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Hi there,

I would also seek a second opinion - there are many HTML issues that aren't troublesome enough to bother Google, and the claim that "the quality of coding makes it more difficult for Google to index the site and this may be detrimental to ranking" depends heavily on what those coding "issues" actually are. I'd rather see a list of what they say is detrimental than do a full code audit here - I'd be super curious as to what those issues supposedly are.

That list can be used as a starting point to get the second opinion of other development and SEO companies - I would certainly run the list by SEOs as well as coders, as each group knows more about their chosen field than the other. You'll get a good idea about a) what has been done sloppily and b) how Google might treat that sloppiness.

Agreed that going back to the original coders, especially for diagnosis, isn't the best idea, but if you have proof that something they did is sub-par, you might mention it to them. As DJ123 says above, don't expect a high receptive response if you do, of course!

It could be a legitimate point or it could be a way to charge for services - I'd get some full independent quotes. Perhaps even pay someone a small amount for a audit that does not come with it the chance of further work for that person. That is, the auditor has no financial incentive to find something wrong with the site.

Results are certainly displayed differently for different locations if the query is location-dependent (searching for [hospitals] from Rochester, NY in google.com will get you a very different result from doing the same thing in google.com in Sacramento).

You can change your perceived location in search settings, whether you are logged in or not: http://i.imgur.com/6xgLXAL.png

http://i.imgur.com/e9tuuua.png

Changing my location from its default (based on my IP, which Google actually gets wrong - it thinks I am an hour further south than I actually am) to a location in the north of England changes my results for such a query to reflect where I've said I am: http://i.imgur.com/GqNTKRG.png

I know there's a way to do this in an automated manner if you're building a rank checking tool (my former agency did this), but I'm afraid I don't know how to do this off the top of my head, so you're stuck with the manual option here.

I will assign this question to the Help Team as they will have more information about the IP location Moz's rank tracker crawls from.

Again, not sure what your queries are but they very much could be influenced by geo-location if they are at all dependent on a user's location.

It can do - as others have said, there is a lot you can get away with with brilliant results if you manage to go undetected, and the linking pages' metrics are good enough to fool search engines about their quality. Spam still ranks - "churn and burn" link development (where you cycle through throw-away domains, ranking one for a short period for a highly-profitable keyword, putting a new site in its place when it is penalised / banned) still legitimately works too, but is obviously not most people's idea of a great long-term business plan if they have any desire to build a brand or use their online brands offline. But if you rank top-three for [buy cialis] for two weeks with a domain you spend $9 on and link development you can spin easily for new sites, you will come away with a healthy profit.

Not saying this is what your competitor is doing, and engaging in outright spam is a bad idea if you don't plan to ditch domain after domain, but it can absolutely still work if quick rankings are all you care about.

Hi there,

I am not sure why these exact examples are being picked up for duplicate content (their title tags are exactly the same, however) because the text on page is different.

Even though many of these pages are different, the tool will be picking them up as duplicates because there is too much duplication between each page's content, e.g.:

http://i.imgur.com/D44s1wV.png

and

http://i.imgur.com/hEARGo9.png

One option is to have this heavily-duplicated information hosted on a separate URL, with the page calling the content of that URL into the text box using an iframe. This will "remove" the content from the page as far as Google is concerned, but it will mean that the same content is not being found over and over again on different URLs.

This will mean that the URLs have very little content on the however, and you should really write new content to provide sufficient unique content to tell Google what the page is about.

Consider the "tabs" option I mention above - you would start with a URL like http://www.destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=501 and use CSS tabs to switch to the rates page, video page, photos page, etc. This would house all of a cabin's information on one URL and mean that there are no more URLs like http://www.destinationbigbear.com/Property_detail_rates.aspx?propid=501 where the text content of the page is largely a duplicate of every other cabin page.

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...

What I don't know is how to do good link building and some of the nitty gritty details about what ranks and what doesn't.

I would suggest the link building category on the blog here. There is nearly 10 years of link development information in there, clearly with the newer information being more relevant than older.

Should I do them all at once, or one at a time?

I really can't say if you should take them down without seeing them, unfortunately.

Will I forever be penalized by google for directory submissions?

