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Hi there,
Assuming that http://northernheights.co.uk/ is the previous website, it's still clearly indexed / returning a 200 OK server response - no 301 redirect has been put in place.
http://**www.**northernheights.co.uk/ redirects, but you need to redirect the non-www version too. This could be halting indexation of the new site because Google can still find it in the old location.
Agreed with Martijn about the footer, best get rid of that 
Agreed that link building and therefore increasing the trust / authority of the website are the hardest or most time consuming parts of marketing a website in search right now. You may not see the results of good links immediately - it can take months for rankings to rise as a result of good link building, and the bar for "good link building" is very high right now.
Hi there,
Definitely agree with Anirban here - The site doesn't have a good collection of high-quality backlinks from diverse sources (as per Open Site Explorer): http://i.imgur.com/cplbcne.png
You need to clean up the backlinks and build a lot of new ones from authoritative sources - check out the link building category on the blog here to begin with - there are years of great link development content in there that should come in handy!
Cheers,
Jane
Hi Mark,
As Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates, so if you were dealing with English language, I believe you would use en-AE for tags like the rel="alternate" tag.
Hi Darcy,
If one is using adwords and finds hundreds of related terms, how best to broaden the pages appeal to that large number of other terms?
Generally, Google is quite good at understanding semantics, related terms and meaning, and can deduce (for example) that "zesty pizza sauce" might be a good page for someone who searches for "spicy pizza sauce", even though the two aren't exactly the same thing. For instance, take a search I did this morning: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=iphone+holder+for+car&oq=iphone+holder+for+car&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2j69i60j0l2.324j0j9&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8
The first two results have "mount" boldened instead of "holder", because in this instance Google understands that although I searched for "holder", "mount" is the same thing.
To add to the likelihood that Google will pick up a page for relevant terms, you need a decent amount of text content (nothing crazy, but let's say a hundred words or so describing the pizza sauce and its ingredients, including "spices" or similar related terms to the adjectives like "spicy" you'd also like the page to be relevant for).
There is no great return in trying to make one page rank for absolutely everything. Taking another example, SimplySwim's competition page ranks for [racing swimwear] (http://www.simplyswim.com/departments/PopularSearches/CompetitionSwimwear.aspx) but its home page ranks for the similar query of [training swimsuit]. Whether you are looking at just one page for a wide range of queries or multiple pages should be decided on a case by case basis, but a good rule is to decide whether some terms are synonyms or similar enough in meaning / intent to make one resource suitable for a user. In the case of zesty versus spicy, perhaps. Training versus racing swimwear, no.
Radically changing rankings are normal for a new site, or a site with little authority. Established sites with good off-page optimisation rank more steadily, holding the same or similar rankings week after week.
We would need to see your site to decide if you had an over-optimisation problem, but I find that unlikely - the ranking issues you describe sound more like the site lacks strength. Generally, social media sharing, bookmarking and forum promotion are not enough to make a big difference, especially in more competitive markets.
Hi Eduardo,
Ah - I understand. I don't see this as being a problem - many internal links like this have many thousands of links pointing to them internally and Google understands that this is the nature of internal linking. If you crawl a few other larger sites, including this one, with a service like ScreamingFrog (you'd need the paid version to see the full site crawl), you'll see that resources like this blog are linked to thousands of times, since there are thousands of blog posts from years ago, articles, tool pages, indexed Q&A pages etc.
Cheers,
Jane
Hi Michael,
Ah - that's different yes. You would want to be doing this with CSS, with the collapsed content available in HTML. Google and other search engines don't regularly execute js so would likely not see the content. Manual investigation would let a webspam team member see that you're not hiding anything maliciously, but it's not a risk you want to take.
Can you do this with CSS?
Cheers.
Hi Eduardo,
The use of the hreflang tag, also called the rel="alternate" tag, is perfect for what you are trying to do. This post talks about how the tag works and suggests various URL structures that work best.
