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Are you able to share examples? Maybe PM me?

It doesn't sound like these links will be good for your website. Anything done "Just for SEO" sounds like a bad idea. These "link building" tactics used to work pre 2007 ish. I would focus on building great content that relevant sites link to.

Do you have any competitive insights available? Do your competitor's product images show up in Google Images? Do Product Images show up in the SERPS?

+1 to what Ross said. Subdomain hosted elsewhere won't have any impact. However, you should consider moving your subdomain to the sub-folder if that makes sense for your SEO Strategy.

Have you also seen any impact in traffic during the same timeframe?

Take a look at this post on Moz - https://moz.com/blog/seo-changes-using-google-tag-manager. Also, take a look at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/tag-manager/Ilxks3tQKrg. Personally, I wouldn't recommend doing this via GTM. Noindex and Schema specially. They are both important for SEO and are better off done via the CMS.

Depending on the following questions, the answer might be very simple or very complicated. I don't think there is a 1 size fits all answer. Some details would help:

• How big are the old sites?
• Are they all same/similar topic?
• Why are you merging them?
• Is it fair to say that Content from Site1+Site2+Site3+Site4+Site5+Site6=New Site?
• Are there any duplicate content issues between the sites that you are merging?

If your AMP is setup correctly, I wouldn't worry about this. Do you have the correct amphtml tag and the reference back to your canonical?

Sounds like it's the same company, right? If yes, you could do Homepage to Homepage only. That should atleast solve the issue for the right Homepage ranking, for your brand name searches in the respective countries.

It's been a while since I tried Moz's crawler. This new "major refresh" looks great Dr Pete and Team Moz. Cheers.

You are thinking right. What would stop all the major brands to go out there and buy the "spammiest" links networks pointing to their competition. How does the competition prove they did not do it.

I think Google dealt with this years ago with the Miserable failure change.... here. They basically altered their algorithm to not give "too much" advantage of links/anchor text from all over the web. In a sense, they created the ability for their algorithm to discount the value of links, not penalize the website being linked to. Does that make sense ? I think what's happening now is not any different...they can and will continue to identify link spam, de-index link networks and manipulative techniques using pattern identification. But if not all, most cases, discount the value of those links...and not directly or not 100% penalize the site being linked to, because then technically a group of people/websites could run a mass campaign and kill any online business. That's not how the Internet is supposed to work...

Move whatever content makes sense and do 301 redirects. If there's no reason for that content to be there and if it's not bringing in any traffic, or if it is, either wya, it makes complete sense to move/migrate content that's relevant and then do 301's. Make sure you check where most of your backlinks are coming from and if you can get any of those links changed to the new website. I would also check for deep links to the old site and make sure, whatever URL those deep links were going to, are redirected to the new page on the new site. I hope this helps.

Honestly, I think you gut is telling you the right thing. And thankfully you answered the question yourself.

The fact that those pages were created to manipulate rankings (as in doorway pages?)

If that's the case, and there are external links to those pages, I would do exactly what you are thinking. Delete those pages and let them be a 404.

Did your client also receive the unnatural links google penalty notice ? If that's the case, then it's a no brainer to do this right away. You could also try to find if there are link networks involved and if there are certain webmasters who control multiple website specially when you say 3800 links from 1500 domains. I would atleast try to get "some" of them removed or atleast have some effort. If there's a way to send a blanket email to all of the 1500 domains, it's well worth the effort of atleast trying.

I hope this helps.

If you think about it, what you are suggesting has some sort of "usability" built into it - (lawyer give the accountant a plug when discussing minimizing taxes on his blog).

The problem with a network is that it eventually creates patterns. So if you think about BuildMyRank network of sites. Let's say they had 1000 Blogs B1-B1000. Now let's say they have 100 clients buying 10 links each C1-C100. If you graph it out, you'll notice the links will develop a pattern, which is fine (to some extent).

The problem lies when the content is completely unrelated to 1 another within 1 blog. Also, every blog post is linking to atleast 1 external site. Further, a network that size would certainly have some level of overlaps in terms of Web Hosting, IPs, Class C's, Domain Registrars and so on.

When you do it only to tweak search results (and we all know we need links to rank), it always contains some element of risk. However, I would suggest you do it more with Brand Keywords rather then exact match with your keywords. So if it's ABC Law Firm you are linking to, let it be ABC Law Firm as the anchor text vs Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer. Mix and match, maybe even nofollow them. And as I have said several times in my posts, don't overdo any 1 kind of link building. A natural link profile consists of 100'd of different kinds of links, varying anchor texts and so on.

I hope that helps.

Yes, you are 100% on the right track. You do need the canonical tags in place ASAP. Both on the category and the product level.

And yes, duplicate content is also a very important consideration, so I would definitely suggest creating a business case to get unique copy done for each of your pages.

Both of these points are high priority and I am sure that's why you posted the question...to confirm. You are right.

It is being picked up from your DMOZ Listing in http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Law/Services/Lawyers_and_Law_Firms/General_Practice/North_America/United_States/Mississippi/

• Fortenberry Law Group - Trust and estate law firm providing probate-related representation to clients throughout the United States. Handles probate matters in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

Add a meta tag as following in your HTML code if you don't want that to happen.

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

This will take care of the problem.

For a franchise scenario, it would be best to use a sub-domain, however it does depend on other things as well.

1. Would franchises be able to control / add / edit any content on these sites ?
2. Any duplicate content issues between multiple sites ?
3. Do all of them need to be indexed in the search engines and getting/targetting search traffic ?

As a general rule, for SEO, sub-folders are much better, but in your scenario, it's a different case.

You might also want to refer to other similar questions here on SEOMOZ.

1. http://www.seomoz.org/q/blogs-are-best-when-hosted-on-domain-subdomain-or
2. http://www.seomoz.org/q/setting-up-a-company-blog-subdomain-or-new-url
3. http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-vs-blog

and the post from Matt Cutts

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Yes, you definitely should and when you do that, make sure you do a redirect from www.website.com/index.html to www.website.com You could do that via .htaccess RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]

I see you have 2 responses from SWD and SanketPatel. They are both different strategies and you need to decide what you want to do as a Business. Here's why:

If you adopt SWD's solution, you could technically get rid of the problem, by telling Google that do not index page 2, page 3 and so on and just index your page 1. My question would be, do you have a View All page ? Do you want search engines to index and rank each one of your paginated pages ? Do they have unique collection of products and does it help the user if they land directly on Page 2 or would you rather then have land on Page 1 always ?

SanketPatel's solution definitely gets rid of the problem from a GWT perspective, however, the bigger question is, what you are trying to achieve and what your users would prefer.

Instead of looking it it from what's right in GWT or SEO, find what's right for your user first and then implement that in an SEO Friendly way.

I hope that helps and makes sense.

I would recommend not using any kind of link networks. If you can contact relevant blogs directly, maybe do some of those kinds of guest posts etc. Also, diversify your link profile. Do a little bit of everything or in other words, don't overdo any 1 technique. A natural link profile consists of all kinds of links and too much of any-kind is where it becomes un-natural.