Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Given how strict Google is about footer links (with fairly good reason; they have been abused badly so often that footer links with good intentions get swept up in the mix), I would nofollow those links if you wish to keep them because they've brought you qualified traffic.

If the client site is otherwise quite strong, consider looking for another location to link from in a way that seems editorially-chosen and "natural". It's unfortunate that footer links have become so "poisonous", but they truly are best avoided or nofollowed.

Hi,

Can you grab the IP addresses of the visits, e.g. from server logs? It could be automated scraping - Googling some of the IPs will shed some light on that if that is the case, as folks will have posted about this on other forums and cited some of the IPs. If it's a scraper, it might identify itself via an ISP name as well, e.g. when Facebook crawls a page, it IDs itself and the crawl usually comes from Palo Alto or Menlo Park, California.

Coming from solely Miami and Chicago sounds suspicious or at least like automation - if this was natural US traffic, you would expect more geographical diversity, even if there was something that particularly interested people in those towns about your site.

Andy is 100% right about images too, at which point you can move the images to another file location.

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.

you're are going to need some keyword anchor text from followed links - but not an unnatural amount!

Yeah the ratio of what you need is crazily small right now - I've seen sites with some amazingly good rankings in competitive spaces with nearly blanket brand / miscellaneous anchors, but of course the sources from which they obtain these links are largely relevant to their competitive market / keyword. Like Mailchimp - 10,000 unique linking domains linking with "mailchimp" (plus many more variations below); 28 linking with "email marketing" (all from some questionable badges, mind you) / SERPs right now. The commercial terms will pop up naturally from time to time and that's fine, but to be honest, we'd stopped seeking or being happy about deliberate competitive anchor text a while ago.

Hi Fabio!

I can't find any good updated information on this either, so I am marking it as Discussion to get the conversation going. From what Pete said on the other post two years ago, it sounds like they may pick it up in a similar way to how Google does: with recognition, but will ignore it if it doesn't make sense.

It would be good to hear from people who have implemented this and seen results in Bing, if anyone has experience with this.

I would look at them for the entire backlink profile, but pay more attention to the followed links when it comes to something like anchor text distribution. Here's why:

If I were Google and I were looking at a car insurance website, and I saw that it had 200 followed links with brand mentions, URLs as anchor text, "click here", etc., then that looks fairly good. However, if the site also has 400 links with "cheap car insurance" as anchor text, does that look somewhat like the site has been doing something like comment spamming? Yup, it does. They make up a telling part of the profile and Google would be silly not to take them into consideration, but they should not directly affect site authority in the way followed links do.

Keep in mind that DA scores are a Moz metric and whilst Moz attempts to replicate how Google operates to the best of its ability, it isn't a Google figure so can't be relied upon to show how Google views a site's authority.

If you've been penalised, I'd most certainly start with removing followed links that are poor in quality. I have not heard of a situation where someone has recovered from a penalty after removing nofollowed links (this doesn't mean it hasn't happened). It's the followed links that Google cracks down on if they dislike them, and the followed links that make a large difference to your rankings.

Hi there,

I am not sure which fix will stop Moz from flagging this, but just in case it is also being picked up by Google, are you able to serve the canonical tag on domain.com/?s=keyword and any search query pages, pointing to a generic page?

You can remove parameters from Google in Webmaster Tools as well: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en

This ensures that Google does not crawl pages with the parameter you specify, meaning they won't be an issue in its index.

Hi there,

The internal link number isn't the best metric to go on when looking at authority - if it were, you could rely on a page with 100,000 internal pages to have the best rankings because all those pages link to each other. Far more importance is placed on inbound links.

The importance of inbound links is to ensure PageRank is being properly passed around the website, especially from top pages like the home page and other strong internal pages to the page you are interested in having rank.

I am not sure why OSE wouldn't have picked up all of your pages - I take it that those 400+ pages are not indexed in OSE at all?

