I'd scan through mentions of "penguin" or link building on inbound.org: http://inbound.org/articles/all/votes?query=penguin

If you know the date, like Oct, should help in finding it.

Corwin - that's awesome info - thanks for posting the results of your tests!

1 - Can't say regarding nofollow - you could always try adding rel="nofollow" to the <area> tag and give it a shot.

Whether the links are followed depends on whether they're indexed. In my opinion, they shouldn't have any issue crawling the links. If you look at the source code of a page with an image map on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map for example) you'll see that the links are pretty clearly listed (and in Chrome's source code view they're even hyperlinked - which alone suggests they should be crawling them just fine.)

That said, I have not tested this, and I can't find any references to actual testing done online.

If I were you, I would test this by doing the following:

1. Create an image map somewhere on your site (we'll call it the Map Page).
2. Link that image map to a 2nd page of the site that is not linked anywhere else on the Map Page.
3. Feel free to tweet the URLs of both pages to speed up the indexation process.
4. Go in to Google Webmaster Tools, and see if a link is reported to the 2nd Page from the Map Page.
5. If there isn't, double check the cache date of the Map Page to see if it's after the image map was added to the page.

• If you go through that test, and GWT doesn't report a link from the Map Page to the 2nd Page, then I would go ahead and use the image map, but I would also add text links on the page to ensure your optimal site structure is in place.
• If GWT does report the link, then that seem sufficient to me, so long as you specify the alt and title text for each individual link since that will function as your anchor text.

2 - The image will probably be considered one image as far as indexing in Google Images (would be strange if they indexed portions of the image), however the alt and title attributes should behave more like multiple images.

3 - I would just do the test I described above and you should be set. Also, take a look at what popular websites using Image Maps do in this situation. National real estate listing sites are a common one for image maps IIRC.

Also, I would add one comment: write all of your web dev-related content from the perspective of a realtor. That's the one thing that will make the content work with the rest of your site. If you start writing about advanced developer topics that are totally useless to a realtor reading the site, then that is typically going to be too far off topic.

Relevance is definitely important, and you'll want to be sure to get plenty of links from real estate related websites. But, you should take a broad view of what's relevant.

For example, if someone writes an article about "fun ways to keep your kids entertained during a day of house shopping" for a mommy blog, that's a relevant piece of content, on an otherwise unrelated website.

Say you write an article for YouMoz about "10 creative pieces of content that any realtor can use to earn links" - that too is a link from a relevant page on a site that is otherwise unrelated.

Don't worry too much about the relevance of the domain, especially if you can get the page-level relevance higher. Google is OK at understanding things on a domain level and a page level, but that doesn't mean that they'll discredit good links from sites that aren't in the exact same niche.

Also, don't forget about other forms of relevance. Local relevancy is a great one for your niche (ranging from neighborhood level to city level [Pensacola] to county level to state level [Florida]). Also, think vertically within your industry: house inspection, title insurance, mortgage brokers, and other homeowner-related sites all are relevant to your website in their own way.

Yes, I understand. You're only going to get those links from web design sites if there is content on your site that is relevant to web design. So, you need to create that content on your site before you have anything to link to. Those pages won't rank for traditional real estate keywords, but the pages will pass link value to other pages on the site, and the domain overall.

The relevance won't be an issue - although you will have to build all of the normal realtor links as well as the web design-related links if you want to compete. However, the web design links will be a good way to exceed the competition.

Google will recognize on a domain level that the site overall is about both web design and real estate. They will also recognize on a page level that some pages are about a specific topic. You'll need to be conscious of what keywords you're targeting on each page.

Google would not be confused - if you're building a site about web development for the real estate industry, they'll pick up on that very quickly. There's nothing wrong with that and frankly I think it's a good way to build yourself a niche.

If your question is regarding whether you'll be able to still target traditional keywords like "Pensacola Real Estate," I don't think that will be an issue.

Sitelinks tend to take awhile - I think they may need to be "earned" either through increasing branding or increasing general domain authority. Not certain about that, but I don't think they show up for newer sites often. The could be a factor.

I would build up internal links as well as branded links to the site, and I imagine they'll come soon enough. That Google article I linked to gives a small amount of guidance - since you're doing a static site I'd double check these items:

"There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

For the red arrows in that seroundtable post, that's common for branded searches. It looks junky because the titles and descriptions (IMO) are too similar.

