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Hi Shawn,

It is most likely going to be one of two things:

1. The On-Page optimisation for the Category pages is not direct enough to rank for all product pages and therefore you would need to re-focus the on page optimization and messaging to the products you are directly aiming to rank for.
2. You have built backlinks or internal links to the product pages so they hold more authority (you can check the PR and PA/DA of your pages vs. category pages for an idea)

Possible solutions are:

1. Re-optimise the category pages to be relevant for the products you want to rank
2. Build more powerful backlinks and authority to the category pages
3. Make category pages canonical page for product pages (probably not the ideal solution but just a thought).

I guess the real question is why wouldn't you want clients seeing the exact product they are trying to search for? If they are searching XL Blue Widgets and you would prefer they go to the Widgets page, then it doesn't make too much sense?

Hope this offers some insight.

Hi Jan,

I would imagine the Pinterest links are all "nofollow" and not passing authority, also the link from Polyvore is also "nofollow".

The reality is there pages have more authority, the title is the same and at present that is why you are being outranked.

I guess the most important question is; "does it matter very much?" - I haven't searched the keyword tool for an estimation on search traffic, but I'd hazard a guess it is slim to nil. The fact that they outrank you due to SEO factors is unimportant if there is no organic traffic. You outrank them on the social factors, hence the larger following and that is where the traffic is, so if I could pick more Pinterest traffic or more Google traffic for this instance, I know where I'd be putting my money.

Hope this is of some assistance.

Redirect is the best option for you I believe, you will pass the majority of link juice if anybody has backlinked to the https version.

You will need to contact the host where your server is in order to get this implemented. Alternatively you can just resubmit your http site for index in Google via GWT and see how that goes.

Hi Adam,

There are a lot more factors than simply going and disavowing all of these. You really need to determine what you are thinking when you say "these are all crappy links". You can use metrics such as DA/PA/PR/MR/MT and have conditional formatting set for the excel columns. You can export all back links from Google WMT, Ahrefs, OSE and even then you won't have all of your backlinks. Then use the Moz Toolbar to go and test the parameters you have set and paste them into the respective URL fields on the excel.

The process is manual, but the process of disavowing should be, it would have been automated crappy SEO that got you into this, so unfortunately automated crappy SEO, won't get you out of it. Time and effort is required or you will end up disavowing all of the value with the rubbish and you may as well just start from scratch.

Hope this helps!

As long as you outweigh them with great natural links then you will be fine. These spammy links are part and parcel of building great sites. It is when they are viewed in isolation or as a large proportion of a site's backlink profile that it is clear they were built for the purpose of ranking.

Hi John,

You might have numerous pages displaying 404 errors if they are broken links. 301 redirect them all to the right page, then run the report again and see if it is displaying and information on meta descriptions missing.

Hi,

We have experienced similar and in my experience if the 7 locals slot in between say 3 and 4, these effectively become 3-{4,5,6,7,8,9,10}-11 so the natural rank 4 is really 11th.

The reason I say this is I have noticed results moving up out of the local listings, into the top few and then back down into the local. This has been across several companies in the past 6 months, mind you just for one industry.

In my experience the only additional pages which you can rank in addition to having a local listing, is a sub-page. Although we have seen a local listing and also organic homepage listing ranking as high as middle of the second page.

I hope this has been of some assistance, just my observations from our listings.

I think his hugs are "nofollow" so they aren't worth much anymore

Not especially for link authority as they will be "nofollow" attributed links. I would recommend doing it from a social link traffic perspective as any specific SEO benefit would be negligible, traffic is traffic though

Hi Heather,

Rand had an article on just this topic for a Whiteboard Friday, well worth a read:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-move-rankings-up-on-older-existing-content-whiteboard-friday

Takeshi is right, the argument against BOTW and Yahoo isn't that they aren't great links, as often times they are. The reality is that at $300 odd per link, can you get far more substantial elsewhere for less? That depends entirely who and what you know. If you can justify the cost and have the budget then yes the links themselves are quality.

Hi Paul,

Moz can run campaigns on multiple subdomains or sites, you get up to 5 separate campaigns for $99/mt, then up to 12 for $199/mth.

Each campaign will allow you to track the relevant pages within each for rankings via rank tracker i.e. if a sub-page ranks it will tell you that.

Hope this helps out!

Try as best you can to do a 301 redirect page for page i.e. map out the structure and relevant page and then redirect it to the relevant page on your new site. That way you have the best chance of passing on the relevant juice and hopefully rankings for each page.

Just a link on the homepage will give you a far less juice through and little of the backlinking power to the old site that you are trying to harness for the new sites' rankings.

Hope this helps!

We use LinkedIn predominantly in the B2B space and find it is a great way to engage i industry discussions and also personal and company branding. For B2B social marketing my personal vote is LinkedIn #1!

No problems Stewart happy to help.

Yes that would be the case, as long as they aren't "SPAMMY" websites or those blogs selling links then of course it is safe to do so. That is link-building!

Also be sure to not over target anchor phrasing, make it as valuable for the people reading the information as possible and you have a sustainable SEO strategy.