You are very unlikely to be penalised "forever" for anything as long as the offending links are removed. If you receive a penalty (which you are not guaranteed to do if you use directories for link development, but it's a risk), how soon you recover depends on what type of penalty you received. If you received a manual penalty, i.e. someone from Google's webspam team looked at your links and decided to penalise the site, you will first receive a notice in Webmaster Tools telling you that you have been penalised and why. You should then remove or disavow the bad links (try to actually remove them before using the disavow tool) and file a reconsideration request. If the site / links now meet Google's standards, they will revoke the penalty (although it can take multiple iterations of filing for reconsideration and having those requests rejected before you are successful).

If you have been penalised due to the Penguin algorithm (i.e. your links trip a trigger in that algorithm and cause you to receive an automatic penalty that has not been overseen by a real person), you will have to wait for a "refresh" of Penguin to see that penalty removed. These refreshes seem to happen ever few months or so, but there is no set period or refreshes.

In short, if you remove your bad links, you will not be penalised in the future after those links are gone.

I would take down the links that were placed in directories for link building purposes alone and leave those that have been built for a combination of reasons, including for the purpose of people finding them and clicking on them. Do review the other sites the directories link to as well though - if you find that the directories linking to you also link to spam sites, remove your links. You are judged not only on the quality of your links, but on the quality of the sites that sites linking to you ALSO link to, if that makes sense.

I am working on getting my husband to write "fishing reports" (We are an deep sea fishing company) and have them published on the top florida fishing websites.  Will this help?

It might, but this is not really enough information to know whether this is a good tactic or not. If the reports are placed on high-quality websites (which top fishing websites should be) and links are placed back to your site, this could very well be beneficial.

Hi Michael,

It's definitely best practice to place title tags (at least) on all pages and I would recommend doing so if these pages are accessible to search engines, i.e. not blocked by robots.txt, a login requirement, etc.

"Would it help the site as a whole rank better?" - I can't say whether it would help primary pages or the home page actually rank better for their target keywords, but it's certainly not a good sign from a search engine's point of view to come across as website with a lot of pages online, indexed and devoid of titles.

Mike's right - Matt Cutts is a huge HTTPS fan but there are no direct benefits yet. If both versions of the site are available, you need to make a decision about which one you want to use and stick with it, either redirecting the other or pointing to the preferred version with a canonical tag.

We used to say that only pages requiring secure connections (payment pages, or pages where other sensitive information is passed) should be secure, but since Google can clearly handle these pages and some high-ranking people within the search team prefer them, I'd say you're definitely safe to use them if you want to.

I would say that it depends on why the penalty happened in the first place, but if it's a manual penalty then removing the resource probably won't get rid of the penalty overnight. I'd do a combination of trying to remove the links, disavowing what I couldn't remove, removing the page with a 410 and filing for reconsideration explaining what I did and how I've tried to fix it. I'd also explain that the page was obsolete to begin with and was always destined for the scrap heap.

Hi Anirban,

Just from this one specific are? That's odd. I would be tempted to guess that Google changed its way of looking at IP addresses from that area on the 6th of May if you saw that across a range of websites, not just one.

If you take the missing Pune traffic, is your total traffic also down by that much or is total traffic from search pretty much the same as before?

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.

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 there,

Not Samuel, but I'll pitch in too.

A few years ago, he paid some company to create these keyword-focused pages. I HATE them! But, they have always ranked.  Are you suggesting that I delete these pages? (Please say yes lol)

It's hard to say without seeing the pages. At best, the pages might be fine - this is a page that targets some specific keywords that is perfectly okay: https://www.endsleigh.co.uk/personal/gadget/phone-insurance/

So is this: http://www.johnlewis.com/home-garden/tableware/salt-pepper/c80000896

However, on the other end of the spectrum you have low quality, made-for-SEO pages that include "doorway pages". The grey area between pages targeting certain phrases legitimately and doorway pages is large. Would you class these pages as being somewhere on that spectrum, and if so, where?

2. What do you mean by publish?  Are you talking Press Releases?  We have a blog that we publish to WP and then syndicate to FB, Twitter, G+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Samuel was likely talking about publishing high quality content across your web "properties", focusing mainly on your own website but also keeping your social media accounts up to date with good stuff as well.

I've requested to be added to 50-60 directories (yelp, city search, etc.). I have links on all the major social media sites. I add weblinks on the content I put out on youtube and Pinterest.  Our blog has been shared quite a bit. My SEO says he's done press releases, but I don't know if he used anchor-text or not.

