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Let's Say I come in searching for reviews for ABC Web Hosting. Why would I leave a review ? What's my reason to post a review on a random website ? Is there an incentive of doing that ? I would suggest you brainstorm as if you are the user. What attracts you the most ? Maybe building a community ? Giving them a value. Something.
Does that make sense ? Post or PM me your URL and I'd love to take a look.
The question remains open for answers anyways...but you may want to post it as an ongoing discussion instead of a question. I don't think there's anything that can be done except to post it again.
Wow, every since BMR (BuildMyRank.com) got booted down, lots of Private Network questions are out there. In simple words, private networks specially when owned by the same person and / or link to the same network of sites are identifiable by automatic algorithms (Think what those Phd's are doing at Google).
Also, you might want to read these similar questions 1, 2.
Keep in mind, you are still prone to risk and whois protection or not, if a human can find it, patterns in linking can also help them identify themselves as networks. Moreover, if these sites are not strong themselves, how are they going to provide value ? so now, you will have to worry about getting links for those 30 sites as well to strengthen them. Otherwise, if there's no inbound links to those 30 sites, there's not much link juice they have to pass.
Makes sense ? I hope that helps.
Depending upon the link profile, domain strength and authority of your website, you should be good between 3 days to 1 month. I have seen scenarios where a 301'd URL got replaced with no drop in rankings in as little as 3 days and on a different website, lower authority as much as 30 days. But yes, you should be back to business with the steps you have already laid down.
Best of luck 
I think it's because you do not have enough domain strength, domain authority / backlinks etc. I see that the site / domain was registered in March. I would continue to work on content as well as some links/citations and don't do everything / every link with your keyword "EMV Cards". Do variants.
It would not be a good idea to interlink them for SEO reasons as you mention "creating a link wheel/pyramid". I would ask these questions to myself: 1. Do all the sites have unique content ? 2. Do they have any duplicate/repurposed content at all between theme ? 3. Do uses on one website need to navigate to the other website, since it provides value to the user ? 4. Have you considered nofollow links ? This is a bigger strategy discussion that you have to do to figure out your next steps. If they don't provide too much of a value, how about you aggrgate the content on 1, maybe 2 or 3 combined sites instead of 50 and 301 the rest ? It's really difficult to answer further without knowing more in detail. I hope this atleast invokes some questions and a long term SEO strategy.
How new is your website ? Do you have any sites linking to you currently ? You might want to check under Google Webmaster Console or Majestic SEO to see if they are reporting any backlinks (if at all they exist). If not, I would just concentrate on building links and eventually OSE will find you.
It's only a matter of time. I know it's frustrating. Read this great article from Wil Reynolds - How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO
I understand your concern. I am basing my answer based on the fact that if you don't have a robots.txt at all, Google will still crawl you, which means its an allow by default. So all that matters in my opinion is the disallow, but because you need an allow from the wildcard disallow, you could allow that and disallow next.
Honestly, I don't think it matters. If you think the way a bot would work, it's not like robots.txt 1 line is read, then the bot goes crawling and then comes back reads the next line and so on. Does that make sense ? It reads all the lines in the robots.txt and then follows the directives. But to be sure, you can do either of the scenarios and see for yourself. I am sure the results would be same either way.
Andrew
I would essentially suggest to use the crawl report from SEOMoz as a starting point and see which ones translate into real issues and then the effort/reward/prioritize based on time and resources available as well as the importance of that change.
@Maximise is right-on, you can ignore the canonical "warnings". They are more like an FYI.
Great suggestions from Keri and Holly. I would like to add: On the townstate.com, try to do an Infographic about something. Maybe an interesting chart about the Real Estate Market Trends in the last 1-3 years within your city/state. Some top 10 lists like: Top 10 Reasons Why TownName is a Great City to Live In. Top 10 Jobs in TownName Area Top 10 Cities Where People Move from... You get the idea. I hope that helps.
