Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

Dheeraj

I would strongly recommend you concentrate on better quality links. Article directories and SEO Only press releases do not really help build the authority required for websites to rank specially in 2012. These used to work in the past and technically all kinds of links still work, but they are all short term high risk.

Concentrate on strengthening your content, building content that user's would engage with and naturally link to. Do press releases when it's really a reason for it to be a PR. Think of it from a user's perspective. The kind of news you are putting in that PR, what would you think if you read about it in a newspaper. Would you think it is useful ? Would you call it a news ?

I hope this helps.

There are multiple ways of solving this. However, the best solution is to implement rel=canonical tag in your pages.

You could technically do a robots.txt exclusion for such pages, but that's not recommended. Just use one primary URL. So for example your URL is http://www.example.com/red-widgets.php and you have sorting options for that URL, the template/header code should contain:

on all the sort URLs. This acts as a very strong directive to Google and acts as a 301 from all such URLs to your main URL for that product/category.

Taylor, you are 100% on the right track. All the answers exist in your question.

#1. These are "redirect notices", not errors. More like warnings.
#2. As long as they are canonicalized correctly, which you said "do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product".

There's absolutely nothing you need to do. You are good. It's always good and important to verify these technical SEO issues. I hope this helps.

As Ben and Alan have recommended, do something newsworthy. Think linkbait. However, before you do anything like that, I would suggest you look at your link profile and see if it makes sense to do something like this.

Have you been penalized for unnatural links ?
Do you have unnatural links ?

You could also have knowem.com or another agency or (DIY) signup on all social networking sites and have a lot of brand/follow/nofollow links. A natural link profile contains all kinds of links and not too many of 1 particular kind of links. I hope this ignites some thoughts and ideas.

I agree with Irving. Honestly, the better bet might be to get another number / forwarding number. You might be able to do an image on your own website, but think about all the Yellow page listings you you would have on the web with the same phone number. Keep it simple. Get another number for that 2nd business.

I think you have answered the question yourself and you already knew that "I guess there is no solution to it except to find lot of other high value links myself - so not so much a question as a comment really! but happy to hear peoples own experiences of that sort of situation." Just keep doing what you are (building/maintaining that great content), but also spend time in reaching out to people who would want to link to you. I would also possibly add a link to us box with an easy to use HTML code that people could use to link to you.

I would recommend spending that money getting an SEO Audit done and based on the outcome, plan your SEO Strategy. You can try and do some of the stuff yourself and have an SEO company do the rest. I would also spend time educating yourself (specially since you already have this resource handy....SEOMoz.org

I completely understand and agree. I think it's a constant cat and mouse game.

I don't know if you have read this post by Will or not, but if you haven't do read it: How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO

I worked on a B2B with a similar problem sometime back. The business decided to implement a Request for Quote system. And there was no impact on the rankings.

The pages those links link to, were they removed / changed by you at some point. Do you have a page you can redirect those URLs to ? If yes, setup 301 redirects on your server for those URLs to the correct new pages that you may have. If you do not have that content anymore, think like the user who might click on the links from those external links and redirect them to the page that is most optimal for that user.

I hope that helps.

I agree. I would plug those starting point / core keywords into Google Keywords Tool and/or SEMRush and see what you get. Somebody well versed with the industry is helpful but so is someone completely unknown to the industry. Sometimes we call certain things in a certain way, but that's now how majority of the people on the web search.

As Phil said, I would not worry about the age. I would find a subject matter expert, I am sure there are tons of people available on SEOMoz who do freelance. Just see if someone is available, do a small test project and take it from there. If that does not work, sites like Odesk.com have plenty of providers, but then tons of them are offshore. So everything has it's pros and cons.

I would run a test. A/B test both the situations. See what the difference it. This varies so much by who you are up against, today and your competition could change on a day to day basis. So run this test every few days/weeks.

Run a small campaign to bid for position #1 for x amount of time.

Another campaign to bid for position 2-3 for the same x amount of time.

The cost vs conversions, ROI calculation will tell you what's better for you. If the numbers make sense to stay at #1 and you can afford to do that, why not ?

I am presuming all those domains are linking to each other, correct ?

Are they regular or nofollow links ? It boils down how much authority you have on your main domain as well as the other domains. If I were you, I will keep the main e-commerce website on one server and everything else including niche blogs etc on a different server. It's not just SEO, but also security issues.

Essentially, to answer your question, it may not be hurting you to have the niche blogs, a forum with user generated content, the articles site and the corporate site on the same IP/server, but it would help you a lot more if they were on a different server, possibly different Class C IPs. So, you will gain from these links being on a different server. Keep in mind, these links are important for you and its good to increase their value by hosting them separately, because these sites are links that your competition can never get linked from. I would also consider doing a nofollow on them, and that's just my thoughts. I prefer lower risk. Again, it depends on what your e-commerce website's link profile is.