There are some red flags here. Directory submission for SEO purposes is a very outdated tactic. Using directories for exposure is fine, and if you would have submitted to all of those directories for visibility purposes as opposed to SEO, fine (I doubt this though, given the high number). Google takes a dim view of directory links, usually because they're either from low quality websites, they were paid for, the directories link out to a bunch of spam indiscriminately or all of the above. Directories should only be used if you are using them for other purposes besides SEO, e.g. a directory about florists in London area, and you are a florist in the London area who might get business from the listing.

Social media links are fine, but they are usually nofollowed by the social media site, meaning that you do not receive SEO value from them. A large, active social media following where people often share your content is a good signal as far as search engines go (a real brand usually has this sort of activity whilst a spam site does not), but we are yet to really have it proven that any of that activity counts as a certain "ranking factor".

You absolutely need a list of the links your SEO has created. Try to have him send you a spreadsheet report of all the links he has made once a week or once a month (month is usually easier; week would be perfect. As an SEO, it was easier for me to do it once a month though). You need to know of all the ways in which your site is being represented on the web, even or especially from press releases. Like directories, PRs were roundly abused by SEOs in years gone by, meaning that Google is fairly unforgiving about either not crediting links from PRs as having much value, or considering a backlink profile built largely on PRs low-quality. This is from less than a year ago about press releases and SEO: http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339

Yep - cheers! Thanks.

Hi there,

Glad to help!

Given that I run a commercial site, do you recommend I completely avoid an author bio and only link (where justified) in the article body?

I would avoid linking out from the bio, that's for sure. That was / is a really common way to get a link (or another link) into a guest post and it's crazily easy to spot. If you link, link to a non-commercial property (this is being very cautious, but since guest blogging was Google's favourite thing to penalise last month, extra caution is okay!).

Some site owners have inserted bylines on my articles, eg: "By Jeepster of Jeepster.com" (followed link), making it clear it's written by a guest. Again, is that to be completely avoided?

A lot of folks have struggled with this. For the time being, I might avoid having a followed link out from a byline like that, especially if the page also says "sponsored" or "guest post" anywhere. Links from the post (which is part of the point, of course) should be okay when relevant to the text, but perhaps be cautious of "extra" followed links from both bylines and bios. There isn't much you can do if someone wants to note that the post was written by someone else, but if the post conforms to all the other quality standards of writers simply writing for each other's websites, it should be fine.

There's a reputable site in my industry that openly asks for guest writers (completely unpaid; and it's not one of those built-for-guest-posts websites). Can I safely contribute to this if my articles contain relevant links?

I would say that this sounds fairly safe, as long as the site also ticks the boxes in that list (i.e. you go through and figure out if it's been abused by SEOs and / or by the site owners for money from guest authors, which it sounds like it hasn't). Google has surprised even the tinfoil-hat-brigade with some of the stuff they've penalised or said is not okay in the last year or so, so any links out from sites that offer guest posting options aren't 100% risk-free nowadays, but I guess the idea is to calculate the risk versus reward when deciding. Sorry to not be definitive here!

I've been granted approved guest authorship to a couple of heavyweight sites in my industry, ie, I submit articles to them which are vetted at their end before going live. Is that still safe?

Same sort of thing as the other site really, although this sounds more like the "authoritative figure writing for a different authoritative site" scenario that is common in journalism, blogging, etc. We can't be sure what Google will choose to crack down on next, but they're already getting heat for trying to control how information is shared on the web and trying to crack down on knowledge being shared like this would be a further step too far, in my opinion.

Agree with Dennis, if you were relying on this method alone for all your link building, you're going to have a bad time. However, it's perfectly natural for sites owned by the same person or company to link to each other. The best-practice warnings of "nofollow everything!" exist because people abuse and overdo this sort of linking. If you think any of these sites might otherwise be in trouble for any reason, consider being as safe as possible and nofollowing, but I doubt you have to.

Hi George,

My first thought would be that the internal page doesn't have enough authority - from what I can see from OSE, it has no links from third party sources, only internal links: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.exhibithire.co.uk%2Fexhibition-services%2Fexhibition-stand-hire%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=page&group=1

This isn't to say that some sites rank internal pages that have no third party inbound links, but they're generally very strong domains to begin with, e.g. a site like Debenhams having an internal page about (say) pink swimsuits ranking for [pink swimsuits]. I made this example up, checked, and indeed Debenhams does rank for that query, and the page has no inbound third party links. But it's on debenhams.com, and that's the "trick".