Another good resource about the tag is here.
Regarding the links to the blog, are you saying that there will be a link to domain/de/blog/, even if you do not have a German blog, linked to from the German section of the site?
Hi Jason,
To add to what Yusuf has said, is there a specific reason why the whole site has to use SSL, rather than just the parts of the website where sensitive information is passed? If so, I would be tempted to recommend that the e-commerce pages (products, categories, etc.) remain on HTTP URLs.
Cheers,
Jane
Hi there,
Have you looked into the SEO guides available here on Moz? There are a lot of important on and off page factors to get right in order to gain good rankings. Have a look at the Beginner's Guide to SEO - it is not specifically about forums, but all the points included are important and count for what you're looking to do.
As Chris says, you need to look a off-page optimisation as well. It is very difficult to have a site rank well with little or no off-page work. Check out the link development category on the blog as well - there are years of great content about off-page work in there.
Cheers,
Jane
Hi Michael,
I am not sure what you are looking for in terms of evidence, but this is a widely accepted and often implemented tactic for web design purposes, and this will not get you into trouble unless a) you are "hiding" huge amounts of text (many, many times bigger than the page itself), or b) if the text has nothing to do with the content of the page that is available on page load. An FAQ with expandable answers should always be fine, but consider providing the first sentences of the answer on page load if possible.
Hi there,
Cloudfront really should be blocking Google's indexing of its hosted contact - have you contacted the company about this? I am not familiar with their service, but content hosted to deliver to sites like yours should not be available for indexation, especially since the problem is rather large: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fd2rf6flf4rky1l.cloudfront%2F&oq=http%3A%2F%2Fd2rf6flf4rky1l.cloudfront%2F&aqs=chrome..69i58j69i57.677j0j4&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8
Hi Kanmin,
This does not mean that anything has been approved, just that Google has received the disavow file.
This links to information on how to submit a reconsideration request. You will hear back from Google after you submit this (within a few weeks, most likely) if your penalty was manual and that penalty has been lifted. If the penalty was algorithmic, you will not hear back - you would only see the site's ranking and traffic improve.
Cheers,
Jane
Hi Beth,
To echo Andrew, I would be keen to know if your rankings and traffic have also dropped in similar places, rather than just "impressions", which I am assuming you are taking from Webmaster Tools? Impressions being the number of times a site appears, rather than how many clicks it receives. The impressions data from Webmaster Tools is often not regarded as particularly reliable, whilst Google Analytics data is much more reliable and trustworthy.
Are you running ranking reports through Moz Analytics? I'd be keen to know if the drop tied in with any ranking difficulties.
Cheers,
Jane
Hi Adam,
Just looking at the circumstances again, I'd be surprised if Google thinks your site is targeted for the UK - page 8 is a long way back in the SERPs are you often see otherwise irrelevant results that far back, including results intended for other countries.
Have you received any messages in Webmaster Tools recently about the site, including any notifications of penalties?
Hi Kimberly,
Sorry this question has gone so long without a reply: I've just been directed to it.
If the internal links to /default.asp (relative links) result in a 301 redirect, taking people to www.site.com/, there is technically no problem with that set-up. It would be better if the links pointed directly to www.site.com/ as a small amount of authority is lost in a 301 redirect, but is not disastrous by any means.
I am not sure that updating internal links to point to www.site.com/page.asp instead of /page.asp is the solution to the home page will solve this problem though - did you manually update the relative links to absolute links that have been fixed?
Hi Darcy,
Are you asking how to better optimise the page for terms related to the core keyword? Just trying to be clear on what you're needing with that.
If that's the goal, I would use the Google Adwords keyword research tool to find related terms. If you haven't seen the interface yet, a query will bring up hundreds of related terms ([pizza recipes] brings up 801 related searches, but you'd need to do a quick sort through to get rid of terms with very low search volume or terms that aren't really relevant):<a> http://i.imgur.com/9TIhZRv.png</a>
I'd then manually review the page / section of the website for opportunities to write about or expand on the most valuable terms, and use the page grading tool within Moz Analytics to take a look at how well the pages are optimised for each high-priority term you choose.
