Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Carolina, if you can send to me even on pvm a list of some examples of the url you'll need to redirect I'll try to help you. However if you publish here the URI (so your domain won't be shown) the whole community may try to help you.

whooops

Hi loopyal, sorry for my bad english maybe I got you confused.

I'm exactly saying what you state above, even if someone pays you in the street, google may know it's been a paid link, but not because they got a radar on all of us but just because you've replicated a process which get your content recognizedas a paid link.

You're doing great on studying about who're you're linking because bad neighbours which are linking you may create or not issues but surely if you're linking to a low quality site this will give you problems.

About the site you're speaking, what I recommend is to create a valuable post for your users. If that site is in your nihce and you think they may give a valuable service to your users why not writing about them? And if you get paid is better. But beware I'm not encouraging on having content from them and publish it, but evaluate their product, ask for free accesses, make a REAL review. In that sense this review will be helpful focusing on your users and their interests. They're your "clients" and you have to always think about them, sorry if I got misunderstood I'm not saying it's easy, but just that sometimes we complicate the picture asking on how google can recognize a paid link, because they don't; they just recognize the apparel of that link which is following the same structure of paid ones, so even if it's not paid you may be penalized too.

In short. If the site writing you is a good site, with a good product, offers you to use their product, write a content about them and link to them if you find their product useful, I don't think it would be a bad thing linking to them. Just try to have the possibility of writing about their service in the most free way.

As always in the SEO industry, there's no right answer for any particular case but I think you got a really structured approach to it. It would be great to know the results of your experiment. This could be a really good article in the seomoz community, let me know how it goes!

I've always used GWT as a report on my 404, and since it stops on 1000 404s I always download them for further reference and then mark them as fixed.

404s are a natural response in the whole internet so fixing them is a good thing but waiting for google to remove them from your GWT account amy take long time. If they don0t bother you follow streamline's advice.

First of all congrats on taking a linkfrom dmoz, even with its contras it still remains a good source where to have your link placed.

Second don't worry about it. Google knows how many sites are taking DMOZ data even Google directory is based on it

Hi Eric, I'll try to answer your further question even if I'm not an oracle like Pete

First of all thanks Pete to underline that you need to give google just one response since you can't give them both 301 and 404, I was assuming that and I didn't focus on that part of Eric's answer.

Second. Eric, If your purpose is to give google the ability of recrawl the old content to let them see it has disappeared you want to give them a 404 or a 410 which are respectively not found and permanently not found. Before it was a difference but now they've almost the same value under google's eyes (further reading). In that way google can access your page and see that those contents are now gone.

In the case of 403 the access is denied to anyone both google and humans, so in that case google won't be able to access and recrawl it. If your theory is based (and I think you're in the good way) upon the thing that google needs to recrawl your content and see it ahs really gone, 403 is not the response you should give it.

I know that this may be off topic but I would like to spend two more words on this

Just wondering how google would know the difference.

Try to move your focus away on humanizing Google. Google doesn't mind if you've REALLY paid or not for a content, don't think that if someone stops you in the street and ask you for a link for 5$ google may be aware of that, because it doesn't and I think that it also doesn't care about the REAL truth.

Google only cares about what IT thinks. Even if your link is natural and free, if it comes from a link network which sold links but in your case not, then you've paid that link too. Google is a private entity, which plays on its own rules, not bad nor good but just its own rules

Bear in mind that Google is not human, it's not under the human law of being truth when evaluating links, condemning the paid ones after demonstrating that they've been paid showing an invoice as a proof.

So when you analyze your backlinks (or trying to achieve new ones), try to understand if those links may be paid or not under google eyes not yours.

About being paid for a review you can create good content even being paid, just say to the one who's paying you that you will be writing a review but not publishing their content. You'll use their services and then write a review, so you're compelling and writing soemthing really useful for both users and google.

Great! Look forward to see your results

I think that the link #102 may have the same value of link #35, I don't think that adding many links diminishes the value of each one. What I assume however is that:

• having many links in one page diminishes the control you have on them, so google may crawl some of them and give different weight on each one. That0s why I'll better put fewer links
• you're right about having more links to your pages augment the possibility of have thoes pages in a better position against other. However as I said before, beware that google may not crawl all your links all the time. You can achieve the same proiportion of importance with less links (ex. 10 links vs 2 is the same of 100 vs 20: same weight more control and less internal spam risks.
• be wise when you build your links and try to not use too many anchor rich links. Even if you're onsite you don't want to let google think you're trying to overoptimize your page or its backlink profile. Create variations of your anchors and use them all.

