Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Robert and Ryan for your great input on this, Luke

Hi, a website I know of, let's call it Americanizedwine.com, is undergoing development. It includes a detailed map of hundreds wine growers right across the Americas, with all the map grower icons / names pointing to unique pages within Americanizedwine.com (info pages with online retail functionality where wine grower wants to sell direct through this website).

This website is teaming up with wine magazines / food blogs etc., offering them subdomains of Americanzedwine.com - e.g. [magazinename].americanizedwine.com - to carry within their own websites > duplicating the map and all the wine grower/retail pages from Americanwizedwine.com website, including meta data, etc (hmmmm!).

Could you simply use some method to simply tell Google that the mother website is elsewhere, and this subdomain information is simply duplicate copy? Would that suffice I’m wondering? Or will the solution here require deeper exploration?

Thanks for your responses everyone. Really helpful and much appreciated, Luke

Hi Robert and thanks for your feedback there - 4 out of 24 pages are of some concern here. SERPs and enquiries from these internal pages is, good so they did get some ROI from their linkbuilding work. That said, not sure leaving things as they stand is worth the risk. This is locally-focused SEO, in an area without huge competition.

Regarding these 4 pages, I'm seeing a mix of article submission / social bookmarketing going on and use of poor quality directories (in the main using same directory description text over and over again, and the same article submission text) - though I haven't found any gambling or other such website nasties backlinking to the website in question.

Of these 4 pages, I'm seeing between 100 and 250 backlinks per page (Homepage has around 800 backlinks - generally OK and all looks very natural) - and no other internal pages, other than these 4 pages, have more than 5 backlinks each.

Hi all,

I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages.

These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.

I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs.

Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it?

Thanks in advance, Luke

I agree Mat, but it's difficult to tell who is who. Client worked with a big name in the world of digital marketing. They checked references, put in place a carefully worded contract (phew!) and (thankfully) I had the knowledge to identify a well-hidden blog network, and secure link takedown. The SEO industry needs an aggressively policed quality standard, in my opinion.

Hi, an incredibly popular website, with several thousand pages, has offered me a site-wide footer logo link.

The site this popular website would backlink to has 50 high quality backlinks (and low volumes of traffic - it's a new site).

I am tempted to say no, because of the risk of penalty, but then I started wondering whether a logo link posed the same penalty risk as a text link.

Exactly the reason I don't use (or trust) SEO agencies. I've seen this, I've seen blog networks. You name it...

Thanks EGOL, Brent and Irving. Some good advice there.

It's not really traditional Guest Blogging Irving in that content providers get fee instead of a link - and are pointing links in from their external sites, so a little loss of control there, though without any anchor text guidelines and so forth.

Hi,

I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website.

I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site.

That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.

What would you advise?

Thanks Marie, Irving, EGOL, Andy - excellent advice as ever!

Hi, was just wondering about suppliers linking to website - copywriters, web developers, etc. - could these be seen as purchased links by Google. Is it best to specify that suppliers shouldn't link through?

Thanks Donnie and Oleg - good advice there! Couldn't believe how many dodgy sites were hitting this particular site. Around 15% of links (out of not many links - around 300) from dodgy outfits all doing more or less the same kind of stuff.

Some great feedback here - firstly, thanks EGOL - I'm focusing 100% on content on a new site. Should be interesting - and that's a good point re: vandalism. I am concerned with the consequences of negative SEO / scrapers, clones, etc., though. Would be so good to be able to cut nasty incoming links in some way (I can but dream...) Love that saying too Donnie!

Good points there Marie - yes I get plagued by that stuff too - I'm beginning to wonder whether many of these comments are more about hoping some lunatic will click on the link than about manipulating SEO though.

To be totally honest, I wouldn't mind if Google laid down specific rules for linkbuilding. We advise that site owners should only proactively build no more than 10 links/page from relevant sites. The rest should be generated naturally. Something far more specific than we have at the moment.

And thanks Arpeggio. A very good point indeed. I agree.

There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason.

I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there?

I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it.  I'm sure most of us on here could do the same.

Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?

Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names).

To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed.

Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.

I will have another go I think

http://productforums.google.com/d/topic/business/2b-n5hzA9EU/discussion - hope that helps > I posted it before and someone got wrong end of stick, so tried again.

The person answering here suggests it is fine, and having just looked back at SEOMoz forum notes, I've been given same advice from someone on these forums before.

That said, it might be logical in some way to have both, but it might land you in trouble as you've suggested. Would be so good to clarify this point.

A good many people will be getting this wrong.

Thanks Miriam. I haven't had an answer, so not holding up much hope. Is there anyone on the SEO Moz team who may have stumbled across such a specific ssue before? Do you have better access to Google? L

Hi Miriam, thanks again for your feedback. I've asked the question, so awaiting some feedback. Hope I can get their position on this (I live in hope!). Yes, it was me before mentioning some other sites. This is impacting me in several places at the moment, which is a right pain! If Google provides an answer, I'll definitely try to share it around

This problem keeps coming up at the mo, partly because I'm working for out-of-town locations. Hey, ho...

Anyway, now I'm in S.W. England. The site has a Bristol postal address. But is actually in Bath & NE Somerset County. So the post office claims them for Bristol, the administrators for Bath, and the business is about the same distance from both.

Bristol is more of a key market than Bath, but both are very important.

This is a pizza takeaway, pizza restaurant, bar, function room. There's a homepage, and 4 key landing pages for each key service, then loads of internal pages under each category.

Web developer did this in the title tags - key service (e.g Function Room)| Bristol & Bath | [then company name] on the 4 key landing pages. Then they've targeted Bristol and Bath individually on interior pages - e.g.  Function Room **| **Bath | [company name] on the party venue page.