I am sure they did, but we were never able to have a read on it because price data was never added to the site. We just started measuring the Call to Action / Conversion as a successful RFQ or a visit to the contact page from these product level pages.

Definitely submit (it's a high quality link). However, do not have any hopes. Spend 5-10 minutes doing your submission in the right category. If you are a regional business, don't forget to submit in your regional category. That works really well, only if your contact page has the physical business address listed as well as in the whois (Yes, the editors check).

Submit it, Forget it. If you get a link. Celebrate.

1. Where are you ranking currently compared to your competition?
2. How many common keywords to you see ranking between your website and the competition?
3. How large is your website compared to the competition ?

Looking at the metrics, I think the fact that you are competing with internal pages and yours is a homepage, makes it easier. Are you sort of a niche site ?

It's more of quality and then relatedness of the links, then just pure quantity. I would continue to build brand links to homepage, inner pages and adding more content to strengthen my presence in the niche.

I hope that helps stay on track. You are definitely on the right track in terms of what to look at. Just don't get distracted in the number of root domain links / domain authority.

Robert, I have actually seen that in Chrome for several weeks. Try it for other domains and you'll see the same thing.
Try Yahoo.com  Bing.com slickdeals.net amazon.com ebay.com orientaltrading.com and so on.

What kind of blog is it ? Is it a wordpress.com or typepad.com or blogspot.com hosted blog ? That could be the only reason why you could not use a sub-folder.

I would recommend using wordpress.org hosted blog and install it on /blog/ and then import content from your existing blog, whatever platform it is, I am pretty sure there are import plugins available in the wordpress plugin database to import your content seamlessly.

I would not bother. Imagine Fortune 500 companies with 10;s of thousands of employees and each with their browser homepage set to company homepage. Think about web design/e-commerce companies where design teams are looking at the site, browsing the site and then not to forget the QA team. I would definitely not worry about 1 person

You might want to think about it a a little bit  more and see how it all fits in your marketing strategy. The recommendation is definitely to just link to the articles. The question is, where to link it from ?

Also, the question is whether you would want to pass link juice from your website to those pages?

As far as reproducing the content, that's definitely a no-no in my opinion, since you are then signing up to duplicate content issues.

Very interesting question Donnie. Although pretty simple, it's a little complex at the same time.

Here's what I am thinking: It does make sense to have it unique on every PR, somewhat related to the theme of your PR. However, it's an about us...not about the PR. I think although right from the SEO perspective, it might not be 100% right from a PR/business standpoint.

My mind is also relating this to the fact that if we have a header and footer on every page, it's the same/duplicate content. Should that not be unique then ? I think Google is way past these things. Google understands what duplicate content is (to a very great extent) and I would not worry about it if you are doing less then 10 press releases a year. However, if you are doing something like 1 press release every week for the client, then it might make sense to have a relatively unique copy written.

But before you decide, I suggest you discuss it with a PR professional. Sometimes, for us, it get's difficult to think outside the box (SEO Box :).

Eric, Have a few questions for you:

1. Do you have executive buy-in to do SEO Work?
2. How much SEO potential is out there for your website to rank?
3. How well does it rank today?
4. How big are your Top 3 competitors? Have they been growing last 1-5 years?

If you can demonstrate the size of the opportunity you have and prove it's achievable with a smaller project, test or experiment, you might have "unlimited resources" ;). Just saying :).

I would suggest implementing canonical tag for Magento. That would take care of duplicate URLs for the same pages. As for the review pages, if you are not using the functionality, isn't there a way to disable them completely from within Magento administration ? If not, I would first install that canonical fix and see what you see on those review pages. If not, you can always do a disallow using robots.txt but it's better to have them not exist at all specially when you are not even using them instead of doing a disallow/noindex kind of thing.

I hope that helps.

No, unfortunately not. There's no way to get a read on these keywords. You are right, since the users are logged into Google account, starting October 2011, Google started doing their searches for logged in users by default on SSL, which means the data is secure between the user's browser and Google. The search query is not passed onto the website.

However, one almost sure shot way of calculation is to take the 80% of the data you have available and see what (%age of Total 80% those keywords are and just convert the data into 100%. In most cases, those 20% users are also typing the same sort of queries (relatively) as your 80% traffic.)

I hope that makes sense and helps.

Any kinds of bulk links...I would suggest to stay away from unless you are trying this for a throwaway site if it gets penalized. If you are planning long term, invest in content and more "real" link building which is a lot of hard work.

Also read this question here.

I agree with what you are thinking. The biggest effect would be if you can move them all onto one domain name (sub-folders) and setup 301 redirects. Keep hosting those domains forever since the 301s would stay only as long as you own the domains and continue to host them to serve the 301.