Hi again David,

I haven't heard of this particular company - could be good if the 40 penalties stat is true, but get your research in and you should be fine.

Also check out the Recommended Providers list - there could be some good options on there too.

That's such an interesting point, because it happened a few years ago. Check this out: this story went up on Search Engine land in 2010 about a company that appeared to be seeking negative publicity because the brand mentions looked like they were helping the company rank - http://searchengineland.com/googles-gold-standard-results-take-hit-new-york-times-57081

Google didn't take kindly to that. http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

http://searchengineland.com/the-decor-my-eyes-fiasco-local-reviews-tactics-57725

http://searchengineland.com/no-you-cant-rank-well-just-by-cultivating-terrible-reviews-57333

The bloke involved ended up in prison.  http://searchengineland.com/decormyeyes-merchant-vitaly-borker-sentenced-to-four-years-in-federal-prison-132434

So yep, Google attempts to decide on intent in mentions as well, and I would guess that they have worked hard on that since the DecorMyEyes fiasco, which was a few years ago now. They definitely need to be careful that companies who are often talked about negatively don't benefit from it, although there are some examples of largely negative press companies doing quite well after those companies are also often linked to - Ryanair does crazy-well (even though they claim to only have just started doing SEO last year) with mostly negative press.

My former agency did a good study on the travel industry a couple of years ago - see the PDF here. This screenshot shows the companies in the UK flights industry who were performing best in June 2011. Ryanair was the best-ranked airline, outperforming "legit" airlines. I see you're in the UK so you don't need it explained to you why that's pretty crazy!

I can't get into Ayima's system to see how Ryanair perform today, but they're still page 1 for a few of the high value keywords I checked.

Suffice to say it's a difficult task for Google, but since they created and subsequently are trying to destroy the linking ecosystem, they need to work hard on it.

Hi,

You don't need to redirect at all (with a 301 or otherwise) if the canonical tag is in place. So don't worry about that at all - both URLs can load together if the canonical tag points Google from the "duplicate" to the "correct / canonical" one. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I am not sure the frequency of Moz's crawling or if you can force a refresh, I'm sorry.

Hi,

Hard to say, but it definitely won't have helped. As Bryan says, you've split authority between over twice the number of pages the site should have, and Google can take action against sites that produce a large amount of duplicate content. I'd get the canonical tags in place (and thoroughly check they're set up right, as it can be a mess if they're implemented incorrectly) and check on progress over two or three weeks. If you see nothing happen, I'd say your reason for dropping could be something else.

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 there,

I'll answer these one at a time as there are a few responses to go through.

default.htm is the home page as created by the CMS, but you want to either use that URL or www.cheaptubes.com as the home page, not both.

The solution is a 301 or the canonical tag so that home page content does not appear on both URLs.

Hi Dana,

The problem when it comes to passing authority internally is that properly paginated and crawled listing pages can be one of the primary routes via which Google finds and assigns authority to internal pages. Unless those products are linked to elsewhere, they're not going to be found if they cannot be found on a URL like http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-technica?page=2, ?page=3 etc.

The lack of a unique URL with content changed dynamically also means that there never could be a good flow of authority through the site as Google does not have new pages to crawl and new outbound links to index / follow on those pages.

Your diagram is correct - the second option (Page 1 ---authority---> page 2 ----authority---> page 3... ) is what you're looking for with pagination.

Hi David,

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

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

Hi again,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best,

Jane

Hi Yoav,

I doubt this impacts your SEO as long as it isn't being seen as manipulative. I doubt that though, since the set-up is very transparent. If you want to exclude URL.com as a referrer, check out this guide.

Hey David,

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

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

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

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

Hi Alexander,

You can also check out the Google Adwords tool for keyword ideas (you don't need active AdWords campaigns; you just need to sign in with a Gmail address.