What does your competition look like? The domain itself only has a 29/100 domain authority, which can be fine in an uncrowded market but might not be enough for internal links to extent much authority to the desired page. Your home page is also pretty darn relevant to the original query: the site itself is about exhibition hiring, and you mention "stand" once on the home page where that text does not link elsewhere. I would say that the combination of the home page being very relevant for the query and the internal page not having high enough authority are causing this to happen.

Hi there,

For the guest blogging point, I would say that the absolute best type of guest blogging achieves two goals:

1. It looks like a guest author, who is an authority of a subject close to the heart of the publishing website, being commissioned to write an article for that website. My father runs a blog about swimming. The website has been online for eleven years. If a swimming coach from a successful program writes a post for him about a new method of training and links either to his / her own website and to a product that helps with the new training method, neither my father's blog, the coach's website nor the product page are ever going to be hurt from doing this. This is a standard practice that happens every day (usually without giving thought to SEO).

How many people sometimes write for big magazines who aren't permanently on staff there? Moz was told that Youmoz was fine. What you need to avoid here are the crappy, "made for low-quality sharing" **posts that are easy to spot.**It can be really obvious posts come with a generic author bio that links to a commercial site, are poorly written, or are totally at odds to the topic of the site. Using the swimming blog example, if he were to publish a piece by a "freelance journalist" about the same new product, link to that product and include a crappy author bio about how "Peter is a freelance journalist who enjoys hiking, traveling and indie music. He is often found working at [COMMERCIALSITE.COM]", then you're in much more dangerous territory.

2. Because the goal is to provide something that is of relatively high quality, both you and Google get what they want: a web with high quality content that provides Google with the signals it needs to rank good content above bad. Essentially, Google has created an environment around guest blogging where you have to do it particularly well in order to succeed. Which is pretty much fair enough. Just a lot more work The harder you work to "hide" the fact that you're guest blogging, the more Google's problem with low quality guest blogs goes away.

So how does this tie together with keyword optimisation? I'd definitely agree that you no longer want to seek links to your car insurance site with the anchor text "car insurance". Some of these are going to pop up; let them appear on their own if they're going to, but don't seek them.

In that regard, on-page targeting is more important than the basic off-page metric of anchor text.

Regarding off page: we have enough reason to believe that Google understands the content of a page that is being linked from and how that relates to the page that is being linked to: a blog post on an 11 year old swimming blog about swimming that links to a swimming accessory with the anchor text "this product here" will still mention most likely ALL of the product's primary keywords. Google indexes the blog post, sees the product's name and keywords about what it does, follows the un-optimised link to the product website and sees those terms (including commercial keywords) again in the product page's title tag and description. Google relied on anchor text in the past, likely because this sort of semantic processing was too hard for a primitive search engine. This requires a much more sophisticated approach to analysing content, but makes it much more likely that the picture Google gets of a website's place on the internet is accurate.

Two great answers here already.

Basically, you may have a strong resource to work with but Google is also keen on not allowing brand new site owners from benefitting too much from the authority of newly-purchased websites. Google is a domain registrar for the sole purpose of accessing comprehensive whois information and understanding when websites / domains change hands. If a domain's registration information, hosting and content changes drastically, there is nothing stopping Google from removing the authority that domain once had.

Again, this is not to say that the domain won't be useful, but you will probably need to build a useful site on that domain that reflects the quality of the links that have helped it achieve a PR6 in the past. Simply redirecting it to a new location will probably not be of much use - I seem to remember that Google started stamping out that practice's usefulness five or six years ago.

$100 also seems quite cheap for a PR6 domain, but maybe you lucked out!

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 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.

Hi Prashant,

If these URLs are only created when a user searches for a term, but are not linked to anywhere in HTML either on your site or elsewhere on the Internet, this is a very good reason why they are not indexed.

Google does not usually perform queries on a site (e.g. fill in forms) to "discover" what content might be displayed when those forms are filled in. It's tried and tested method of crawling is just that - crawling links and text in HTML. It has become more adventurous with different technology and sometimes finds things that it wouldn't have previously, but linking is still the primary way to ensure something gets crawled.

In many cases, you wouldn't want Google finding content that it has to perform queries / fill in forms or searches to get to: this is how some sites create massive amounts of duplicate content by accident. So in a way, Google is doing everyone a favour by not indexing URLs like this.

We have submitted these urls on google webmaster using a "sitemap" for indexing still none of them are indexed.

