Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jeff, thank you for the quick response, it is truly appreciated

Unfortunately i am not able to publicly release their URL in forums due to part of our contract. However i can provide some feedback to your ideas.

• Different web servers - the website is the same and on the same hosting platform, they just updated their branding and along with that their domain name
• WWW. vs non-WWW. - I did a quick check and it looks like both versions of the old domain properly 301 redirect no matter what the subdomain. I am checking that both with my Chrome developer tools as well s checkmyheaders.com.
• Robots.txt on old server - as it related to my first bullet, it is technically the same website and server the the robots.txt is the same for the new website just reflecting the new domain.

Are there any other things that i could look at for a sanity check? I have never seen a website not get de-indexed after a 301 redirect. Do you think i would need to submit something to Google Webmaster Tools for the old URLs/domains?

Regards, Kyle

So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today.

The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?

Does anyone have a suggestion for the best keyword rank tracking software in Baidu? The keywords would be in Chinese. We currently already have keyword rank tracking software for Google/Bing/Yahoo so we just need to expand to Baidu.

I am looking forward to comparing my research with what the Moz community has to say! Thanks!

As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)?

We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.

Always stay relevant, as soon as you start posting stock trading articles to technology websites is when you start stumbling down a dark path that will return very little traffic and possibly a penalty!

Keep searching out there, i did a few simple queries and found almost +80k results return in Google:

• inurl:blog + "guest blog" + stock trading
• inurl:blog + "guest blog" + stock trading + finance
• inurl:articles + "guest blog" + stock trading + finance
• inurl:resources + "guest blog" + stock trading + finance

Good luck and keep on searching!

• Kyle

I wouldn't worry about trying to find a directory, instead let Google do all the work with some highly specific queries. My favorite approach is using the "inurl" modifier to target any website with specific words in the URL. Here are some examples.

To find a blog that offers guest blogging:

• inurl:blog + guest blog + hardwood flooring
• inurl:blog + article submission + hardwood flooring
• inurl:blog + "guest blog" + home improvement + floors
• inurl:resources + "guest blog" + home improvement + floors
• inurl:articles + "guest blog" + home improvement + floors

You can then simply keep trying different combinations until you find a nice long list of opportunities for outreach. Good luck!

• Kyle

I don't have the answer, James.
However, i am adding myself to this thread to find it out as well

I agree, of course the context and quality of the article is the most important but it is a question i get from EVERY client:

"How much content should i write then?"

Then i found this article and it seemed really helpful but i was having trouble interpreting what a good guideline should be.

Okay, kind of silly question but i am looking for some help interpreting an analysis done by John Doherty almost a year ago: http://moz.com/blog/what-kind-of-content-gets-links-in-2012

In the document he mentions the correlation that longer posts on average receive more links but the graphs were really hard to interpret (for me). Based on the data what is the correct size we should shoot for (most graphs were missing labels). Any one have any insight? Should i shoot for 300 words per post, higher, etc?

Thanks!

• Kyle

My theory is you get what you pay for, so i only use paid tools My recent favorite is https://serps.com/. You can track a lot of keywords and domains as well as get updated ranks everyday for a pretty cheap price. They also just released some pretty neat international and local tracking options included even in the lowest priced plan.

I have also compared their results with MOZ and a few others and they are always spot on and accurate.

Cheers!

• Kyle

Schwab, you are spot on.

About a year ago Google restricted access to this data to MOZ and many of the other big SEO software players in the industry. As an interim fix they now show Bing results. If you would still like to see the Google data you can get it at the link below via the keyword planner tool (you must be logged in):

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3141229

I asked this same question a little while back and got some great responses:

http://moz.com/community/q/shared-hosting-bad-for-seo-exp-godaddy

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

If i do not have a relevant page to redirect them to i always send them back to the homepage. This way the end user, search engines and link equity are still brought back to the highest level page. It isn't the best case scenario but it is better than losing your equity and end users getting an error.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

What about playing off of the things that make this company a legitimate company unlike the scammy/spammy online gaming sites. Perhaps expand on what they do in their community, highlighting team members, or choose a charity to sponsor were proceeds are donated on a monthly basis. Essentially making a emotional link to end users.