Choose the option to enter a URL and a target keyword: http://i.imgur.com/qes7S31.png

You will then be shown a panel with two options - ad group keywords (groups of keywords Google considers relevant for your query) and a full list of keywords: http://imgur.com/a/XGtEa

Google returned 800 keywords in total for this search - you can download a spreadsheet of these keywords and sort through to decide on the ones that best suit your business.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Tahir,

I would recommend against making this change actually. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the URLs. I can see that you might be considering doing a restructure that makes the type of product more prominent than the location in the subfolder hierarchy, but it isn't advisable to "stuff" keywords into the rest of the URL, e.g. awnings-canopies-brooklyn-NYC.

The existing structure, from my point of view, looks more professional and should not hinder the site's rankings. What is the reason why you're wanting to make the change?

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Daniel,

Whether these links are all okay or should be removed depends on what else the sites link to, and what else they get up to besides linking to you - if they have been picked off for spam tactics (either linking out, inbound links, on-page spam, etc.) then you'd want to avoid having them link to you, even if they are otherwise genuine industry partners. Sadly some legitimate businesses also run less-than-clean websites from time to time. I would ask the agency who provided your link report for an explanation as to why they placed some of these industry partners in a "remove" category - they may have some very good reasons, or they may have mistaken the intent of the links. I would say that even if they are mistaken, both you and the agency need to ask yourselves if there's a chance Google might also mistake these genuine links as manipulative or unnatural. Unfortunately that can happen as well, but if you are filing for reconsideration you can always explain that x, y and z links have arisen due to a mutual respect / partnership that does not carry with it a commercial benefit to either company in direct relation to the link.

Google has been extremely authoritarian over the last few months about links, and there's a possibility that they'd say a partnership link wasn't "natural" because it had commercial intent. Sometimes it's damn hard to figure out exactly what they mean by "natural". It's incredibly frustrating.

However, backing up again to where you're at right now, I would say that you need an explanation and thorough analysis of why genuine links have been flagged. You never know, the agency might have found something that's actually going to save your next reconsideration request.

Hi there,

This could definitely be a case of both non-www and www URLs resolving, but I'd like to echo the guys above me and ask for more information - if you could share the actual examples, either on here or in a private message, it would be easier to find why Moz has found twice the number of URLs your site should have.

Thanks,

Jane

Hi Carl,

Dana has a brilliant answer here, but I'll add a couple more things:

Links are still a heavy part of the ranking algorithm, but it's absolutely clear that Google wants to move away from this reliance, simply because link building has been scaled so effectively by so many people that it is not a true measure of impartial authority anymore. I'm sure they would love to rely on social signals as this is people talking about what they like, don't like and do in a candid fashion, but Google doesn't have the ability to infiltrate the most valuable social network for this (Facebook) yet, and they probably never will.

As such, they still need to rely on what is posted on the rest of the web, and citations / "mentions" seems a good place to start. It has long been true that they seem to look at "links" that are not link but simply cited URLs (e.g. if I write out http://www.site.com/, this CMS doesn't link to it but Google crawls this page and sees the URL). This is plainly obvious if you are checking a site's 404 errors through Webmaster Tools - I have seen a lot of "404s" that aren't links: Google reports a broken link in WMT and shows you where the link is placed on the third party site; you visit that site and see that it is not a link, but simply a URL written out like the example here.

Does PageRank pass "through" that "link"? Impossible to tell exactly how Google deals with those from an authority point of view, but they see it. And they would clearly be wrong to ignore data like this, so we can expect that such citations are at least factored into how a site appears to Google.

It's also likely that they take into account mentions of a brand name in a similar way, and links that are nofollowed. It's impossible to say how, but I would certainly like to guess that 100 mentions from authoritative sources (including many newspapers that do not link out, as a rule) are more likely to increase a site's authority than 100 links from questionable or lower-quality sources.