As eyepaq said a 100 links limit is not the case anymore, however even if google is able to give value to them all it really makes sense to ahve so many links in your page? Are you using fat footers? Don't rely on that structure to give value to your internal pages, if you find 100 links in one page to be needed for users to navigate through your site try to restructure it a little and create different categories.

I don't know how much value is lost after 100 links but you should try to have tinier and themed list of links adding a further step in your navigation.google won't give hesmae value to those pages as users' won't either.

It's always good to have seo friendly urls, both for the bots and the users so they can easily understand what the page is about even in serps!

So you have to be cautious:

• be sure to implement well your 301s. Don't leave any page out if so you may lose real rankings
• prepare a new sitemap to submit as soon as you'll be swapping urls.

Even with that google will take a little to fully digest your new urls. SO you'll see some lower rankings at the beginning but maybe you'll recover in a couple of weeks.

Why not make a test with a bunch of lower priorities pages? So you'll be sure about the time to recover and maybe the impact will be less since it will be spreaded in a longer period.

It's a tricky situation, it seems like you were making many changes to your site, it's always risky to put links with keyword rich anchors, and when they're too many and built in a short time period that's definitely dangerous.

First of all get rid of everything you made in a "dangerous way" like your many internal links, normally google has itsrict  parameters to check out a page and when you're above a certain threshold you get hit. However I think that to recover the threshold is even lower, it seems like, google is more strict with you since you've tried to game their algo.

Now these are just my ideas and nothing confirmed but I think that you should try to clean up all the new links first, then have a look at your pages, that way to create a lot of pages in such short time, seems that they're programmed pages without any valuable content so they may be toxic for your recovery. Try to make a step back, and restart creating them on a slower pace and maybe hope google to reconsider your position. However if you don't have any manual penalty you'll have to wait until you get recovered. Reconsideration requests won't help you at all.

Hi Fablau, I'm still seeing you first with both your keywords, but in the google image results. It shows the first page of the sonata while the link to your html seems down to the 9th and 13th page.

It's strange to see such old and good pages (it seems they got high authority) going so down in the serps. A couple of things:

• have you done something since the change? Like affiliate promotion or heavy linkbuilding? I'm seeing 11 domains linking to the beethoven page but ~5k links. Many of them are from origenmusic.com it seems like they' linking a lot to that page. An affiliate? Maybe you can explain more but seeing so many links from few domains, seems the kind of things google doesn't like so much these days. In november I remember a couple of panda updates with one of them being quite aggressive.
• I'm seeing you having many tabs which are also different urls. Why not consolidate all those pages into the same one maybe using ajax to load the content so all the value remains in one page?
• Include your images in your pages, it seems that google like it since you're still ranking first with that, maybe you can use that value including that image into your main pages.

Hope that helps!

Hi Spry, as you already mentioned, not all links has the same weight, there are navigationla links like in the footer, in the menu; also google may give some different weight among them, moreover some value may be reduced, and also there are some other factors that google uses to weight each link in a page that we don't know, but we may assume they have.

So given that we can calculate an aproximate value of juice passed from a link to another I won't rely so much in PR, the time you're spending in this caluclations may be given to other tasks. In general you may assume that the best pages to obtain links are pages which are nearest to the homepage of a site and which has the least number of outgoing (both internal and external) links.

Don't rely so much on PR, I've seen so many low page rank pages ranking well and high pr pages with no rankings that I think that you need to consider other parameters which are more important when it comes to linkbuilding: age of the domain, authority, topic related, etc etc.

If your calculations are made for onsite optimization just try to have your main pages higher in your site structure and linked directly from the homepage or from m ain categories.

I agree with you, but what I really like of this job is that there is a base which everyone agrees on and then there is a shady part where everyone makes unique his job, there's a matter of knowledge + creativity.

For example the definition of good may be different from you and I and whatever other seo

I think that you need to be wise. You don't have to turn everything down nor everything up. I think that being paid for an editorial post may be good but always be sure that what you're writing is useufl for your visitors.

