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I have created a number of lists in the new Keyword Explorer tool, and finally had a chance to put them into my company documents. I noticed a drop in some keywords which I assumed (rightly so) was incorrect.

For example, in my "list" I have the keyword mixed media. When I export the CSV it shows a volume range of 0-10.

If I type just that keyword into the explorer I get a range of 4.3k-6.5k for mixed media, which is where I would expect it to be. (https://moz.com/explorer/overview?locale=en-US&q=mixed+media)

This issue happened to about a dozen keywords at least in my list, and most of them are that major of a difference. Any idea what is going on here?

The threshold definitely makes sense for why they are appearing, thank you for the great explanation.

The recent crawl of one of our sites revealed a high number of duplicate content issues. However, when I viewed the report for pages with duplicate content I noticed almost all of them are not duplicates.

For example, these two pages are marked as dupes:
https://www.writersstore.com/publishers/hollywood-creative-directory
https://www.writersstore.com/authors/g-miki-hayden

These are thin as far as content goes but definitely not duplicates. Any recommendations or ways to adjust the settings so that these false positives aren't clogging up our site crawl report?

I would also like to see the availability of at least five competitors for a single campaign. Thanks!

My question is about whether to optimize a category page or not, but it’s a rather odd situation. Here’s a bit of background to start.

When we relaunched our site, about six months ago, we had primary, secondary, and tertiary categories created. A user could reach all three levels by clicking through the site.

Then we decided instead of linking to the tertiary categories, that we’d turn them into filters which can be applied at the secondary level. Thus, there is not actually a direct link to the 3rd level categories on the site. An important side note, I did check and confirm they are still included in the sitemap file.

My initial thoughts were to forget any further optimization of those 3rd level categories, but as it turns out we still have rankings for some of them.

Now the question… Because some of these pages are ranking and are found in the sitemap, should I include them in my SEO plan to build up and optimize, or because they are no longer linked to directly on the site will they eventually fizzle out (and I shouldn’t do anything further).

This is such a unique situation that I am really looking for some insight from the community. Thanks!

I tried many different htaccess file codings (such as recommended here), but they didn't work. Had to succumb to using the outdated Meta Robots plugin by Yoast, which can add the "noindex" code to the http header of /feed/ URLs. But, at least it's a solution: http://wordpress.org/plugins/robots-meta/. Hopefully this helps someone else.

I believe I found the solution: implement an x-robots-tag into the HTTP header of the various feed URLs. But, I need some help with creating the code to place in my .htaccess file. Any takers?

Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these:

<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator>

Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses.

My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore.

I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index.

FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all.

Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.

Chris, the spam links are coming from multiple domains to multiple spam-created forum profile pages on our site's forum. We are deleting the profiles and agree that this is probably all we need to do...but we can always use a tool like Link Detox or Link Risk to further assess our link profile if we get penalized by Penguin for some reason.

Alan, the spam-created forum profile pages are already set to noindex,follow (as are all forum profile pages). They previously weren't (decided by someone before my time), but I had our Developers change that setting 6 months ago for reasons like this. I just didn't discover all of this spam until now. Anyways, the concern with keeping the pages live but set to noindex,follow is that the link juice coming from the spam-sites to the spam profile pages on our site could be passed through to all the other pages linked from the nav menu/sidebar/footer. I believe this is how link equity flows through pages set to "noindex,follow." If the pages are deleted, then I believe the link equity evaporates (which supports why SEOs do "link reclamation" by fixing broken links).

If anyone has any further clarification...I'm all ears!

Thanks again, guys. -Dan

Hey Everyone, we recently discovered that one of our craft-related websites has a bunch of spam profiles with very sketchy backlink profiles. I just discovered this by looking at the Top Pages report in OpenSiteExplorer.org for our site, and noticed that a good chunk of our top pages are viagra/levitra/etc. type forum profile pages with loads of backlinks from sketchy websites (porn sites, sketchy link farms, etc.). So, some spambot has been building profiles on our site and then building backlinks to those profiles.