Just use a crawler like Screaming Frog, crawl your website and see if you see any errors / 404s that you are linking to. And you can identify what all pages link to it.
I hope this helps.
I think I agree here. It's difficult to have a standard "SEO" page count. It also differs/varies by industry. Whenever I am getting any articles, I give the authors/content writers a general idea of above 500 words or less then 500 words (Short article vs long article) and let them decide what's needed based on what they are writing about. If they have more to write about the subject matter, I don't like the length of the article as long as the scope of the article is focused. They might be done with 400 words and if I tell them 700 words, they might not have something to write about and then I don't want fluff copy in there as well.
I know that does not really answer the question, but we usually try to target small/big articles and the actual length varies by the subject matter.
Try this in the .htaccess file. It should work fine for sure. You don't need to manually add your website name.
<code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</code>
Since you said you are using Wordpress, try implementing http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-image-sitemap/ or another similar plugin. Once you do that, check in Webmaster Console how many images are indexed. You might also want to try doing a site:yourdomain.com search at images.google.com My guess is your images are indexed, but not ranking.
All the 3 options are okay. You have to keep in mind, that with the nature of the Internet, you are not really going to be able to control which one of the 3 technique people/other website owners you, so essentially you can't know what people decide to do.
Another oppurtunity would be to implement something like www.repost.us (I saw that discussed here a couple days ago) and when I took a look at it, it looked interesting. Check it out.
I hope that helps. And yes, the most important aspect would be to make sure the content you are adding should be seen by Google on your website/blog 1st. If you are using WordPress or something like that, I would suggest using a plugin to publish and ping to Google an updated XML sitemap as soon as a new article is added. That should so it for you.
If your product names and brand names in itself, I'd totally use them/track them if that's what my goal is. There might be very little search volume but your conversion would be high, so you'd want to make sure all those review websites are not outranking you for your own brand name/product name keywords. So yes, you are right and on the right track :).
I implemented the canonical tag last year in a similar situation and yes, it's on the original page as well. No issues. Look at eBay.com, they also have canonical tags on all pages including the original page.
I have not seen/encountered any issues. Now when I go check the cache for http://www.example.com/duplicate-url-3.html which has a canonical tag referring to the original-url, Google shows me the canonical URL. The duplicate pages literally disappear from the SERPS, because essentially its like a 301 redirect.
I see you have canonical tags in place. Considering that, I would suggest you are good. No need to setup any of those redirects. Canonical tags are in essence sort of 301's anyways, so you are all set.
I agree with Greg. No need to worry about anything. These plugins take care of a lot of basic stuff + give you the ability to do template(d) Meta Tags (Titles and Descriptions) based on your Focus Keyword (Yoast). All In One SEO also does a great job doing basic SEO without too much effort and then give you the ability to do more with custom meta tags for each page and so on. The URLs won't be impacted. You can tweak the URLs with your permalink settings so as long as you are not doing that, these plugins won't impact it.
Rand, that's a very interesting point about Google trying to find the details about the sneaky techniques a webmaster might have used. I see how that makes complete sense for them to find the source and get it off the roots like they did with BuildMyRank.com network.
You might want to email help@seomoz.org with your campaign old domain and new domain and they "might" be able to help.
Yes I agree they work great. But this topic has been openly discussed way too many times..including directly with Matt Cutts at Pubcon. In short, the effects of EMD have changed a lot from 2 years ago...and it will continue to decrease. It's not that they will get penalized (although in a way they will)..it would basically mean that the "magical" effect will go away but they will still have an advantage in my opinion. Here's how:
Let's say your website is abc.com and keyword is Blue Widgets. If somebody links to you, the link code will be:
Blue Widgets vs if your domain was BlueWidgets.com the link would be: Blue Widgets or Click Here
You see what I am talking about. That advantage would always be there. Having your keywords in every incoming link, even if it's not an anchor text link.