From there you could also create a blog that focuses on more natural yet still relevant topics like poker strategies, how to play black jack, infographic on odds of winning a big jackpot, etc.. You could also have contest that could tie into social media, perhaps have end users choose what top prizes would be for payout in the next contest?

I think the biggest thing you need to get away from is trying to build the link but instead build the community. Like we have seen with MOZ a strong community will bring in new customers and new links.

Hope this helps!

Just found this today and after a year and a few months it is still helpful, thanks Dr Pete!

Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301?

Yes. 301 redirects make sure end users, search bots and link equity are passed to the new page. It is true though that not all link equity is passed with a 301, however good or bad it is passed. I have found this out with my own testing with clients as well as a few post i found on SEO round table and Google groups.

Does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped?

Where you tracking your external links use OSE? If so they crawl a different amount of domains and URLs each time they update their index so chances are you are looking at different data sets each time.

Gotcha, i already disavowed their entire domain do you think it would be more effective disavowing each URL that they have listed in GWT?

Thanks for the response Andy!

Yes we have seen a decent amount of links get removed, close to 600. However none from this blog network that was the largest culprit. It was just driving me crazy that we got them removed but Google is still showing them there if i do a query of site:blog.com + "brand name"

I just wish there was a way to make Google recrawl that blog indepth rather than waiting, which on that point, what happened to Google cached pages?

I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days.

After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed.

Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website?

Thank you in advance,
Kyle

You could take some averages of the same time frame over the last few years if you have the data, for instance compare:

8/1/12 through 8/7/12 to 8/1/11 through 8/7/11 and 8/1/10 through 8/7/10

From there take the average increase/trend and forecast it for the missing weeks. Finally for some quality control measure it from the few weeks leading up and the few weeks after to ensure you are still close.

Other than that i would go with the "honesty is the best policy" approach.

I agree... essentially if they would like to rank they would have to work on the content (both targeting and freshness), building additional links, and increasing social mentions and presence.

Good point on the title tag, definitely want to make them read more organically and natural. Perhaps instead something like: Disaster Restoration Experts > Serving Ohio and Indiana.

Noah it looks like you are heading down the right track:

• Your site is indexed in Google/Yahoo (24 pages which seems like all pages)
• You have a great diversity in your anchor text
• Your domain authority is low but if it is a new site it should not be surprising
• All of your content is in search engine crawlable content types, including the navigation
• You have a properly formatted robots and XML sitemap

My suggestion is find a way to keep your content fresh moving forward. Perhaps like a blog or articles section on your website where you can begin targeting longer tailed content themes. Also, keep working on your outreach especially on social. Perhaps offer a social referral bonus for customers who refer a friend on a social network?

Keep up the good work!

• Kyle

Thanks for the input Cyrus!

If your interested, here is what ended up happening:
It turned out that my colleague, the person who was pressuring me to find the research,  had read some hubspot powerpoints that talked about the size of your website and how much inbound traffic you can receive, rather than the size of your website being a ranking factor. So this was my response back:

It sounds like we are both trying to answer a slightly different question. I was looking for “Does a site’s size determine its ability to rank in search engines". You were looking for “Does a site’s size effect the amount of traffic it receives”

While they both seem very similar they are quite different. In regards to a site’s size being a ranking factor I would disagree. A site’s ability to rank for a given term is based on its external linking factors, social mentions and on-page targeting. This is why even smaller websites and companies can be competitive for individual keyword terms. However I would completely agree that a site’s size does give you a better opportunity to gain more overall traffic because there is more content to be indexed in search engines and shared across social networks, blogs, directories, etc..