This seems OK to me, but not sure if Google will find this spammy or not (2 key cities in the title tags). In which case I will start playing with the title tags. I don't want them to take a hit from Google, particularly with all the changes coming through at the mo. I'm being very cautious.

I also question the div between, for the service (e.g. Function Room) and they city in question. I would take that first div out.

Any thoughts on this would be great. I'm finding UK boundary confusion, and how Google might deal with that in instances like this, mighty confusing.

This boundary thing seems to be haunting me at the mo. Oh what I'd give for somewhere within a defined boundary!

Anyway, just noticed a client has one city in its official postal address, and another city under its geotag.

So I'm looking at the title tags and I'm thinking of mentioning both cities on the main entry pages (6 of them) then dividing mention in sub pages.

Is this acceptable to Google? Might they see mention of both cities in homepage title tag (and other entry pages) as spammy. I don't want to upset Google!!!

PS. Both cities are core markets. I would say they're of equal importance in terms of current business bookings and business potential.

Thanks guys - appreciated.

Hi, just wondering what your thoughts are on this one - several businesses I work for are located in in-between places.

For example, one is in one city for its address, but in another city's council (/state) area. Another is in a rural area, almost exactly the same distance between 2 cities (about 10 miles either way).

Both businesses mention both cities on several pages of their websites, including in title tags (including homepage title tags), and it seems to be working OK in terms of rankings (ie they're ranking well for keyphrases for both cities).

Is it acceptable practice to mention both cities in a single title tag though? That's my question.

(some of this confusion dates back to UK local authority boundary/name changes, in 2009)

Thanks for your useful feedback Dan, Anthony and Marisa - much appreciated

Just spotted bigger H1s and small H2s on a website, in the newsroom.  The smaller H2 = section heading (Newsroom), the larger H1 is a news headline. Might that cause me any search engine problems?

Thanks for the useful feedback Matt - It sure is a tough one - they are ranked in top 3 for a specific business category, they are relevant to client, and they channel large numbers of bookings to target geographical region.

That said, booking with them could undo my SEO work, so not worth the risk. My impression is they're not being purposefully manipulative - it's just they don't get the SEO implications of what they're doing.

Was just about to book an advert in a directory until the salesperson told me that the directory listing would be replicated over 40 times, from different websites (they white label the directory to different sites, who then sell their own adverts in the directory).

I asked them whether they did nofollows - they didn't know what they were, so clearly not.

I'm thinking 40 plus identical links coming through (over 10% of total links to site) could attract punishment from Google. Your thoughts would be welcome.

Thanking you in advance, Luke

Just wondering whether anybody has experience with this? If Googlebot is able to analyse Facebook activity that is (I'm not entirely sure whether it is...)

Google sure are, so I'm keeping watch Just this afternoon a supplier I do business with has been de-indexed (gulp). Thanks for that outline - very useful framework there.

Hi Matt - thanks for the answer there - some very good points indeed.

I'm working with Pizzas and some of the pages can look a little stuffed - it's quite basic in-your-face marketing and pizza is mentioned a lot (as are some other words) because of the way we communicate (which works, but then Googlebot might not understand and mistake it for keyword stuffing, that's the concern I guess).

That's a very interesting point on not using meta tags because of the competition. We're in a very competitive market so I sure think that applies to us.

Hi, I've just checked the number of keywords appearing on my website's pages.

On some of them the keyword density was way too high (7-10%) if you included the meta tags, but all under 3.5% if I didn't include the keywords and description meta tags.

So my question is - when looking at number of keywords used per page, do I have to worry about what's in those meta tags? Do the keywords in there count towards keyword density / number of keywords per page?

Thanks, Luke

Thanks Anthony - that's very helpful feedback - I'll have a go with those formats and see how it goes. I have quite a few pages to play with so I'm gonna test, test, and test again...

Hi,

Question 1) I have gotten in the habit of putting e.g. Pizzas Birmingham, Pizzas Coventry, Brand name, for pizza outlets that straddle 2 towns / cities (which is often the case) - in title tags.

I tried, for example, Pizzas, Birmingham & Coventry, Brand Name - and it didn't work as well.

PS The Brand Name includes the word Pizzeria, not Pizzas.

Both towns / cities will be key markets when I use the above format.

But could this be seen as an over-optimization I'm thinking?

Question 2) In one of my title tags, I have Pizzerias, Restaurants, City, Brand name

which is working well, but that's 4 elements - is that too many? Is that an over optimization signal?

Thanks in advance for your help

Thanks so much Matt, Kerie & Marie - brilliant advice there - really brilliant. With your help it's all removed now.

Blimey, that discovery sure set my heart racing (eeeek.)

Thanks Ben, O&M, Alex and MHM

(hey Ben, that info's really useful btw! - thanks again!)

One thing I didn't understand O&M is: "One thing you shouldn’t include a slash is after a file name in the URL" - do they mean file name extensions I wonder. I took a look over at Matt Cutts's website and he'd bunged in a trailing slash on all his pages (I think - all the ones I looked at anyway).

Hi, I'm just about to put up a new site and I need to decide between having no trailing slash at the end of the all the URLs, or putting one in there.

I think Matt Cutts has a slight preference for them, as stated here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more

"Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document."

However, I'm really wondering. I mean, if people link to my site, they'll tend not to insert a trailing slash, I'm thinking...

Your thoughts would be welcome on this one!

Cheers, Luke

Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched.

I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do?

Thanks, Luke

Hi, I have a blog, and like most blogs I have various search options (subject matter, author, archive, etc) which produce the same content via different URLs.

Should I implement the rel-canonical tag AND the meta robots tag (noindex, follow) on every page of duplicate blog content, or simply choose one or the other? What's best practice?

Thanks Mozzers! Luke