Hi Ben
I understand the panic in such a situation. I truly do. I checked your website and the fact that you do not have a robots.txt. You also do not have any kind of noindex or anything like that in your code and you look like a strong established website.
Do you have an XML sitemap in your webmaster console ? I would suggest you build one and submit it if you don't already have it.
Other then that, I would also suggest to have a robots.txt even if it's blank. Rather then a 404 redirecting to your homepage. Give me 24-48hrs and in my opinion, you should be back.
I hope this helps.
Here you go... Visit http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/
This tool does a great job in find potential guest post sources based on your niche/keywords.
Earlier, it was the actual question that was hyperlinked. Now, as matbennett said, it's a button. The "Go to question" button.
I hope this helps.
Yes, I understand. I would check the domains being redirected to see if they have any history associated with them. If they have been linked from anywhere on the web, then Google knows they exist. If not, they are pretty much (almost) like brand new domains. This process would also make sure and help you find if there was nothing fishy/spammy going on with those domains in the past. I would still do a staggered redirect depending upon how many you are planning to do. As you said few dozen, I would just spend some time looking them up and based on the results, select the ones that have most type-in traffic first. And then in a few weeks, check to see how it's working for you and if you want to redirect more of those.
You could use the SEO Spider Tool at http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/. The free version has a limit of 500 URI maximum but you should be good with the free version since you said you have 300 pages.
I hope that helps.
Savio
It's always a good call to remove unwanted links, links that user's don't use. Sometimes these pages are thin content pages, lead to within the site duplicate content issues as well. I would strongly recommend removing the links, but then just with this change, expecting a major change, I guess not, but then it depends upon all the other metrics of your website.
It might also make sense to consider doing a no-index on them. Is this a wordpress blog ? If yes, you can use All-In-One SEO ro Yoast SEO Plugin to noindex on you tag pages.
Then look at your website and see if you see any SERP movements and continue to audit the site and refine the structure, add new content, build links and repeat. It's a continuous process you know I am sure
I hope this helps.
I would strongly recommend the Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs - http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/
Sure and FYI here's my question about the same topic I asked day before.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-conferences-which-one-s-do-you-attend
Yes, I have seen it only 2-3 times ever since it launched. I guess the way we all search or the kind of searches we have, don't have short answers
Is your site brand new or relatively old/established ? If it's relatively old/established, do you really care about the extra 30 uniques a day from 30 domains ? If it's a brand new site, relatively new(ish), and it does not have a link profile of it's own, I'd probably not do it. It just sounds scary.
However, going back to if you are established and have have strong domain authority, link profile, redirecting domains is not an issue. EG, Apple.com has tons of domains that redirect. Some of them have lots of history in the SERPS. Think of all kinds of mis-spell domains, trademark domains and so on. So whatever makes sense from a usability perspective, definitely do it.
In my opinion, it's a very clear, think line.
I would not worry about it that much if it's just a short number. However, if it's a larger string of numbers, I'd recommend moving it towards the end of the URL if possible or completely getting rid of it.
If it's something like:
www.example.com/red-widgets-c1.php or www.example.com/c1-red-widgets.php both are fine, but I'd prefer the 1st one. I hope this helps.
I would work with your developer/coder/cms/IT guys to make your homepage the real-homepage URL. That refresh is definitely not helping you.
You could also use Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog SEO.
My experience has been that .com, .net and .info all work great. And .org works wonder in certain niches.
So yes, to answer your question directly...go ahead... .net is fine.
If you do not have any paid links / unnatural links, then there's nothing you need to do except file a reconsideration request to Google and explain.Let me go back one step and ask you, did you actually get a unnatural links profile message from Google ? If not, then are you saying you got hit by Panda/Penguin, based on dip in rankings ?
I also would not worry about Shareasale / Affiliate Links, they do not influence directly towards SEO.