You don't want that your users think that you've sold your content. I've never been paid to publish content on my sites just because when I found something useful I will write about it and link to it even for free. HOwever if someone's contacting you offering money and you think that it is a good product why not accepting an extra money?

I think that SEO grew alongside the search engines. In the first period the SEOs were geeks programmers which tried to achieve top rankings spammin here and there. both internally and then externally.

Google seemed a machine to game to achieve your top positions. Now I think that Google helped a lot in giving to this job a further qualification. As they evolved their algo we evolved our knowledge in a game which is starting to move from the pure development to a larger integration with the marketing side of our job.

SEOs are everyday more marketing oriented, integrating a lot their job with pr building relationships with other webmasters. As you said I see SEO as an enhanced art where technical knowledge melts with marketing skills.

A good SEO is a marketing artist imo.

Hi James, that seems weird. Are you sure that you've included the analytics code in all your webpages? Maybe one page don't have your code so analytics may think that is an external source even if it's an internal link... dig into your referral, see the url which sent the visit and check the html code.

Hi Eric, in my experience I've always found 4** better than 301 to solve this kind of issues.

Many people uses this response too much just because they want to show google that their site don't have any 404.

Just think about it a little, a 301 is a permanent redirect, a content which has just moved from one place to another. If you got a content you want to get rid of, do you want to give google the message "hey that low quality content is not where you found it but  now it's here", no. You wan't to give google the message that the low quality content has been improved or removed. And a 404 is the right message to give him if you deleted that content.

It's prefectly normal to have 404s in a website, many 404 won't hurt your rankings, only if those pages were ranking already so users will receive a 404 instead and if some external sites were linking there in that case you may consider a 301.

While I think that google has a sort of a black list (and a white list too) I don't think that it has a memory of bad sites he encounters, if you fix your issues you'll start to rank again.

The issue you may have is not that you're site may be tainted but that maybe you still have some issues here and there which you didn't fix. As it seems Googlers said that Panda is now part of the algo so if you fix your issues you won't need any upgrade to start re ranking.

Hope this may have helped!! G luck!

Hi Moby, first of all the difference between all the tags you mention:

• canonical: is a meta tag which indicates which page containing the same content is the original one, It may be used from one page to another to indicate which one is the main one or a as a self canonical indicating the same page where it is located, because you can avoid duplciates due to sessions id or other kind of tags (trackings and the like)
• noindex: is a meta tag which indicates to bots to not include that page to their index. It's used to avoid low quality pages to being shown in serps
• nofollow: is both a meta, used to avoid search engines to crawl all the links in one page, or is used attached to a link to indicate bots to not pass value to that link.

So if you got pages which are identical you want to use the canonical in both the original page (as a self canonical) and in the other oines pointing to the original one. If they're are almost identical. If they're not you may want to:

• noindex those duplicates
• add quality content to the other regions pages so google finds that they're not identical at all.

Maybe your regions pages are seen as identical due to:

• low content, an image and slight changes to the title tag is not enough to mark a page as different, try to add good content, or mash content from other pages.
• is the content accessible when not logged in? If not google is seeing identical pages because its bots cannot crawl the content (bots cannot login)

About the login page you may noindex it, but I don't see any hurry to  make changes to that page.

Hope that helps!

you're welcome, hope your site will be speeding up a lot!!!

Hi Myriam, I totally agree with you, is always good to have such good opinion from other experienced SEOs. I also think that you're right when trying to encourage someone in building a good website and invest on it, they'll be happier and the users too.

My idea got out after seeing how much google is pushing their products into serps, I own a  portal which has many features but mainly lists different shops in categorized pages.It's quite frustrating to have the same rankings as last year but lower traffic due to  due to local listings and 7pack serps pushing my listing back and deep into the serp.

I was both trying to optimize for broader keywords without locations which are not affected by local listings and also trying to find a spot inside the locals. I know that this may be a further question, but how are you guys recovering the lost traffic due to the serps giving every month less exposure to SEO results?

first of all don't panic, wait for google to notify you.

Meanwhile you may want to see where are you losing that organic traffic. If the loss is at page level you may want to check if the pages which are losing traffic (and so rankings) are also heavy linked. If that so you may want to disavow those links and try to recover your rankings.