I tend to think of sitemaps like road maps: they're a guide. The site itself is the road. If a map tells me that I can drive across a river but when I get there, this is no bridge, I'm not going to drive across the river. Maybe I will if I have a huge four-wheel-drive car with a snorkel, but possibly not. Maybe Google will index URLs it can't find on the web itself, but possibly not.

If you want the URLs to be found, link to them

Cheers,

Jane

I would stay away from botw.org to be honest - your time and money are better invested elsewhere than with traditional directories, even well-known ones. Google is well aware of how entries are made into directories like this and are perfectly capable of disregarding the authority that would otherwise be passed here. Suffice to say, I am not a fan of using directories for SEO purposes anymore at all.

Similar can go for the BBB but if you are comfortable that you are also doing this for visibility purposes, then the sole purpose is not SEO.

Other partnerships and associations can send good authority to your site, but be aware that if you are "paying for a link", Google may also be aware that the paid link opportunity exists and disregard / penalise it accordingly. What I mean to say is that any link you can easily find the payment terms for, Google can easily find the payment terms as well. Google would say that paid links should all be nofollowed (in which case, no problem, not no SEO benefit either). Again, this isn't my personal view on what an ideal web looks like, it's what Google regards as "how you should link."

It's likely that your competition is going to be a mix of large book sellers, online outlets, the author's or publishing house's pages or sites, review sites (after the book is released - and this can include major newspapers and magazines). You can get a good idea of who these are actually going to be by looking at the author and publishing house and searching for books they've published in the past. What do those SERPs look like?

Getting in first with a landing page on a good website is a good piece of the battle, so definitely create your pages about the book early. If there are press releases or interest from readers in the lead-up to the release, your site should be one of the only resources ranking early if you get in before the big retailers and newspapers. Amazon is particularly strong for some book queries, but Google would ideally prefer to rank diverse websites (not three or four Amazon URLs on the first page, which I have seen happen for book names).

Marie is correct - this is unlikely to work unless you are VERY careful to not let Google know that the websites are connected, as they're partial to transferring penalties from one site to another if you try to get rid of a penalty by starting a new, identical website. Simply redirecting a penalised site is a trick that used to work back in 2009, 2010 (you don't mention redirection, but it's worth noting that this used to work, so if you see it mentioned online it's probably old information).

Even if you do not redirect the old site, Google may still recognise that the content is identical to a website it previously penalised, especially if all the new site's registration information, hosting, template, etc. is the same as the old site.

That's not for sure - you may get away with doing this if there are no ties between the old, penalised site and the new site, but using identical content is a big give-away.

Assuming that your penalty was links-related, the safest way to do this is to remove the old site's content, wait until Google cache the old site with the content gone (so the content is completely out of the index), take the site down and re-publish on the new domain. That said, Google's ability to remember what it has seen before could result in the scenario Marie describes.

Unless there is a specific reason to keep the areas separate (e.g. you don't want people to be confused about the brand, or one activity is very inappropriate when paired with the other), it's usually best to keep the content on the same domain. brand.com/activity also usually looks more professional than exact-match-keyword.com. Furthermore, you often gain more trust when people see that the site's offering is well-rounded and includes a variety of activities.

You can also benefit from accumulating good reviews from happy customers to just one website, rather than accumulating surfing holiday reviews for one of your travel sites, wedding holiday reviews for another and so on.

Again, if you feel that the subjects clash badly and will create a weird user experience, you might look at developing different websites, but if you have a range of different activities / holidays that involve one location, I'd be 99% confident that these should all site on the same domain.

Feel absolutely free to link out as often as you like to as many sources, as long as those sources are high-quality. I personally do not recommend nofollowing links "just in case" they are spammy in the future; the vast majority of the links you create will be to sites that will never suffer a spam problem (and if you are ever worried, perform a check on your site's outbound links once or twice a year).

As Anirban says, a site that links out to trustworthy sites makes itself look more trustworthy in return. A very simplistic way of looking at this is that spam websites link to spam websites and to trustworthy websites. Trustworthy websites _only _link out to other trustworthy websites. So while you're not giving the sort of positive signal that likely results in improved rankings, you are failing to give a negative signal.

If the links are user-generated, place a nofollow tag on them, but if they are editorial and added by you because you appreciate the resource, you can do this as often as you like (within reason, still don't create massive pages with thousands of outbound links!).

