If it makes sense to put their link on your site, then go for it. If it fits naturally and isn't out of place, then yes. Otherwise, no.

Basically just use your common sense. If it looks spammy on your site, don't use it.

Also, avoid having a page full of links. That's a huge red flag and could end up hurting you. And if they are putting your link on a similar page, you are better off without it.

hi there, wonder if i can ask my question here to you Tom --

I found your post helpful and have been reading that blog entry you linked to. I'm working on a couple wordpress blogs grandfathered into the company I work for and am trying to clean them up. They are providing something like a combined 800 links to my company's domain and we have a manual penalty with Google currently so I'd really like our backlink profile to be cleaned up.

So basically... I can't seem to install the Yoast plugins. Is that only for those who are hosting their wordpress offsite? Or how does that work... because basically, i go to wordpress.com and login and I can't upload files to directories or anything like that.

I guess I'm a wordpress noob, but proud to be. Because my experience with wordpress so far has been far from positive.

(backstory: when I got here, our company website had been developed in a Wordpress format and was a pain in the ass to work on. Nay, impossible to work on. I spent a month completely redesigning the site in HTML and have been happy as a clam since. But that is unrelated to the wordpress blogs we are running...)

Anyway, thanks

excellent catch, Mike. He's absolutely correct about the index.asp page.

these two fixes should really help your site.

oh i gotcha. yeah that makes sense then... irving has you on the right track. i don't know much about multi-language web work

still i would no-crawl that mobile site and that will fix one of your problems at least.

good luck!

why would you want google to crawl your mobile site?

i think that because you said "http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates" your issue might actually be in the www and non-www canonicalization of your site.

Make sure that you pick one or the other (i recommend www) and in your IIS server settings redirect the non-www to the www. (or vice versa if you must)

This should solve your problem.

**update -- I just went to your site and yes this is happening. You have two sites going, http://lucid8.com and http://www.lucid8.com. The "index.asp" portion of it actually has nothing to do with this. But Google is currently seeing each version as two separate pages, resulting in duplicates of every page on that domain.

Definitely add the 301 redirect in your IIS settings to one or the other. A linkrel=canonical tag wouldn't hurt on each page either, but isn't necessary.

Good luck

add a no-crawl in your robots.txt for each subdomain you don't want crawled?

appreciate the input thank you. makes sense - throw the new sitemap on the server and let it happen. will do

thanks again all

That was exactly the answer I was looking for and makes perfect sense. I had a feeling I might be working too hard in that regard.

Thanks again!

hmmm...

do they point to the same IP address?

Hello,

My question today is regarding sitemaps. I'm often confused by this and because I am a bit obsessive I believe I may be giving myself more work than needed..

Basically my question is, do I need to update and/or re-generate my sitemap every time I make a change to the site? I mean, I must have to if I add a page, correct? And so in Google's Webmaster Tools, do I just delete the current sitemap and re-upload a new one for Google to crawl?

Is it possible to overdo this?

Any sitemap suggestions would be fantastic. I feel like there's been a few weeks where I've updated the sitemap daily and re-submitted it and I worry that might be hurting my site.

Thanks!