If the site was hit as a whole you should have received a notification by google or will receive that shortly. In that case just go on with a full disavow and start the reconsideration request telling them in details what you did, what you're doing to recover in details, and apologize for all your bad guy actions taken

as Paul correctly said, if your purpose is to improve the page speed just be sure that you're not resizing the images with css/html but that you're uploading the images in that dimensions.

An image of 10241024 resized to 100100 still weights as an 1024 image so my recommendation is to resize all those images to the desired dimensions, moreover if you can use an external cdn you'll save bandwith and have those images loading outside your website. That will help reducing the loadtime of the page.

Normally if Google didn't send any warning of unnaatural linking to your site you're not supposed to send a disavowing request since this just raise the attention goole is paying to your site, however I unserstand you want to prevent any issue by acting before any warning message.

About the disavow request, if that've been received google should have take that into consideration.

You said that that page was an offending page so you want to 404 it. I think that if you're getting rid of that page returning a 404 you're preventing that (bad) value to be added to your domain. I think that this is a correct approach. Just be sure that those 879 links are all bad because you don't want to lose all that value. If there are good links pointing there just ask those webmasters to point to your homepage instead. Just be sure that if there was some good content inthat page it has moved to your home before asking a link to be changed.

Hi IC I don't understand well what would be the purpose of anoindex tag there, if your page is blank and have a blog as an iframe, the content ehich google is seeing is blank so no duplication issues there, why are you thinking on no indexing the page? Maybe your purpose is another and I didn't unserstand it well, sorry for that.

I imagine that since you've got a robots txt error you'll probably ended closing a whole directory to bots which you wanted to be indexed. You can easily spot the directory and resubmit a sitemap to google changing the lastmod of those pages to today and the priority to 1 but only of those pages.

If you still receive warnings it may be due to errors in your sitemap. You're probably including some directory you don't want. You can try it in GWT putting in the box at the bottom the url you want to maintain in the index and then trying to see if some urls are being blocked by your robots.

If you want you can post here your robots and the URIs you want to be indexed without knowing the domain so that won't be public. Hope this may help you

That was what I was thinking about, give support in exchange for a link in their google + page as the main web address

hi Cyber, EGOL,

I think that you've to be cautious on what you publish. Your focus should be always the final user. If you're focusing on the users you can't do it wrong, if after making the article you see that is not useful (because it is mainly done to attract google bot) avoid it because it won't be adding value to your site.

The division EGOL is proposing makes sense:

• articles to give freshness to your site which are industry related updates. You said that your niche is quite interesting so your users may find interesting to have all the industry news centralized in one site which is reporting them shortly and quick (you can also use that feed to update your social profiles)
• deep diving articles. Guides and helpful content with videos and images to really help your users and which are link/share worthly. One note: beware of how tos and the like. That is  demand media (ehow.com) core business and it was something which google was supposedly going after with the Panda update. Be sure to write good and deep articles without trying to scale it with easy articles written in a bunch by freelancers.

Always have a look at your final result and ask the question "is this adding some value to the user reading is?" if you find that you're losing your time while reading it the user will feel the same

thanks for your answer roger, I generally agree with you, as you can't take the initiative and start spamming glocal with new businesses, but what if I contact the shop owner and give him the support to create that page? we can create it for them and then include a link to our website which is hosting the only available version of that shop online (because they don't ahve a website). So when someone's clicking on the glocal result will go to the google local business entry but thispage will also ahave a link to our website which the user may reach to buy what they want directly online.

every new page you post is additional keywords you're targeting. If you're creating low value content with bad user experience the additional bounces will only hurt your site as a whole but if you encourage creating only high value pages, useful for users you can improve your site. With the contente you manage your site being fresh and updated if you don't create new pages your site will be obsolete and so not so useful for users. It really depends on the market but users always changes their way to search for something an dyou need to be sure to let them find you in different ways. Wikipedia became great because of huge high value content being created on a daily basis, if SeoMoz achieved its position is due to the great care they use when they write new posts on their blog/site.

The general rule is it's worth to add content which is useful, is bad to create unuseful content which will make users enter your site and leave it as soon as they see shallow content.