Cheers,
Jane
Hey Carl,
Eek, that's not good. If the affiliate sites had other things in common with your main businesses as well (registration information, for example), Google can easily take action against sites it considers to be in the same network as spam. They can and have blacklisted IPs in the past. They can appear almost vindictive in this manner. Former Mozzer Matt Inman had his entire network of sites wiped out after engaging in questionable link building practices on a few of them. He wrote about it here. It was a while ago but still relevant.
Do you know what would have triggered the pure spam penalty?
I'm not getting jofdallin.co.uk to load at all: http://i.imgur.com/Z4R4QyD.png
Hi Darcy,
I see what you're saying.
My former company did this internally - the process we used was for competitive analysis, but it did provide an estimated traffic score for ALL the relevant keywords in a niche or an entire market. I wrote a little about this process at the beginning of this blog post, so you might find it helpful for a general idea on the subject. Sadly they do not provide this tool for external use: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/competitive-backlink-analysis.html
So - we were estimating the amount of traffic a site could expect to receive in the pizza sauce market by doing the following things:
HOWEVER: this has proven to be NOT an exact science by any means for true traffic. The use of these reports was more to compare sites' visibility to each other: it's not likely that rightmove.co.uk received 315,000 visits from organic search in the month we ran this report. However, findaproperty.com probably did receive around 80% of rightmove.co.uk's organic traffic based upon their difference in visibility. The actual numbers could well have been lower or higher.
Unfortunately, this is the best method I know of for looking at traffic potential across an entire market. SearchMetrics does a similar market share job as Ayima's internal tool, but again it is for the purpose of site performance review rather than keyword traffic prediction.
Google has recently made this super easy: check out the rel="alternative" or "href lang" tag, as it is often called. You can provide the "same" content for UK, US, Aus and not run into duplicate content problems.
The same goes for Spanish in lots of countries, French, German for Germany and Austria, etc. Very handy.
He can certainly buy both domains and that would be a good option (301 one to the other), but he will likely need to serve different stores or dynamically change pricing etc. due to the different currencies and possible shipping / returns differences. It's also worth noting that if he's targeting North America, some of their spelling is different to Australia (US vs. British English).
He can use the href lang tag to show Google that even though both stores are in English, one is English for the US and one is English for Australia, one is Spanish for Spain and one is Spanish for Mexico, etc.
HI Carl,
The traffic issue will definitely be due to your server problems, rather than a loss of rankings - I would guess that you are still seeing no traffic in GA due to the lag in reporting time. Are things back to normal now?
If you are not running ranking reports in Moz Analytics, have you run some test searches on terms you know you normally rank for to see if the site is still there?
A site has to be performing badly for a fairly extended period to lose all of its rankings, although it is best practice to serve 500s instead of 404s if the site is going to be down entirely (sounds like yours were up, just very slow). A 404 instructs Google that the requested resource is gone forever; 500 is an error message and indicates that the resource will return.
If your site was loading okay but just taking a very long time, I definitely doubt that this could cause ranking issues.
Hi Darcy,
What are you using to determine how many visits you get from a particular term? Google is no longer showing the vast majority of referring keyword data, so I just wanted to be clear on how you're determining how many visits a term brings (I assume you are looking at the total organic traffic to the page, hence mentioning related terms).
Hi Audra,
Eric is right - it's generally easier to rank in Bing, with its engine behaving somewhat like we remember Google being a few years ago. The standard for links is a little lower, and if you have questionable links in your backlink profile, you're unlikely to get away with it in Google the way you can in other engines. It's not uncommon to see results like this, so I'd start looking closely at your backlinks and perhaps look at taking down those that potentially violate Webmaster Guidelines.