Hi,

If you have a page on a certain procedure, a blog post about that procedure should aim to expand on the existing content rather than repeat it in an attempt to create fresh content. You're naturally going to mention the same topics, but this is normal and Google sees "similar" content all over the web all the time. What you'd be looking to do with a blog to make it both useful for search engines and people, is take a topic where you have basic information on a "product" page and consider exploring the following for a blog post (please excuse a lack of surgery knowledge here!):

1. Gather the latest medical research on the procedure and talk about how it has changed over time
2. Go into more detail about how a procedure is different for men and woman (if it is) and what needs to be considered when treating patients
3. Tips for how to maximise results after the procedure is complete
4. Common recovery issues and how to resolve them or watch out for them

Any new or different information you can include will add to the status of the blog post as a new, relevant piece of content, rather than something that has been repurposed from a product page.

You can link internally in the way described above, but make sure you're always linking with the intention of explaining what the linked-to page is about, rather than with the idea that you are trying to manipulate how search engines view the page.

Agree with Brad and Andy here - if you can keep this content within the same site, expanding and perhaps restructuring what you already have, that would be better.

Some large corporates (think HSBC, Aviva, etc.) have a corporate site and a customer-facing site - and even then, it can get them into difficulty when the "wrong" site outranks the right one for certain content, like the brand name. In the case of big corporates, it's usually bad for business when a corporate site outranks the customer site, and this happens with annoying regularity to some of them. If it's possible to have all the content on one site, that site's home page is going to be virtually guaranteed to rank for brand terms, rather than there be a battle between a .com and a .co.uk, for example, for some queries.

If your current CMS does not have the capability of building a larger site on your domain, consider investing in a new CMS as long as it makes sense to host both types of content on the one domain / site.

Hi Claudio,

To the question of "is it dangerous to start with similar content to the old site", I would say that it's very hard to tell. Some sites in some niches all have very similar content (think or real estate aggregator sites in the same cities - it's not as if they have access to different properties on the same market - they generally list the same houses for sale and rent at any one time). However, Google is ver adept at processing text to understand it if has been recycled or "spun" from other content it has seen before. If the original content came from a severely penalised website, re-using it in this manner would definitely not be risk-free.

You would probably also want to take the old site offline completely as opposed to simply noindexing its pages if you were to do this.

Google understands very "similar" content due to content spinning having been such a popular way to create content in previous years. If you can re-work your existing content to be of a fairly different length (shorter or longer), take a different paragraph structure, and be placed on the new site that is very dissimilar to the old one in terms of structure, this may work out well. I cannot say that this is risk free however, for all the reasons Casey has brought up already.

Hi Dana,

Just to be clear, what I'm seeing is that if I visit a page like http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/led-stage-lights with 107 products, and I click "next", I do not receive the same URL with different products, but rather the URL changes to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher with the next set of results. I think I'm just being blind, but how did you block that URL from crawling and indexing? I can't see a meta tag or a line in the site's robots.txt file.

This set-up definitely needs a modern pagination solution - glad Ryan's post at Ayima helped! This current set-up is definitely very detrimental to passing authority throughout the site to all products effectively.

Hi Denise,

You should be safe to redirect back to the original domain - two months is long enough for Google to have completely indexed the new site and assigned it rankings, but a 301 redirect generally takes care of this and reverses the situation back to its original state. It's not optimal - optimal would have been never doing this in the first place unfortunately - but you do need to complete the redirect back again because the original site is now thought of as the new site, as far as Google is concerned. You need the 301 to say "hey Google, we're not on pmd.com anymore, we're over on brand.com!" just as you did the first time, when you changed the pmd.com two months ago.

Again, it's not optimal because they fewer redirects a domain / site can go through the better, but I'd class this sort of redirect for keywords as damaging and not something you want to keep around.

I hope this helps!

Best,

Jane

Wow, I had never heard of this method of sorting before! Is this something you plan on keeping?

I would not be surprised if this is somewhat related to why Google sometimes finds and ranks some products, only to drop them for others. If the CMS serves it a different canonical version of the website every time it visits, it will index different products at different times.