I'll advice to use the hreflang tag on each page to be sure that google know ehich language are you targetin for especially for english and spanish having those languages different variations from one country to another.

maybe you'll see a swap for local search engines for your base language which I suppose is english and gain some additional trafic from other languages. You'll start ranking in languages you disn't have before so extra traffic is highly possible.

I actually have a portal with multiple listings from different users. Every listing is a physical shop with a different address, but more than the half of them doesn't have a website.

I was thinking on creating a local business for them and then add a link to my website in the section where google asks for your web address.

Does anyone already made something similar? does google allows links to inner pages and from multiple domains? Do you have any other and better idea on how to show in local results if you're like an affiliate and not the direct owner of the shop?

With google local listings crowding the serps it should be interesting to know how to fit in there.

Hi Tom, You definitely have a duplciate content issue, it has always been struggling to optimize an https site, but now with the new feature SE gave you can solve them.

Duplication can be solved using canonicals. Teh canonical tag will help bots to understand which page ranks. I recommend to use the http url which is the frendlier one and the easiest to build links, you can leave the https url for the transactions portions of the website which is where the https is really needed.

Read this article though, it helped me a lot while optimizing such a website

Hi Ve, just as a further clarification, remember that when you use the 301 redirection you're passing that value to the new page although you lose something of that value (further reading here) that's why you should schoose wisely whenever perform a redirect or not.

In the case you need to do that consider that you won't be starting from 0 but not even from the same point you were with the other page which was ranking.

try to nofollwo your login link and block your loggedin pages in your robots, so you'll almost prevent google to reach those pages. If you're able you can also noinedx your content.

As Tom, and webmaster central blog states 404s are a natural part of any website. They don't hurt you directly.

Redirect to home is not always a good idea, don't forget the real meaning of redirect: "a content which is permanently/temporary moved to another address.

If the content you are redirecting has just disappeared try to enhance the user experince: what is the advantage for an user looking for a product to reach your homepage? it will only raise your bounce, try to create a customized 404 which give to the users good alternatives to what thhey were looking for, like related products or the category where the product was.

Sorry Mavvy maybe I didn't understand you, are willing to rank for SEO right? You don't need any SEM or other kind of advertising to rank good for SEO, they're different and definitely unrelated channels, even if advertising may raise your branded terms search volume.

About social, it seems that this still doesn't influence seo rankings but it will probably in the near future, so you should push your watchdog to let you use it. Btw social is useful to create a network and build relationships (in the future links) there. You can always use your personal profile to do that.

About how to rank for SEO, make a good and depth keyword research, optimize your site structure and title+metas, create good content and then go out building relationships+links!

Also if your main keywords are highly competitive start with longer ones, with less competitors, these slight variations will lightly improve the rankings of the main keywords too, so you'll start to achieve easy traffic. Normally the 1 visit keywords summed up give more traffic than the main ones, although are more difficult to track.

Hope this helps!

I think that you'll better merge those 6 pages in two: cat and dog focus. You don't have enough differentiation among those pages, that's why google is changing them. Since they're synonims you may consider canonicaliza the whole value in one page for picture|image|printing dog free printing, I can see how those keywords will fit in just one page.

Hi edison, I'll try with multivariate tests, Google analytics has this functionality so you can make tweaks to your pages and get google to rotate them, It will then give you an answer on which pages performed better based on the goal you give to it: conversions bounce etcetc.

More advanced tools are outside but depending on how deep you want to go I'm sure that for a first try GA will be highly helpful

My two cents here are to not overoptimize urls just for ranking purposes, It's better to have kws in titles and h1-2 to help you rankings I'll choose the url structure based on how the choiche which will give you the highest control on them just for easy analytics study and future re-strucutration of the site. Also having a keyword may be good to have them bolded in serps so whichever choice you made may be good although I'll rely more on the shortest option which can give you both control and keywords in it.

Hi Carolina if that's the ONLY thing you've changed you may consider adding just one line using wildcards in your htaccess and you're done without any plugin.