The instruction in the audit template is probably given to give you a 100% true view of what Google sees when it comes to the website, unobstructed by things meant for humans like cookies, javascript, etc. As Stephen says, Google traditionally does not accept cookies or execute javascript, or do a lot of things that are meant for usability (but may take some of this into account if it's being used for malicious purposes).

This is not about whether cookies are "harmful" and you are not being instructed to turn off cookies on the website itself. You are being instructed to disable your browser from accepting cookies so you get an idea of what Google's experience on the website is like.

Edited to add - posts like this are being shared, literally today, so keep an eye on the Google-accepting-cookies issue, but for the purpose of the site audit, it's just wanting to let you see what Google traditionally sees.

Hi Gordon,

It can be easier than you'd expect to outrank big travel / price comparison websites for queries like this by appealing to heightened relevancy, rather than authority. No one really needs to state that you won't build the same authority as Lastminute or Trip Advisor, but you can certainly be more relevant to them for the specific subject of weekends in the Lake District, and similar queries.

I definitely wouldn't say that those are "local" queries in that they're being searched for by people all over the country, but they're also not Lastminute-style websites' bread and butter.

This isn't to say you won't need links, but you don't need the thousands of links that point to the root domains of large competitors. There are already "smaller" websites ranking for that particular query (hotels, as opposed to national brands). I'm searching from Berkshire so am probably fairly indicative of what your market sees.

I can't say how likely it is, and it's not easy to compete in an area that the big guys are working in already, but half the battle is creating a website that is vastly more relevant for the query (i.e. a better, more well-rounded resource) than the fairly standard information given on a page like http://www.lastminute.com/hotels/the-lake-district.html

Unfortunately, there is no 100% safe way to do this without the risk of losing either some rankings or traffic, but this was what the hreflang tag was created to help mitigate.

Would it recognize it's the same it knew, just in another language when using the hreflang and would just display the german language now in the german results without mainly affecting the rank?

This is certainly what should happen. Say you move the English version to /en/ and keep the German version on the original URLs (which Google currently sees as being in English), you'd use the hreflang tag on the German content, with the tag pointing to the /en/ subfolder to say "the English language stuff you're used to seeing is over here now." Are you comfortable targeting the English language to one particular country or would you prefer to keep it as non-specific English content?

If you do it the other way around, moving the German content to /de/, you'd still place the hreflang tag on the default URLs (which in this case, would be in English), and Google should rank the new URLs in Germany because it is being told that those URLs are for German audiences.

None of this is a certainty though - the hreflang tag seems to work really well on newly developed content and I am sure Google can make it work in this case, but I don't have any case studies or anecdotes that involve a similar scenario.

As the others have said, redirecting domains with no backlinks (and even domains with just a few backlinks) will likely not be useful at all in terms of making the destination website rank better.

I dealt with a client a few years ago who literally had thousands of parked domains, all with names somewhat related to their industry (for example, if they were in the sports betting industry, they owned thousands of domains like expertfootballbets.net). We completed a backlink crawl for each of these domains and threw out those with no links or too few links, first checking that there were none with particularly catchy names in the list.

Then, we filtered through to find those that actually had good or passable links and decent names. The remaining list was pretty short. We sought (with budget) to build actual sites on those domains. They were basically affiliate sites for want of a better description: they were not "microsites" in that they didn't take away from the business of the main domain and the content wouldn't have been better off on the main site. From the many thousands we started with, I think our build list was about 30 sites, which was appropriate for the content and industry.

I would imagine that most parked domain lists would end up with far fewer than 30 workable websites.

Obvious misspellings or old company names should be redirected, but for usability purposes.

It's much more work, but actually using the domains is much more useful in the long run, if that's possible, than just redirecting. As altecdesign says above, you're better off reinvesting the hosting / registration elsewhere for domains that have no other noticeable value.

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?

If you have been hit with one of the most recent updates, there may be no sign in your Webmaster Tools account like there would be if you had been handed a manual penalty for spam. Has anything stabilised for the site over the weekend? Check your Webmaster Tools account for any mention of a penalty, just in case more is explained in there. However, many sites' rankings changed significantly over the past week due to Panda and Google's "payday loans" changes.

There is no magic number of frequency of links that will secure you good, long-term high rankings. Richard is right, you shouldn't consider link building as a painting-by-numbers game where you decide on a number of links from one type of source and fill these numbers into a chart as the links are built.