The subsequent paginated pages are canonicalised back to the first page, but do you have unique product pages still returning 200 OK? I take it you do, due to the wording of your question but just to clarify: To use Amazon as an example, if a page like this is paginated, is a product page it links to still available even if it is listed on a deeper paginated page? If so, Google won't necessarily drop the product page if it doesn't see it linked to by the paginated listing pages, but it might do if it never sees it again due to pagination and canonicalisation. So you might end up with a situation where Googlebot found the Glastonbury coffee mug in January, keeps ranking it well for a few months, has not seen it again by April and drops it. But a white coffee mug set was found a few times in March, so it ranks that instead.

Have a look at this pagination post from one of my former colleagues as well - it has some comprehensive solutions to ecommerce pagination problems.

If you're actively link building to those pages from external sites using that sort of optimised anchor text.  You'd want to stop that immediately. Internally, there's not a pressing need to do this, but I would stick to a rule of natural flow: is the anchor naturally integrated into the sentence, and would the text be there if you didn't want the link to be there?

In general, I'd definitely stay away from doing this in every post you write. Only do it sporadically and only if it truly makes sense to the flow of the text. If it looks in any way unnatural, don't link like that. You can pass just as much authority around a site using "click here" as you do with "voucher codes" and you avoid looking like your internal optimisation is too search-engine focused if this sort of linking is not too common.

Hi Alexander,

Check out Who Is Hosting This - it's a large community with a lot of reviews, comparisons, etc. Commercially it refers visitors to hosts, but is otherwise impartial (there are links to hosts with good and bad reviews). The "compare" feature might be useful for you: http://i.imgur.com/wyyITPL.png

I hope this helps!

Jane

Hi Nitida,

Would it be possible for you to show me the URL in question? Feel free to PM it to me if you do not want it to be public. This may help me answer the question better.

Cheers,

Jane

Quite a few answers here that can be endorsed

Basically, footer links have been abused shamelessly in the past, when they were a good way of including juice-passing links to whomever you liked without many people seeing the links. Big sites still do it and still get away with it, but we've long known that all is not fair in SEO and Amazon can sometimes get away with things that small companies cannot.

Nofollowing footer links is the safe way out, especially if you want to keep the links for branding purposes.

Hi there,

You may have a more complex pagination issue. My former colleague wrote a good guide to this sort of e-commerce pagination / canonicalisation problem a few months ago. It may qualify as one of the non-boring reads on the subject Do you see a solution here that looks good for you? - http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

Hi,

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

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

Hi there,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best,

Jane

Hi Denise,

I have to say that the rebrand strategy worries me too. There was a good need to have a domain name like this in 2006 / 7 or so, but it's very unnecessary now and verges on dangerous if it is seen to be a spammy move. It also reflects quite poorly from a usability point of view - if a brand-name regional insurance company like Pemco (http://www.pemco.com/) for example, and you change your domain to www.seattlecarinsurance.com, it doesn't look particularly professional.

I would definitely avoid making this change across social media as well. Is there any other reason besides SEO that this domain change was made in the first place? If not, I strongly suggest changing this back to the original name because there is unlikely to be any SEO benefit in doing this at all.

Hi Claudio,

I would echo the guys above in saying that it sounds like you could do more to revoke the penalty on the original site. If you begin anew, I would definitely not 301 the old domain (not that it sounds like you were going to), but I'd also invest in completely new content, rather than duplicating the old content. Google's ability to track duplicate content is amazingly good, so even a noindex on the old content could still have G draw a connection between content it penalised in the past and the new site.

Moosa is absolutely correct that it is better (and unfortunately much harder) to remove bad links than it is to just disavow them. Google's spam team often appreciate genuine effort to remove links - disavowal appears to work best if you have been unsuccessful in your link removal and can prove that you got in touch with as many sites as possible (screenshots of emails unanswered or answered unfavourably, for instance).

The other very good thing about removing links is that they can never hurt you again in the future if Google one day decides to change the way it views previous disavowals... which we certainly can't count on it not doing.