In the end they decided to take the suggestion and combine the product and demo pages to help increase their page's authority and in turn its ranking position.

1. Are they passing bad link juice?
Yes, if you 301 redirected a website/page you bring over both the good and the bad link equity with it.

2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain?
Refer to question 1

3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Have you received a unnatural links warning in GWT yet? If not you maybe safe with waiting it out. If you are trying to cut it off before that happens i would start with running a LinkDetox report (only $50 and totally worth it). They will define the toxic links, from there i would disavow them.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Hey Justin, it is a pretty long and specific process. However there is close to 50 different blogs and articles published on MOZ alone for it. I'd start here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amoz.com%2Fblog%2F+%2B+unnatural+link+removal

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Great point on the unnatural anchor text, that would definitely have a greater effect in regards to top 50 rank. After clearing up your link profile the content portion will get you the rest of the way.

You can take this analysis with a grain of salt since it only entailed around 5 minutes of my time but i think it has to do with the percent of unique content to ads on your page. I clicked through around a few articles in the formula one section and all of them had close to 6-7 paid advertisements (mostly above the fold) and only a few sentences of copy.

Then taking it to the next level the page load time was relatively slow but it seemed almost all to do with the advertisements slowing the load time (using fiddler to inspect). My advice, either limit down the amount of advertising you are running on actual article pages OR write more and higher quality content.

Best of luck!

• Kyle

Thanks for all the feedback guys!

It still just sounds more like a correlation rather than causation. The idea that often larger sites are doing the right activities to get higher ranks (branding, cross channel marketing, RCS, etc.) rather than the fact that they just have a large site.

I really wish that there was some more definitive research out there other than just gut feelings.

• Kyle

The Scenario:
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank.

The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused.

• http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm

The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank?

I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks

• Kyle

Good point on the a/b testing, perhaps i move forward with that first to help build some data to support my case. I agree to the end user pop-ups are terrible but i am still intrigued if any data supports it is terrible for SEO?

Well if you know that the frame is already indexed you can do a site search of the frame and see what it looks like as well as the last cached date. The query would look something like this:

site:example.com/iframe-page.html

This will give you the page that Google has indexed. If you are going have the pages not be indexed i really so no SEO value into adding a hyperlink pointing to the frame itself (why build its authority if it is not in the SERPS?). So i would really just take into account the end users experience. If they can already see the framed content, why have a link that just shows it again?

If you are able to share some URLs i might be able to give some more specific answers, thanks!

• Kyle

Since you have control over it you have a few options to help give the best experience for end users. The first update would be adding the following META tag to your iframe  section:

This will allow search engines to crawl the page, follow the links and pass authority BUT keep from indexing them in the search engines. From there if each page is only being framed in on one page you could also include a canonical tag to pass the authority to the higher level page that would be better for end users. However, if it is framed into multiple different pages that approach probably wouldn't not work.

Let me know if that makes sense or if i miss understood your question, thanks!

• Kyle

Quick question, do you have control over the iframed content?

My two all time favorite tools (free to a certain degree) are Ubersuggest and SpyFu.

Ubersuggest gives you a lot of keyword variations and suggestions while SpyFU can be used to look at how your site compares to your competitors. I also would suggest letting Google SERPs give you an idea, try using long tail keywords related to your site and see what others are targeting.

Hope this helps!

• Kyle

Good call rick, i will check out the stats and let you know what i find.

So i have been working with a company running their SEO for close to two years now. Since i started to engage with them they have always used a very simple pop up for the first time an end user visits their website (via javascript and cookies). The pop up simply ask them if they would like to download a solutions brochure  from their website. So as far as pop ups go, it is at least relevant. The client loves this pop up, i do not.

For a while we have always held spots #1-3 for a lot of our keywords but we have started to drop to lower on the first page. So i have been researching to see if some of the new algorithm changes are targeting sites with this type of functionality. If i have some data i could definitely get them to remove it. So the question is, do pop-ups hurt your organic ranking?