Check out the link building category on the Moz blog. It contains years worth of high-quality content about creative, sustainable link development ideas.

Please keep in mind that "social bookmarking" is a very outdated technique. Depending on what you actually plan on doing, a lot of these links may be nofollowed as well, making their usefulness for SEO purposes negligible.

There's no direct evidence that over-doing your internal commercial linking (i.e. linking with your primary keyword internally in a site) causes problems, but it certainly doesn't look professional to continually link to your car insurance page with the anchor text "car insurance". There has been some speculation that internal linking like this can cause issues, but I haven't seen it tested or proven yet in the way that having too many inbound links like this has been tested / confirmed.

I would certainly not overdo this sort of linking despite there being no solid evidence that I am aware of, partially because of the unprofessional vibe it gives a page (related to everything David has mentioned above) and partially because I am sure it sends sub-optimal signals to Google regardless of whether it is considered a ranking factor.

The guys here are all correct - you can handle these in WMT with parameter handling, but as every piece of text about parameter handling states, handle with care. You can end up messing things up big-time if you block areas of the site you do want crawled.

You'll also have to wait days / longer for Google to acknowledge the changes and reflect these in its index and in WMT.

If it's an option, look at using the canonical tag to self-reference: this means that if the CMS creates multiple pages with the same file on different URLs, they'll all point back to the original URL.

Hi Kyle,

I would probably only include the URLs that have been translated in the hreflang sitemap, unless the English content that hasn't been translated can be assigned to one territory / language, e.g. en_us or en_gb, etc.

If the pages that haven't been translated are otherwise linked-to throughout the site and are present in a regular sitemap, they will be found. I am not 100% sure that leaving them out of the hreflang sitemap is the way to go, so I will leave this question open for other people to reply as well. However, I'd say that if you wanted English language content to serve internationally because it has not been translated, it would be a mistake to target it to one English-language speaking area via hreflang.

What you sort a list of web directories and only use ones with high PR and DA?

Well, if I were going the directory route I'd first look at the relevancy of each directory to what I'm selling, meaning that I'd look specifically for sites in my niche. From those, I'd use PR and DA to determine strength and possible penalties (i.e. if the DA is insanely high and the PR is non-existent, perhaps steer clear). PR isn't a great metric, as it's updated infrequently and may well be sometimes obfuscated to avoid it being used as a link-selling metric but comparing it to other things like number of links and Moz figures can be useful still.

I'd then progress to more generic directories that had categories relevant to me and do the same thing - order them in terms of perceived strength and likelihood that their intended user-base was interested in what I sold.

From the directories I chose, I'd look very carefully through their links - you're judged on who you're linked to alongside, so get rid of any that link to what you'd call low-quality sites, parked domains, etc.

I would be willing to bet that sites with good rankings who have gone in for directory SEO are ranking largely because of other factors, as directories are not something Google likes to put a lot of weight into anymore, and has become better at picking out. And as "holistic" as it sounds, I'd choose directories based off of whether I'd want to be listed there if SEO didn't exist. It's just a case of this tactic having been used so many times for spammy purposes that search engines end up devaluing it or being quite suspicious of it.

What is the difference between web directories and page where donors/sponsors are mentioned with anchor text and dofollow link?

Not very much in that a Google rep would likely tell you that sponsors / donors' links should be nofollowed because money changed hands in establishing the relationship. But this will likely be just one page on a website, and for many businesses the number of links won't be astronomically high. If the outbound link numbers are very high, they might attract webspam team attention. As an SEO, I've done FAR more to encourage sponsor linking than go around trying to nofollow these links, however, as have most people. We haven't got to the stage yet where Google has put out memos about this being not-white-hat, but that's what a webspam team member would likely say. I'd still not link out from a site to my sponsors using their commercial anchor text ("car insurance", "mobile phones") - I'd link with their names.

Hi Ryan,

I guess the first point here is that Google doesn't treat this sort of filtering as "penalisation"; it's just filtering two or more versions of the same content because it believes (sometimes mistakenly) that users don't need to see two versions of the same thing. This gets REALLY tricky in fields like real estate when all the aggregators in the same town have access to pretty much the same feeds or properties.

If Google were perfect, you'd put up the two pieces of identical content for all 55 millions products, and Google would serve the right one given the appropriate query, like the example above ("fridge sale san antonio" brings up the local page; "refrigerator" has your main site rank). And this might happen, because Google is getting better at these sort of query-appropriate results. We still recommend not providing dupe content solely because we can't be sure that Google will get it right.