Hi,

If you want those pages to be indexed and rank well, and there is a possibility of duplicate content between the secured and non-secured versions (or other content), you should implement the tag. Google crawls HTTPS pages (a simple search for inurl:HTTPS will show the extent of this), although if the pages are behind check-outs or log-ins, blocked by robots.txt, etc. and otherwise not available for crawling, there is no need to use the tag.

Hi again,

Sorry it has taken a few days to get back to you. I replied in the other thread about ccTLDs versus using one site. Some additional info: in general, you will have an easier time using the subfolder structure recommended in the other question (again, as long as there are no factors which make it important to have country-specific domains). The Singapore / Indonesian sections of the website will naturally inherit authority because they sit on the strong .com. Just being linked to by the .com isn't enough to give them such a large boost.

Apple uses this strategy for internationalisation: http://www.apple.com/uk/ for the UK, http://www.apple.com/nz/ for New Zealand, http://www.apple.com/sg/ for Singapore and so forth.

On the other hand, BlackBerry uses subdomains: http://uk.blackberry.com/ and http://sg.blackberry.com/.

Amazon obviously uses ccTLDs.

All of these domains are hellishly strong in their own rights; traditionally it has been thought of as best to use one site like Apple does if you are no a mammoth already. However, you can make other options work with good link development. I think in your case, one domain is something to seriously consider.

Hi Adam,

Would you be comfortable sharing the site and the queries involved with me? You can PM them to me if you'd rather - I can take a look at the backlink profile to see if something telling lies there.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi again,

This is definitely an option - you would probably be best to consider www.name.com/sg/, www.name.com/id/ instead of subfolders however, because subfolders can often be treated like separate sites, just like totally separate domains are. Subfolders tend to inherit much more of the authority of the parent site.

This is something to consider, especially if there is no good reason (like regulations in different countries or local markets with people who particularly like domains targeting them personally) for them to remain separate.

It's good practice, especially if you are operating a CMS that can create accessible URLs that cause duplicate content problems, create "junk" pages, etc. For example: http://www.asos.com/robots.txt

Google dislikes search results pages being indexed, so you can block those off, e.g. http://moz.com/robots.txt

You can disallow the archive.org bot if you don't want old versions of your site appearing in its search engine, and as others have said you can point to your xml sitemap.

It's not a bad resource to have at your disposal for site hygiene / maintenance reasons, but it's not an absolute necessity either.

Hi there,

I haven't seen this personally - would you be able to include (or PM to me) the email from the web spam team saying that it is the subdomain that is causing the problem?

Nofollowing the link could do the trick as nofollow is meant to make Google essentially ignore the link, but I am curious about their rationale behind a manual penalty due to linking to your own subdomain.

Hi Bob,

I definitely don't think there's any harm in going after more generic searches, as some potential customers will certainly be looking for information before contacting a practitioner. If you offer remote services and attract this traffic, you can likely attract these people with good conversion rate optimisation. Have you checked the volume for generic searches that do not specify a location? Are they large enough to focus on or do people generally add a location name when searching?

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,

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

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

The two responses above are good - we advise not doing redirects unless they are truly necessary due to some people's experience with ranking problems that are hard to fix (i.e. redirection shouldn't be carried out "just because", for aesthetic purposes that aren't important, etc.). However, if the redirection is necessary and it is done properly (check out those resources TrentonM11 linked to) you should be able to complete it with very little problem, as Anirban says.

Hi there,

If you have the potential to acquire movieguide.com, that's a great domain name. That said, you're right that this is a crazy competitive space and some of the competitors are giants like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes!

One option is to buy the .com and redirect it to the .org. If you engage in offline advertising (magazines, on the subway, etc.), you could use the .com because it does look more professional. You could have the .org continue to be the resolving website, after the .com is 301 redirected.

We are always hesitant to recommend redirection (especially of an entire domain) if you don't have to due to the risk of lost rankings. The rankings are usually not too hard to get back, but it's never a sure thing.