Moving them to sub-domains might be minimal / zero effect. I only see risk in doing that.

Ask yourself: Does it help the users in integrating all the content into one big website ?

It's just another link. It's completely navigate-able and they have canonical tags in place to prevent any duplicate URLs. It looks good. http://www.ties.com/long+black-ties Canonical is consistent with the linked URL.

Let's say for a second that you are able to manipulate this one ranking signal. Keep in mind there are well over 200 ranking signals. What would one do for the other factors ? There's too many items to manipulate. And if you have naturally been able to achieve 140 of those signals, would you really want to risk all your good and hard work and try to manipulate it ? I wouldn't.

I hope this helps.

Directory links are the "manipulated" links of yesterday. I would strongly suggest to ignore them. Great details Alick300. I would suggest to spend some time reading Moz's Link Building and SEO Guides i.e. http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

It's very easy to get in trouble with the wrong links.

Saw this earlier today from a Newsletter. Kudos to Buildmyrank for openly accepting what happened and stuff. Anybody who was using their network for links, would they care to provide some examples of the kind of links were generated through their network ? I am kinda curious to look at them and see what patterns if any existed in there.

Yes, you can use the crawl test tool here at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test It's limited to 3,000 pages and you can run upto 2 reports per day. I hope that helps

You said there's outbound link tracking. Check if those links are nofollowed as Ryan suggested. You can also check if if they are something like www.thatsite.com/redirect.php?id=1 and if the redirect.php has a noindex or www.thatsite.com/robots.txt has a disallow or something like that.

If the links are redirects via a tracking, they are not really being counted towards the linked to site's backlinks anyways, so I don't think there are any issues here.

I agree with Ian 100%. It does not make sense (Even though that pingback link is nofollowed). Does it help your user ? Would it be useful to have that link available to them ?  Think about the user experience and in most cases, we get the correct answer, which is almost certain to be white hat way of handling the situation :).

Great answer Ian.

This could be for multiple reasons. If you are looking at raw total links (not unique domains) linking to you, one blogger linking to you with a sitewide link and if that person change his blog's link display from sitewide to homepage only can impact numbers like that. Have you also been monitoring your competitor links ? How have they changed ?

Also, the quality of the sites OSE uses it's in index would improve over time, in which case spam blogs etc might get dropped, thereby causing in reduction in the number of links.

There could be a number of things. See OSE Stats below from their update on 9th Oct, 2014

• 166,012,290,869 (166 Billion) URLs
• 14,298,548,989 (14 Billion) subdomains
• 168,560,672 (168 Million) Root Domains
• 836,560,885,910 (836 Billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.51% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 63.17% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 36.83% are external
• Rel Canonical - 19.74% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 105.24 links on it
  • 87.45 internal links on average
  • 17.79 external links on average

In my opinion you are fine when you are targeting individual the 3 keyword examples you laid. It's very similar to if I had a website about Toyota Camri. The homepage is where I might target that keyword, but then I might have a separate page for each year/model, so 2000 Toyota Camri, 2001 Toyota Camri and so on. No issues here.

The issue would be if from the 2011 Graduating Class page, you are linking to another page with 2011 Graduating Class as the anchor text. That would be more of an issue.

Does that make sense ? I hope that helps.

What I'd suggest doing is randomly revising some of those 404's that appear and check whether they should indeed be 404s. Are there any bulk rules / wildcard 301s you can implement to redirect the traffic for 3-6 months ?

These URLs are usually found from external links to your website. When you click on a detail of any of the reported 404s, it tells you what the error details are, whether this link is in the sitemap or where it is linked from. You'd realize in most cases it's linked from somewhere. If it's an internal link, correct it. If it's external, do you think the webmaster might update it if you contact them or is it easier to just set a 301, retaining the SEO value ?

I hope this helps.

I usually never limit it. I let the content writer decide based on how / what the topic is and I try not to restrict them to a certain word count. Short article or long, it should serve the purpose it's being written for and if it's for the user, which is what it should be, it should cover the article title in the right way and do justice to it.

I hope that helps.

It's not possible to use that information alone and say for sure that those reasons are connected. They very well may be, or absolutely not.

The links could be a variety of reasons. What if they acquired another big company and did a 301 from the old to the new. Could be the tool you used for the backlinks data crawled more. It could be organic links. It could be something that went viral. There are too many things that could happen. So without digging into the details, I can't say anything for sure.

Look at fresh web links and see what you see there. If you are concerned about that competitor, download their backlinks from OSE and audit them.

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

I definitely think there's potential as long as it's not over used and instead of being semi-related, it's tighly related. See my response to a similar question here. You have to weight the risk and the reward and it's best done with bringing value to the user rather then just links (even though we all know the reason is links).