As an aside, it would be so great if they worked on a tool for localisation in the same way that they have given us the href lang tag for internationalisation. rel="city" or similar would be awesome, especially for big countries.

Your idea about serving the content from a shared source will certainly work (iframe, text hosted on separate URL, JS etc.). The pages serving this text clearly won't be credited with that text's content, which removes its SEO value of course.

Linking internally with optimised anchor text should be fine, but be careful not to overdo this in the same manner that you would not overdo inbound links with optimised anchors.

In the last day, I've read a couple of theories about over-done internal anchor text being a common factor in sites that have recently lost rankings, but do NOT take that as gospel or even particularly important yet, as this was acknowledged by the person who said it as a very preliminary theory that they had not run proper analysis on yet. Just something to keep an eye on - I am sure the person will publish this theory if they establish that it has more merit!

The image re-usage should be fine, although it's best to use entirely unique content in both text and imagery.

Hi there,

Just adding to what has already been said here: for the longterm health of the website, I'm in favour of removing all bad links where possible rather than relying solely on disavowal, even though disavowal can and does work in the short term. My reason for this is that relying on disavowal puts the power in Google's hands to at some point say: "Well we don't really care about the content of your disavow file anymore; those links still exist so here's your penalty back again."

Likely, no. But if the links are completely gone, they can never hurt the site again.

Regarding losing the links worsening your rankings, it's possible if those links (as bad as they may have been) were not actually contributing to your penalty (yet) and were passing PageRank / helping you rank. Hopefully the SEO company were correct in marking them as bad... and even if they weren't hurting yet but were otherwise spammy, you're best rid of them in the long term.

The success rate of link removal can vary a lot. At my old agency, we had a set process of "outreach" for link removal that carefully left a certain number of days between emails to webmasters if we received no response from out initial email. We also used carefully-worded templates that we had tested enough to be confident that they worked well. We made at least three attempts to contact a webmaster for link removal.

Not much anyone - you or the SEO company - can do about being held to random for link removal. Sadly that's a popular part of the link take-down process now, as people are aware they prey on site owners' desperation to clean up their profiles.

If there are good reasons why the rest of the 100 of the domains can't be reached, this is certainly where we're lucky disavowal now exists. You are not under a manual penalty so won't be submitted reconsideration requests, but if you ever do, it's there that you'd cite your attempts to contact the X sites you've not managed to remove links from.

Hi there,

Is there a discrepancy between the number of inbound links to internal pages versus the home page when you look at the site's backlink profile via Open Site Explorer?

Any way we could look at the site? Feel free to PM me the URL if you do not want to share it publicly.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

David has covered some important points already. I wanted to point out that the URL you supplied here (www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/theft-crimes.html) 301 redirects to http://www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/san-diego-theft-crimes-attorney.html. Are you using the resolving URL to do any link building (although you say the number of inbound links to the crime pages are very low)?

If there was an older version of some of these pages and you've gone through recent redirects when moving to Wordpress, those new pages / URLs may have a hard time ranking initially.

Yeah, I'd say you need to wait and see now, since you've added a different type of link (text, absolute link rather than a relative one as is used in the logo). The home page links using the logo are fairly buried in the body of the HTML but that really shouldn't make a difference to whether WMT picks them up, unless I am missing something.

Hi there,

This definitely shouldn't be happening as you also have a link to the home page in the footer as well as in the top navigation: [http://www.konacoffeepurveyors.com/](<a class= "Kona Coffee")">Home

How does WMT report other links throughout the site, e.g. links to the blog or the Terms / Privacy pages, which are linked to in a similar way?

Fetching as Googlebot and ensuring the page is visible elsewhere on the web (marketing!) are the best ways to spur quicker crawling and indexing, as others have said. If you notice the cache date of the pages not updating and changes not making it into Google's index, it would be time to check for larger issues that might be preventing or dissuading Google from reaching the site more regularly.

You should definitely be able to ignore these as they're quite common (not specifically these websites, but these types of links). That said, if you are under penalty and can't work out which links are causing it, having cleaned up all the rest, I'd go for a disavowal. If you are 100% certain that the penalty is due to Penguin, approaching the manual webspam team isn't likely to help you at all. But getting that disavowal in before the next Penguin update (which, despite Google's updates of this week - Panda and "payday loans" - can't be far away) might help.