All of that said, I wouldn't personally worry about it for branded searches. If they've made it that far, they'll find you.

"Keyword | Company Name" is fine for your title formatting. Whether the homepage is different depends on your niche and the value of your brand I guess. Overall I'd probably leave it as keyword first unless you've got a great brand that's been built up quite a bit over the years.

Are you saying that the website is showing up multiple times when you search for "company name" or an unbranded keyword?

What exactly looks bad about the SERP? Are any of the titles or meta descriptions the same?

The "grouped" links that you're referring to are called sitelinks - read more about them here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right?

That's the best way to target that keyword, yes.

I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one.

An optimized URL with 301 links is going to be better than a non-optimized URL with the same number of direct links. We don't know the exact loss in link value for a 301 redirect, and we don't know if it changes over time or in different circumstances, so any answer to this questions will be somewhat subjective. That said, I think most other SEOs would opt for Good URL with 301 links, and then they'd proceed to go build new links and change old ones where possible.

A personal guess is that the majority (>90%) of the link value is maintained in 301 redirects, however I couldn't say how it changes over time.

Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?

Yes, you're better off with better-optimized URLs in most of the cases I've encountered.

Thanks John - as mentioned on Twitter I appreciate you sharing tested results. Haven't had time to test on my own sites and certainly don't want to be testing on a client's live production site.

I did notice that one of your posts (http://www.johnfdoherty.com/canonical-tag-delays-googlebot-web-vs-mobile-index/) does have the self-referencing hreflang but the Spanish version does not. Based on recreating your SERP screenshots myself, it looks like it's working fine.

Also, I think my opinion on the Au/En version where you're geotargeting with the same language is that is should be set up the way you indicated, so I'm glad to see more testing that has confirmed that.

Thanks for taking the time to answer - Thanks to Dave as well!

Thanks Mike.

Regarding your comment on canonicals - I agree that separate languages should be treated with different canonicals - I think John's response above has confirmed my hunch with testing, however.

Regarding hreflangs - I don't think there's any penalty either. The trouble is that Google, as many of us have experienced, often makes mistakes on code that should function fine. Google Authorship is a good example. So, just trying to work out the best practices for this before I make a client recommendation.

Regarding feedback outside Moz - @IanHowells weighed in on Twitter. His opinion was (A) self-referencing is not necessary and (B) canonicals should be for each language, not pointed to the default language.

Thanks for your response Mike.

Re: Canonicals:

The first Google blog post you linked to is applicable when some of the content is translated. For example, if your English Facebook profile showed up on the Spanish section of the site, but they only translated buttons, nav menus, etc.

"We’re trying to specifically improve the situation where the template is localized but the main content of a page remains duplicate/identical across language/country variants."

So, this isn't a perfect match for my situation, which is a 100% translated page, which changes the reasoning behind the proposed canonical solution in that post - so that question is still in the air for me.

Re: Self-Referential hreflang Tags:

The second article is definitely relevant and is the primary announcement of hreflang, but doesn't clearly indicate whether the self-referential hreflang tag for the page you're on is necessary. Now, I've seen it used both ways successfully, so my first question is somewhat moot. John Doherty's testing from January 2012 and the homepage of WPML.org each use a different method, but Google.com and Google.es seem to be able to sort out each domain correctly.

OK, 2 primary questions for a multilingual site. This specific site has 2 language so I'll use that for the examples.

1 - Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag Necessary?

The first is regarding the correct implementation of hreflang, and whether or not I should have a self-referencing hreflang tag.

In other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), I am uncertain whether the source code should contain the second line below:

Obviously the Spanish version should reference the English version, but does it need to reference itself? I have seen both versions implemented, with seemingly good results, but I want to know the best practice if it exists.

2 - Canonical of Current Language or Default Language?

The second questions is regarding which canonical to use on the secondary language pages. I am aware of the update to the Google Webmaster Guidelines recently that state not to use canonical, but they say not to do it because everyone was messing it up, not because it shouldn't be done.

So, in other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), which of the two following canonicals is correct?

1. OR

For this question, you can assume that (A) the English version of the site is our default and (B) the content is identical.

Thanks guys, feel free to ask any qualifiers you think are relevant.

Responded in the other thread per your request - hope I got all of your points from this thread:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-it-better-to-have-urls-of-internal-pages-that-are-geo-targeted-or-point-geo-targeted-links-to-the-homepage#post-117343