Samuel's three questions are really good and are exactly what you should be thinking about. I am not so sure that you're directly asking for trouble by getting this link in "followed" format, although a Google rep would say that those links should be nofollowed.
Definitely only do this if you believe you should be getting this link regardless of whether it passes authority. I say this due to it being a link on a directory - they're notoriously iffy for SEO, but obviously there are directories where you SHOULD be listed for marketing's sake. Because this is visibly paid and followed, beware of any alternate intent Google might assign to listed businesses.
Hi there,
Have you geo-targeted the site to Australia in Webmaster Tools (assuming that Australia is the only market you want to rank very well in, i.e. target market)?
Google handles special characters in URLs, titles, etc. just fine now - a page like http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Château_de_Versailles uses the proper accent on the a, and is displayed properly in modern browsers as well as in Google's results.
There should be no impact on rankings, although it's safe to say that best practice would include using the proper characters, as they certainly benefit usability.
Hi there,
Since Domain Authority is a Moz metric, it is not affected by CTR due to Moz not being able to determine or collect this sort of data.
As far as CTR and PPC influencing search rankings goes, there are good reasons why Google would not rely on either metric too intently. For one, it would be very easy to mimic a very bad bounce rate on a competitor's site: set bots to click on search results to a competitor website, click straight out.
It would be a big conflict of interest for PPC to influence SEO either positively or negatively, and although none of us are naive enough to believe that Google always does everything with the best of intentions, they would be in a world of trouble if this type of behaviour were proven.
CTR and bounce rate are so easily influenced / manipulated by factors outside of quality, authority and relevancy that I assume their influence on rankings is quite low. Sure, this data is valuable to Google, but it won't be a signal that has a huge amount of relevance.
Hi Edmond,
Sure thing - it's actually very easy. I'll show you here. Log into Webmaster Tools and go to the account you want to geo-target. Click on the "settings" button where the arrow is in this screenshot:
<a>http://i.imgur.com/ziFanER.png</a>
Click "site settings": <a>http://i.imgur.com/j65txrk.png</a>
Choose "Australia" (or wherever) from the drop-down: http://i.imgur.com/6KNNOVb.png
You can only do this with non-country specific domains, so you can't geo-target a .com.au domain to the UK, etc.
You can then add site.com/nz/ as a new project in Webmaster Tools so it shows up in the initial list with all your domains. That subfolder, you target to New Zealand and so forth.
Cheers,
Jane
Hi there,
Yiannis makes some great points. Here are some more thoughts:
Are there other news outlets, forums, communities on Facebook, etc. in your space that you regularly communicate with? One reason the SEO community shares posts so often is that many people have been chatting to each other in a range of locations for years. They are not posting in a vacuum where they put up blog post links on their Facebook and Twitter pages and wait for shares - they have been contributing in various ways in a lot of places, Moz included, for so long that their peers share their work.
You will also find that there are a LOT of networks like email lists that deliberately share each other's content. They're all meant to be secret and they realistically are - no one who isn't on an individual mailing list knows about it - but if you watch social media closely enough within a niche like SEO, you can see the same people sharing each other's things. You can determine that they have either a mailing list or a private Facebook / Google group where members ask for shares. These deliberate shares always prompt "natural" shares if the content is good enough.
Getting friendly enough with people that you're included in these sorts of lists, or setting one up yourself, is a longer process that means getting involved with a lot of peers, even competitors, where they're hanging out online - talking to them on Twitter and Facebook.
At my former agency, a post on pagination - one of SEO's most "boring" subjects - got so much attention due to being well-written and shared by a few highly-followed people within SEO (including Rand from here at Moz) that it became the second-most visited page on our site behind the home page over an extended period. If we had simply been tweeting out URLs and titles, few would have read it. However, we shared it with friends and cited it where relevant and it was picked up in a big way.
I hope this helps!