Thanks for the input!

• Kyle

A 302 status code is a temporary redirect which, depending on the circumstances, can cause issues with search engine ranks. Here is a great infographic from Dr Pete on status codes and how it effects each user in relation to SEO:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes

If you would want end users to redirect to that page and NOT search engines, then the current setup is fine. However, if you would want to send search engines, end users AND link equity then you would want to recreate that as a 301. This process normally requires access to your hosting environment as well as some technical knowledge.

Hope this helps - Kyle

Hey Cameron - i would suggest using a free service like http://checkmyheaders.com/ and spot check some of your previous URLs to ensure they are 301ing to the correct place. If you get a 301 and never get a 302 or a 4xx/5xx then you are all set!

Also, just a personal suggestion i would start straying away from Alexa, it really gives you no valuable insight to success or authority online. I would definitely suggest using domain authority or even pagerank still for competitive metrics.

Hope this helps - Kyle

Tom is spot on with tools for a link profile analysis.

If you know that you are being penalized by Google (via a warning message) i would also suggest checking out www.linkdetox.com to give you a quick run down on what are good, bad, and suspicious links for removal.

Good luck!

• Kyle

Since you didn't receive any penalties this may be tied to an algorithm change, however that is something pretty tough to prove. If you can check their analytics and see if the drop was inline with any updates listed here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change. Above and beyond that here are some more specific answers to some of your questions:

What would be my best recourse to fix the Spam link problem? I would first define what parts of your link profile is related to spam. A great tool to use for this is called LinkDetox and it is only $40 per site that is totally worth it. From there i would suggest disavowing any sites that are flagged as toxic.

**Also in today's Google,  what is considered a spam link? **
Some red flags would be any website that is not indexed in Google, has a domain moztrust below 2, and if the content is not focused/randomly generated.

Should I just link to his business name, or to a Keyword like Edmonton Real Estate Agent?
Make it as natural as possible. If you are linking back to a portion of the website about home loan questions, use that as anchor text. Or if it is the contact page perhaps use "contact edmonton real estate". Now-a-days you want to keep the end user in mind almost more so than the search engines.

Is there anything I can do about the expired link pages?
Actually this is a good thing - if it was a spam link and it has expired all the hard work has been done for you in the removal

Hope this helps - Kyle

Hi Traian - i would have to disagree.

With the advice mentioned above from both Cyrus and Marie i was able to get the penalty lifted and whether it was normal or not my rankings and traffic have bounced back to exactly where they were if not higher than before the penalty.

It looks like the site is still indexed in Google if you do a site search with their URL. However their anchor text looks bloated in the way that resembles unnatural links. They had 400 different occurrances of a banner ad link with the image alt text of "wally buy sell edmonton real estate". Many of those backlinks looked to either be spammy or have expired.

Did he have Google Webmasters tools hooked up to his site? If so check for any warnings in regards to penalties.

In order to help track down some options are you comfortable with sharing your website's domain?

Thanks - Kyle

Try and do you best to stick to quality websites for links but most importantly make sure the link is tied to relevant content. Beyond that i always look at 3 factors when choosing places to reach out to:

1. Do they have a domain Moztrust above 2
2. Are they currently indexed in Google
3. Is the content focused, relevant and to the point

Also if you ever want a sanity check on your link profile, http://www.linkdetox.com/, does an awesome job of automating the process of telling you good, suspicious and toxic links in your profile. Plus it is only $40 for the tool which is totally worth it!

Good luck!

• Kyle

There is no benefit or negative aspect to either - pick one and stick with for your own internal linking structure, external linking structure, Google Webmaster Tools setup and outreach. I also suggest doing a redirect from the one that you do not choose to the one that you choose. For instance if you want to go with www.domain.com, make sure you 301 redirect any traffic from domain.com.