Now, my question is...we can delete all these profiles, but how should we handle all of these sketchy inbound links? If all of the spam forum profile pages produce true 404 Error pages (when we delete them), will that evaporate the link equity? Or, could we still get penalized by Google? Do we need to use the Link Disavow tool?

Also note that these forum profile pages have all been set to "noindex,nofollow" months ago. Not sure how that affects things.

This is going to be a time waster for me, but I want to ensure that we don't get penalized. Thanks for your advice!

Thanks, Wissam.

Hey Everyone, we redirected an entire domain to a specific URL on another domain (not the homepage). We used a 301 Redirect, but I'm also wondering if I should use the Google Webmaster Tools "Change of Address" section to redirect. There is no option to redirect the old domain to the specific URL on the new domain within the "Change of Address" section. Thoughts?

First off, thanks everyone for your replies

I'm well versed in best practices of 301 redirects, sitemaps, etc, etc. In other words, I fully know the optimal way to handle this. But, this is one of those situations where there are so many redirects involved (thousands) for a large site, that I want to make sure that what we are doing is fully worth the development time.

We are migrating a large website that was already migrated to a different CMS several years ago. There are thousands of legacy 301 redirects already in place for the current site, and many of those pages that are being REDIRECTED TO (from the old URL versions) receive very little/if any traffic. We need to decide if the work of redirecting them is worth it.

I'm not as worried about broken links for pages that don't get any traffic (although we ideally want 0 broken links). What I am most worried about, however, is losing domain authority and the whole site potentially ranking a little bit lower overall as a result.

Nakul's response (and Frederico's) are closest to what I am asking...but everyone is suggesting the same thing...that we will lose domain authority (example measurement: SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer domain authority score) if we don't keep those redirects in place (but of course, avoiding double redirects).

So, thanks again to everyone on this thread If anyone has a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it...but this is pretty much what I expected: everyone's best educated assessment is that you will lose domain authority when 301 redirects are lifted and broken links are the end result.

Thanks, Bryan. This doesn't really answer the exact question, though: is link equity still passed (and domain authority preserved) by broken links producing 404 Error Pages?

Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this.

When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost?

We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name).

Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!

I've read about Google penalizing for duplicate images pulled from external sites (i.e. - Wikipedia) but have seen a thing about internal duplicate images.

Question: If we had hundreds of images duplicated on a site, but different URL (tacking "-1" to the end), is that a Panda issue? Will we get penalized.

I know duplicate content (web pages) pretty well, but duplicate files? That I'm unsure of.

I would agree that eBay's search results are like categories (since Google doesn't have a category page for every niche)...and when you combine this with the fact that their "content pages" are auctions that are typically only live for 5-10 days...then it makes sense for eBay.

But SamAsh.com and GuitarCenter.com both set their internal search results pages to be indexed by search engines...and Google is ranking SamAsh.com's internal search page on page 1 of Google in my example above (reference this Google query, and this screenshot). What I notice about their site is that it looks like they are using internal search result pages as category pages. See their Gibson page. The URL structure is the same as if you were to search for something on their site.

So, perhaps SamAsh.com and eBay.com are both treating their search result pages as category pages...since they don't have true category pages for these niches...and thus allowing them to be indexed?

If this is a good strategy, then I'm inclined to think that sites that do have a lot of category pages would want to keep internal search result pages set to "noindex" so as not to duplicate the topics covered in multiple pages. Example: if we have a Watercolor Painting category page...then we wouldn't want a Watercolor internal search result page to be indexed.

Note: None of this even addresses the "lack of unique content" on internal search result pages, which like "Tag" pages on Wordpress sites, I'm of the understanding that this can lead to Panda penalties.

Click this Google query: https://www.google.com/search?q=les+paul+studio

Notice how Google has a rich snippet for Ebay saying that it has 229 results for Ebay's internal search result page: http://screencast.com/t/SLpopIvhl69z

Notice how Sam Ash's internal search result page also ranks on page 1 of Google.