None of the link databases you use will have the quantity of links that webmaster tools has. You can use multiple sources to try and build the best possible picture of yours or competitors link profiles.

Hi Ron,

Not a silly question at all mate!

It appears there aren't any "nofollow" attribute links on members profile pages, I had a look at this one as an example: http://www.instructables.com/member/JonnyBGood/. I'm not sure if that is for all member profiles though.

I only had a little chance to look at articles and couldn't see any links so can't comment on if they are "nofollow" or not. I would recommend downloading a "nofollow" toolbar extension on either Chrome or Firefox, that way when ever you view any site all nofollow links have a red dotted-line show up around them so you can instantly see the dofollow and nofollow links. It is helpful not just from a link building perspective, but also to see how authority can be directed around pages.

Hope this helps!

I don't believe they are going to hurt you, it is more of a warning that if you are trying to have these indexed that at the moment they can't be accessed. When you don't want them to be indexed i.e. in this case, I don't believe you are suffering because of it.

That anchor text is going to be fine I would imagine. It isn't going to be a high search volume keyword I wouldn't suspect and it is going to be describing the company/brand as opposed to a product or industry term.

I would agree with Tim that your site is going to do a whole world of better than the article sites. I'd recommend if you are looking at the article sites for backlinking or traffic then you adjust your gaze to guest blogging for other great sites in your niche. This will give you far better ROI for time, backlinking juice and potential for natural traffic.

Hi Ron,

I have a pdf explaining, I will PM you, which should answer all those questions:

• Your link isn't hyperlinked - hence not a link, just text
• The link I have shown is a "nofollow"
• Link to member profile page is dofollow

Hope this helps out mate!

Hi Michael,

It is as much about domain, nameservers etc. as it is about developing localised content and also building backlinking properties from the country in question.

Try and think of all the things you would do if you were setting up a local London business i.e. .co.uk domain, London directory listings, content relevant for the audience etc.

Hope this gives you a good starting point.

Hi Jonathon,

WMT is always going to show a far larger index of links compared to OSE or Ahrefs or any other backlink database. OSE and any other tools like that are only every going to give you a picture of your link profile, never the whole picture. We use these tools mainly for competitor research and to support WMT for our own sites.

Here is a decent thread on this question regarding link juice from canonical links:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-canonical-tags-pass-all-of-the-link-juice-onto-the-url-they-point-to

Here is the response from SEOmoz staff member Dr. Peter J. Meyers:

"I have to disagree about link juice. In many cases, canonical tags will work much like 301-redirects, and do seem to pass link-juice. I've even seen experiments where people used canonical tags to move an entire domain. I wouldn't recommend it (except in rare cases), but it seemed to work.

I am concerned, though, that you're linking internally to one version, but then using canonical to point to another version. I find that's a bad idea - while it sometimes works, you're sending a mixed signal, and it can cause problems for your SEO efforts. I personally think that a truly canonical URL should be used consistently across the site, including in internal links. Internal links are one of your strongest canonicalization cues.

Unfortunately, it's hard to say if link-juice is being passed, given the mixed signal. I'm afraid there's no great way to measure it, at least on the level of the individual link. I should add that Google also isn't a big fan of setting a canonical to page 1 of search results. They'd generally rather you canonical to a "View All" or use rel=prev/next. Canonical isn't always a good bet for pagination these days."

Hope this helps out!

Another add on to Egol's post is the split of SEO resources. If you don't have the time to build the necessary online properties to rank both it may be an argument for focusing your efforts on one stronger site then splitting resources and having two "also-rans".

Hi Joni,

Your question is a little vague? By preventing reputation issues are you talking about reputation management? I imagine you wouldn't need that immediately if you are a new company as one would hope you don't have any negative reviews prior to opening?

In regards to starting to brand your new company it is less about tools and more about assets i.e. where can your clients go to find out about you and engage with you? Most businesses generally build websites and social media properties.

I hope this steers you on the right direction, but if you can clarify what you actually need I can give you some clearer advice.

Hi Ricarda,

We have numerous sites hosted on DNN and have been able to implement both canonical tags in the header and 301 redirects fairly easily.

I'd recommend your developer consults DNN for support if the are having difficulty.

Improve your backlink quality and anchor text diversity. If you have access to some of the links, go back through and modify some of your anchor texts.

I'd recommend making at least some of your posts sticky to the homepage on the topic you are trying to rank as without some consistency you will be constantly changing the picture Google has of your website content wise.

Other options would be to add an additional section below the top slider with text, in my profile you will see how we have stuck our front post to the homepage as we previously had blog snippets from new posts and it was making our rankings far more volatile.

Start with the simple as Mike and Kevin said, there are numerous things before you begin looking at Penguin or any other algorithm changes affecting the results for drastic changes.

Alex - while you may be correct, this is definitely not the best spot for Victoria to start.

Hi,

If they are domain specific then you aren't going to run into too many problems. I've seen companies in your situation in the past use nofollow on a portion of their clients websites though just to have some diversity. It is my understanding though that if you aren't keyword stuffing them then the risk is significantly negated.