Hi there,
If you are definitely planning to go global or multi-national, go with the .com. You can rank well in Australia with just a .com - go into Webmaster Tools and geo-target the domain for Australia, changing this if and when you need to. If you want to target Australia, New Zealand and the US (for example) one day, you can have sections of the website targeting each, and you can target a specific subfolder to each nation. For example, site.com/nz/ can be added as a separate project in Webmaster Tools and set to New Zealand.
I hope this helps!
Hi there,
My former agency has a good post on pagination that you might find useful: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html
You definitely want to cut down on duplicate content as much as possible - let me know if that post does the trick for the ecommerce question!
Cheers
There is definitely no need to strive for more internal links pointing from your home page unless your internal pages are suffering from being "orphaned" (not linked to from anywhere) or having very few internal / external links pointing to them. You definitely don't need 1,700 links pointing out from your home page and it's doubtful the number of links on any one page is used as a ranking factor of any particular significance.
The goal should be to pass PageRank to important parts of the website and aid usability, so if 24 links is doing that job for you, then 24 links is doing that job right.
This is a strange thing for an SEO company to say, because it's still widely accepted that good links pass PageRank / authority and add to the likelihood that a site will rank well for its chosen keywords. "Link building" itself might not be a term that fills Google with joy, but it's still a valuable way to improve a site's rankings and Google knows it. The truth lies somewhere in the middle if you want to stay white-hat: you need links, but you should acquire them in a way that does not constitute buying or being manipulative (again, if you want to stay to the letter of Google's law).
The activities they mention are fairly standard "link building" tactics though, and something like "social bookmarking" was a type of link building that lost popularity due to being ineffective nearly 10 years ago. I would have doubts about their SEO chops if they cite both link building as being out of bounds, and social bookmarking as being a good tactic!
Hi,
Sure, I can do some analysis for you - I work solely as a freelance consultant right now. If you're keen, just send me an email (jane.copland@gmail.com). I can do a competitive analysis audit for the main competitors, which could be of use!
Cheers,
Jane
Hi,
If consolidation is an option, I'd certainly consider it. What I'd be curious about is the indexation and page count of your most successful competitors. I have not worked with a coupon site personally, and I must admit that the 8,000 page number per town does concern me... however, what I'd do is run a ScreamingFrog crawl (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ - you will need to pay for the premium account at $99 to remove the 500 URL limit) for a look at competitors' websites. This will show you the response codes, canonical tags, directives, etc. that others are using. I am not a fan of the idea that if your competitors are doing it, you should do it too, but this will give you a good idea of what is working for sites who manage to rank well for both smaller terms ([jiffy lube coupon post falls]) and big terms ([kohls coupons]).
I would say that 1,000 is preferable to 8,000 if structured properly, but I'd be really keen to know what the rest of your field in vouchers / coupons looks like from an indexed / live URLs perspective.
Hi,
If possible, you can definitely 301 redirect these domains. There does not need to be active websites on the domains to do this - a redirect will tell Google that the site's content has moved to the new location, and to assign the majority of the authority from the old site / domain to the new location. It would be beneficial if you were putting something relevant to the supplementary sites' content on the new / hub site so that it's truly a case of content having moved - Google will often dull the benefit of a 301 if there is no sign that real content has moved from one location to another. This is partially to stop people from buying expired domains and redirecting them for the SEO benefit alone. If you're unable to do this however, it's still a good move to redirect the closed sites so that any SEO benefit and any type-in traffic is directed to the best location. Redirection also means that the closed sites will drop out of Google's index quickly and any relevant rankings they had that could belong to the existing site should change to the existing site quickly as well.
Hi there,
I think it's definitely important to first determine which keywords / searches / niches you think the site should be getting visits from, rather than wondering why the initial number is so low. You will need to consider what people could be searching for that the site could potentially rank well for. If the primary purpose of the website is to source work or speaking gigs, what do people looking for Ellen's services search for?