I've always followed the best practice of setting internal search result pages to "noindex." Previously, our company's many Magento eCommerce stores had the internal search result pages set to be "index," and Google indexed over 20,000 internal search result URLs for every single site. I advised that we change these to "noindex," and impressions from Search Queries (reported in Google Webmaster Tools) shot up on 7/24 with the Panda update on that date. Traffic didn't necessarily shoot up...but it appeared that Google liked that we got rid of all this thin/duplicate content and ranked us more (deeper than page 1, however).

Even Dr. Pete advises no-indexing internal search results here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

So, why is Google rewarding Ebay and Sam Ash with page 1 rankings for their internal search result pages? Is it their domain authority that lets them get away with it? Could it be that noindexing internal search result pages is NOT best practice? Is the game different for eCommerce sites?

Very curious what my fellow professionals think.

Thanks,
Dan

Thank you, Ian.

We thought about manually setting the canonicals on specific pages of site B to be the URL of the same article on site A...but we don't have the bandwidth to do this for 8,000 articles...plus, we're redirecting site B to site A in @ 9 months anyways. Really just looking for the best short term solution to protect site A in the meantime from Panda updates targeting duplicate content.

EGOL gives a good breakdown of what he thinks is best. Thanks for sharing that link. I guess I'm dummy for forgetting that the "follow" portion of "noindex,follow" allows link juice to be spread to the pages linked to from the "noindex" page. That makes logical sense...but will it protect our domain authority? I would think so, but don't know for sure. If anyone is more certain than I am, please do add a vote of confidence

Our company has two websites with about 8,000 duplicate articles between them. Yep, 8,000 articles were posted on both sites over the past few years. This is the definition of cross-domain duplicate content.

Plan A is to set all of the articles to "noindex,follow" on the site that we care less about (site B). We are not redirecting since we want to keep the content on that site for on-site traffic to discover. If we do set them to "noindex," my concern is that we'll lose massive amounts of link equity acquired over time...and thus lose domain authority...thus overall site rankability. Does Google treat pages changed to "noindex" the same as 404 pages? If so, then I imagine we would lose massive link equity.

Plan B is to just wait it out since we're migrating site B to site A in 6-9 months, and hope that our more important site (site A) doesn't get a Panda penalty in the meantime.

Thoughts on the better plan?

Yep, already implemented. Good point though.

Definitely. I start with the 30 day view, then go to YTD, then push the start date back to 1/1/2011. That's my 3 step process every time I'm investigating a situation.

I've seen at least 20 of our sites decline in traffic in the past few months due to the April & June Panda updates. The dates of decline in Webmaster Tools (Traffic > Search Queries) line up perfectly with the various recent Panda updates.

Fixing /tag/ issues is one thing...but we have a monumental task of rewriting massive amounts of product descriptions next. We also have a fair amount of "no-indexing" or canonicalizing to do with our syndicated content. We'll be better for it in the end. I only wish I knew about these situations much sooner.

As I tell everyone, protect your unique content with all you've got...and keep duplicate content nowhere near your site. It's just too risky.

Thank you both...and, we're thinking alike. I recently went through our 60+ Wordpress sites addressing the issue of non-indexed /tag/ pages and also ensuring they weren't in the sitemap via our Sitemap plugin.

For the sites that had hundreds or thousands of /tag/ pages, but very little traffic in Google Analytics (Search > Organic w/ Landing Page as "primary dimension")...I just went ahead and set them to "noindex").

For sites where the /tag/ pages were driving a fair amount of traffic (10% of site total or more), I had our editors write unique descriptions for the top 50-100 (like we do with category pages) and then we set the rest to "noindex,follow" via the meta robots tag.

For this one site...I just haven't found an easy solution that didn't leave an uneasy feeling in my stomach. It's tough to give up 25% of your traffic in hopes that Google will get it right and rank your real content higher in place of these /tag/ pages.

Uh oh...I just checked Analytics and or organic traffic started creeping down @ July 13th. When I look at just the /tag/ pages in the organic landing pages section, I see that they dropped in traffic @ 50-60%. Something bad is happening. I am setting them to "noindex" immediately.

Definitely can't wait to read your post. I'll be writing my own on www.kernmedia.com in the near future as well.

We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?