Yes, by using rel=prev,next, you are telling Google that these are paginated. I wouldn't worry about the fact that they have pagerank. It's flow of link juice internally and that's totally fine.
The question I have is whether you have a View-All page ? The reason I am asking is to understand if that could be causing you any duplicate content issues because if you do not have a canonical and you have a View All page, then all your paginated pages are subsets of your View-All page and you might want to think how you are handling that.
See:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
I would ask you the following questions:
If your link profile is mostly natural, I wouldn't worry about it that much. But going forward you could nofollow them. Also, what's the anchor text in your links ? Your Company Name or Website Designed ? Do more of Brand Name, combined with Anchor Text. So all sorts of variations. Do not make them consistent.
I hope that helps.
This is not a manual response, it's actually an automated response. I would continute to build content and links to the site. I hope you explained your effort in trying to get rid of the links etc. That should take care of it. However considering the massive penalty messages sent by them, you'd wonder how long would it take for them to do anything for each one of those. Has to be something somewhat automated, but it can't be.
Yes, I would not worry about it. Google understands these issues specially on large scale websites. I have worked in scenarios where there's a weekly rebuild or deployment which essentially means the site is down for 2-6 hrs. Nothing happens. In a rare occasion, if your page with the maintenance message gets cached, you can always request a re-crawl of upto 50 pages from your Google Webmaster Console. I have never had to do that.
If it's a sitemap for the users and the page appears under 2 different categories, it's okay. Think usability here.
However, if/when it's the XML sitemap, it should only be there once.
As for the intermediary pages, If I were you, if they offer a good purpose (the reason you have those pages in the 1st place), they should then be listed in both the XML and HTML sitemaps if they help the users.
So to answer your question more directly, if your question is:
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in XML sitemap? Yes, it will generate an error/warning in webmaster console.
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in HTML sitemap? No, if that's what is needed for users, it's okay.
I hope that helps.
Deb, Daniel's case does not sound like having multiple URLs of the same Product. It's just that the same product is listed under multiple categories. So depending upon the percentage of duplicate products vs the unique products listed in a category, it may or may not be okay. Also, this may vary based on how big your website is, unique content on the category level pages as well as the overall domain authority.
Is your blog self hosted or hosted by Wordpress.com ? If it's the one in your profile, then it's hosted by Wordpress.com which would then limit your abilities but then probably shouldn't have server "stress" issues. If it's self hosted, then you can try some of these plugins and see if they help (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=spam) Depending upon the software being used to spam your blog, one of these for sure will be able to reduce the issues. So yes, it's automated tools that do all this comment spam.
You might already have this, but http://www.awwwards.com/ is a pretty decent source. If your site is responsive design/HTML5, you could also submit to HTML5 Galleries and if it's an exclusive/custom design on a CMS, you could also submit to that CMS's galleries, eg Wordpress and so on. Just some idea starters, I hope I ignited some ideas in your head
This is fine. Nothing to worry about. The link juice does get passed onto the canonical URL. There's a slight loss, but it's sort of like a 301.
This tag helps you avoid any duplicate content issues.
Is it possible for the CMS to include the canonical tags ? I would suggest you look into it and have www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html contain the canonical tag to www.mydomain.com which should also take care of this issue for the homepage. That way Google will deindex www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html and only index www.mydomain.com
Daniel
I am guessing you have around 200 products exposed in approximately 18 categories, however there may be some overlap in the products within the categories, but the product URLs themselves are unique, so there is no content duplication between the product URLs themselves. You are just checking to make sure if a Red Widget Listed under Category A as well as Category B is okay. With your ratio being 3-4 out of 10, I won't be concerned.
If however this increases to over 50%, I'd be concerned in having 20 category pages being duplicate of each other by over 50%. The closer to 100%, the higher the risk. The closer to 0%, the lower the risk.
And it's just the product name you display on the category level page, not the product description right ? If yes, I'd say you are good to go. Don't worry about it too much at this point.
I hope this helps.