Something like this may work:

RewriteRule ^201(0-3)/(.+)/(.*) http://www.domain.com/$2 [R=301,L]

Hi CB. I think that keyword are the most important part, they're the base of everything you'll be doing then. So:

1. keyword research: make a huge bucket of keywords looking at adwords keyword tool or whatever tool you have and combine that with your competitors keywords, you can make it by putting the url in the Google keyword tool or better using a service like semrush. Build a huge list of keywords just like if you're building a ppc campaign. Then refine them and prioritize by difficult/volume you want the best relation between efforts traffic achieved.
2. then based on your keywords start creating your contents. at least not copied content in the beginning
3. base d on your keyword look for competitors and build the whole list. Try to imitate what they did good, jsut like social followers, sites bcaklinking to them and try to build a list of highly relevant sites potentially interested in your services. When yuor site will be good enough (the enoguh is defined by how good your competitors sites are)start contacting them after having built a relationship in social media, an d create assets for future backlinks.

Hope this helps!

I think there's no agreement on that, it normally depends on personal choice. Normally I prefer to use all the separators just to make the site a little different and don't use always the same structure. However if I need to choose one I'll use user experience and readability for it, and personally I find the pipe much more readable than the hyphen just because separates better the sentences, However you may use a combination of both if the two portion of text are related.

Examples:

• Guide to Ibiza - Boat trip to Ibiza | IBIZATRAVELS.COM
• Hotel Ibiza | Bars and Restaurant in Ibiza

The first sentence (the last part is just for branding if you want although I don't love so much having the domain in the title), got an hyphen in the first part because boat trip seems to clarify which part of the guide to ibiza we're speaking about. The site name is not related that's why I put a pipe. In the same way I separated the two parts in the second option just because they're both about tourism in ibiza but they're not co-related in this case.

the old google dance. Normally this used to happen during algorithm changes and tweaks, you were seeing results bumping and dropping during a whole week, but now that's not the case.

As gfiedel said if your site is new, when google first index it, finds it really fresh and new and as all the new contents usually puts it quite high in their rankings, then after a day or so starts to change its position because of it being not so fresh, the parameters of its ranking are different. After a week or so you'll be sure that your site won't move anymore (if you don't change anything else sure )

Hi Ve. A 404 is generated when someone reach a page which doesn't exist, so to have someone reaching such a page you need to give them a path to it. There may be two different paths:

• internal. You can remove this internal path changing all the links pointing to the old url to the new one.
• external. This may be trickier. There may be:

1. external sites pointing with links to the old page. In this case you need to think if it's really worth to change the url. If it is, get in touch with those websites and ask them to change the link.
2. Google having indexed that page and make it rank. That cannot be changed by YOU.

So make all the internal and external possible fixes

change your sitemap and submit that to google webmaster tools

and then you'll need to modify your htaccess (if your server is driven by apache, which 90% normally do) and create a rule which redirects from the old page to the new one. In that way even if the external site doesn't change the old link the user won't receive a 404 but will be redirected to the new page, and google will drop the old url (in a week or so it depends on the crawling rate) and then index instead the new one.

For the htaccess rule if you're not experienced with that kind of file leave that to your it guys, because a wrong comma there, may brake the whole site.

Hope this is clear

Bob, there's nothing 100% safe for the future, Google is a private entity and they make the rules of their own game. However you can 99% sure that links will always be in their algo, just because is the inner nature of the www to have sites interlinked. I imagine that they'll become every day smarter in detecting patterns and automated links or human trying to manipulate the algo, but what they won't never control is human manual editing. It has no (huge) patterns and it's natural which is what they really want.

About your alumnis I don't have the compelte view of your market and situation but if I understand yyour position: they know that they're helping you but you're not giving nothing back to them. I think that since they've studied in your center they've been selected as top alumnis and been given a badge to demonstrate that. If I were them I would like to show it, so ask them to write a post, I think that the value for them here is intangible, jsut ego-boosting you need to play in that ground, I don't know how renowned you are in your market but someone is always happy to be endorsed by a structure (maybe you can offer special linkedin endorsemnent for a really short group with good websites )

Hi Bob, take into account one thing. Google wants links to be manually edited. Editorial link is good when you hide a link in a widget/badge to receive a link which is not editorially made you're "gaming" the algo. That link is not natural under google eyes. (further listening here).

The idea is good, the implementation not so much. Why not get in touch with your top 50 alumni, ask them to put the badge without any link inside and then ask them to write a post about their happiness of being considered a top alumni or their experience in your school? There they can link back to you (or not!) but it would be definitely higher quality, relevant and moreover editorially made!!!

Also I won't be making heavy linking tests while the next, huge Penguin is in the air