Is there significant search interest around her work from people simply looking to read? If so, what do they search for in the linguistics / grammar niches that the site should show up for but doesn't? With 25 linking root domains as shown by Open Site Explorer, is this much lower than the sites currently ranking for her primary search terms, or is it about right? Do those links go just to the home page, or to pages that should feasibly rank for the terms key to her audience?
I hope this gives you somewhere to start from - I would say that 65 organic search visits per day is fine for some blogs, but is low if there is significant search engine users interest in a topic. Start with the Google Adwords keyword research tool to look into the volumes around Ellen's subjects and see if you can pick out a good list that she should rank for. Then take a look at how the site could be better optimised, or how your off-page / PR / link building work could be better to drive traffic / rankings to those pages.
Hi Phillip,
Try using the On Page Optimization tool under "Search" in your Moz Analytics account to grade each page for the term. It could be that the internal page is better-targeted for the term, even though it's only loosely related.
It's also possible that the subpage has received a high number of links from third parties, although this is fairly rare. There is no chance that the home page is under any sort of filter or penalty from backlink activity (e.g. too many anchors with the target term used as anchor text, pointing at the home page?). Although also not terribly common, Google has been known to penalise pages but not entire websites, based upon the page's backlinks.
You can also try linking to the home page from the subpage and including the target term in the link, but not linking to the subpage from the home page.
Hi Ash,
This makes sense - I'd definitely lean towards getting some freelance or agency help, but on the surface of things, the noindex, follow meta tag could be very useful. Especially if the gateway page has no practical use from an SEO or conversion standpoint, there's no harm in either removing it from the index in this way or doing a minor restructure to get rid of it (although the first option would seem to be much simpler).
Best,
Jane
Hi,
It really is complicated - I would definitely say that you do not need to think about building links to 8,000+ pages - the well-ranked competitors won't have good links to the majority of their internal pages, but they'll engage in good marketing that brings in authority to the home page and similar high-level pages on the site. Then they'll link well, with good site structure, down through the categories. They'll also (for the most part) avoid duplication issues with canonical tags, although as you point out, some duplication within sites like this is to be expected. Due to these sites' pages being indexed and often ranking well, we have to assume that Google understands the nature of coupon sites, although you still need to be careful of site hygiene and keep a close eye on your Webmaster Tools account for crawl errors, etc.
Hi there,
The danger you face in creating tens of thousands of URLs / pages for everything on the site and allowing those pages to be indexed is that it is almost certain that these pages will essentially duplicate each other. A coupon page for deals at Olive Garden in Phoenix will not be different, besides one or two words, from a page about Olive Garden in Seattle.
This isn't stopping most of the competitors mentioned: Valpak is allowing these pages to be indexed, although I am not sure of their reach with these pages in terms of search engine performance. Users access a page like this one: http://www.valpak.com/coupons/printable/Jiffy-Lube/92048?addressId=1689472&offerId=1581320 from the main Spokane, WA page, but this URL contains a canonical tag that cuts off the ?addressId= section of the URL, leaving http://www.valpak.com/coupons/printable/Jiffy-Lube/92048. This URL is indexed: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.valpak.com%2Fcoupons%2Fprintable%2FJiffy-Lube%2F92048&oq=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.valpak.com%2Fcoupons%2Fprintable%2FJiffy-Lube%2F92048&aqs=chrome..69i58j69i60j69i57.895j0j4&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8 and I get it ranking sixth in google.com for [jiffy lube coupons post falls] (not the web's most competitive phrase, but an indicator that the site is indexed and able to rank well for "deep" pages).
MoneyMailer's pages are badly optimised - not even a descriptive title tag here: http://www.moneymailer.com/coupons/online/seattle/wa/dining/855894?pageNum=1 but the page is still indexed. That page doesn't rank for related terms, as far as I can see.
