphrases, but that only one is showing up in Google Analytics as providing any traffic? Sorry for the confusion.

Cheers,

Jane

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 Christina,

There is no harm in changing title tags if the existing tags are not up to scratch. It will definitely not make traffic drop, unless you remove keywords for which the pages are currently ranking (and it doesn't sound like that is your intention). As long as the keywords are added in a way that makes sense and is not at all spammy, adding or changing a title tag is not harmful and is pretty common practice, even on some very large websites, on their primary pages.

In fact, if you look at some popular gambling websites, they often add current offers, bonuses, etc., into their existing title tags for short periods. As previously mentioned, as long as key parts of the tag aren't being removed, rankings won't be effected.

Cheers,

Jane