Regarding location, several are allowing URLs that do not denote location to load, with canonical tags pointing to a location-based URLs, e.g. http://www.localsaver.com/98102/Real_Estate_Agents/Windermere_Eastlake/BDSP-12576652/931434.html is accessed from the Seattle, WA page but its canonical tag points to http://www.localsaver.com/WA/Seattle/Windermere_Eastlake/BDSP-12576652/931434.html
I would imagine that location is pretty key, especially given the nature of search queries you're wanting to target, e.g. people who want a coupon for a restaurant local to themselves. If people want to walk into a specific store or restaurant with a coupon, they will note the area. Where you will see people leave the area out is when they expect to buy online, or the product is more generic than a specific store, e.g. shoes. Many sites seem to employe a combination, but those focusing on location are keeping it simple and mentioning coupons available at specific stores.
I would look to placing content in a structure that avoids duplication but keeps the site structure relatively simple, like coupons/region/category. You are seeing a lot of variation because there are multiple ways to go about this.
Hi,
Guest posting, or seeking PR on third party websites, is still going to work well for a high number of people, especially as Google gets better at determining what is natural and what is not. I believe the issue currently is that determining intent with guest posts is very difficult for Google, hence one reason why they have taken out a sweeping penalty on sites that have even looked sideways at My Blog Guest in the past few years.
The point about going for a piece whether you get a link or not is quite important, although be aware of some other points as well. If you get a post written about you on a site, in a newspaper or magazine:
There are plenty of awesome businesses that have built good rankings off of PR and will continue to do so. Google's primary challenge is also that many people who are doing guest posting for SEO really well are continuing to do it and it's impossible for Google to detect at present because it looks just like PR. In some ways, this is what Google kind of wants anyway - some "SEOs" are now producing content for links that is good enough to add value to the web, basically meaning that Google's stringency has made those posts no longer part of the problem.
Hi Ash,
To echo what Andy has said, adding a noindex / follow meta tag to a page ensures that whilst the page is not indexed, the other pages to which it links still receive PageRank / authority. Are there reasons why it is important that the category page is indexed, e.g. does it receive a decent amount of converting traffic?
Hi Aaron,
Yup - MBG will be your downfall here. You will need to remove those posts to be considered for re-inclusion and the penalty lifted. Google has only just taken this action in the last day or two, so watch our for more analysis and blog posts / commentary on the fall-out and recovery. It has affected a huge collection of sites, including some that used MBG years ago and only for two or three posts.
Cheers,
Jane
Hi,
I'm with Philip on doing this selectively. Many users find content hard to digest in the manner it was intended when they have no idea if it was written in 2006 or 2014. If your industry is one where time really doesn't matter or change anything, this may be different. From an SEO point of view, Google still knows when it first crawled a piece of content, so not including a date won't fool Google into believing the content is fresh when it's not.
I agree that creating evergreen content where appropriate is also a good move - articles, case studies, etc. that can be updated where appropriate (and blogged about + linked to to spur re-indexing).
If you see a marked drop off in traffic to or engagement in a post from 2+ years ago that used to be successful for the site, I'd consider re-writing the post with a current slant, linking to the old one from the post and being upfront about the fact that you're refreshing an old article. You can move engagement to the new post. If there really isn't anything new to say about the subject, you can still cover it again "for new readers" and redirect the old post to the new one, canonicalise it or leave it as is if there are no duplicate content issues.
Hi there,
If you are using the canonical tag and it is displayed properly on the UTM URLs, pointing to the canonical URL, then these links will pass value if they are followed. There are a range of reasons why someone might use UTM tags - a lot of services tag outbound links with this for tracking purposes. I would definitely try to get links nofollowed if the UTM (or another metric) clearly identifies that they are paid links and could be picked up by Google either manually or algorithmically, but the fact that the link contains the tracking code won't absolutely determine it as paid, and you can still gain authority from these links with correct canonicalisation.
Cheers,
Jane
