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My friend has a site: http://www.behindthehedges.com/ and is having trouble getting accepted into Google News. I read over the technical guidelines and best practices listed on Google's site. It appears they have everything covered. However, they keep getting rejected. Any ideas?

I'm currently importing about 15000 posts to my site that are essentially businesses that have posted their programs for people to sign up. To sign up the user clicks the button that links to the program provider's website. I also have the option to link directly back to the original directory site that the program was posted on. I've scraped this information from a different website and I want to make sure I don't get penalized. I don't want to spin the content because it produces poor quality content. I don't necessarily need to rank for the pages because I have relevant, direct traffic coming to the site via purchased domains. I plan on at least contacting all of the larger program providers to let them know that I've listed their programs on my site and to give them the option to manage them. My Questions In order to avoid any penalty, should I just apply a rel="noindex on all of the posts/programs? My domain is still new so I'd imagine that's probably what I should do but definitely need some reassurance. Thanks for your time!!

I recently purchased a domain with over twenty years age, a few .gov links and A LOT of .edu links. Of course, the domain is relevant to my site's content. I'm hosting the domain on my shared server and have setup 301 redirects for each page that had external links pointing to it via the htaccess file within the domain's root directory. These 301 redirects, of course, point to my new domain, which is on a dedicated server. Specifically, they point to a directory on my new domain. I've also verified the purchased domain and my new domain on Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools. Finally, I've completed a google site change request for the old site to point to my new site. My questions: Should I also list my old domain on the dedicated server over the shared server or does it matter? Will the backlinks of the old site show up in my new site's links via Google's search console, Open Site Explorer, etc.? Will the backlinks of the old site improve the authority of my domain? Also, keep in mind that I have the 301 redirects pointing to a directory on my new site, not the root page of the new domain. Will the backlinks of the old site help my new domain's authority? In the eyes of Moz I've read, NO. I understand it's just a MOZ metric but from what I understand it also correlates with Google's actual 'authority' metric/method of giving value to a particular domain over another based on the backlinks. How exactly do the backlinks of the old domain benefit my new domain and is there a way to measure this/see the relationship? Thank you for any help you're willing to give!

I'm having trouble getting http://www.procloud.ch/ to index for their german pages. The english pages are being indexed but not the german. Any ideas? Chris

Hi, I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways: Entire site
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com or Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness? Thanks in advance!

I'm about to acquire a domain with a lot of great/highly authoritative backlinks.  The links pointing to the domain are quite powerful and the domain is an exact match TLD. I have two options (that I know of 😞 1. I could redirect all the links to their new home(s) on my new site which offers the same resources the old site used to offer. or 2. I could rebuild the tools/content on this site. Ideally, I'd transfer to my new site as all those powerful links could help all my rankings. However, I'm worried that some of the powerful links will de-link once they see the site redirects elsewhere, even though it's offering the same content. Also, option one isn't an exact match domain. Which, I know, shouldn't make a difference now-a-days but regardless of what people say, it still seems to help out some sites in less competitive niches. One more thing to note: The domain that I'm purchasing is about 25 years old. I'm leaning toward option one. I want to make sure I put my best foot forward on this investment and thought it wise to consult the SEO gods.

Our site recently switched from http to https. If you type in the http://www.websitename.com then it will automatically go to https://www.websitename.com ... my question is... do I still need to create a redirect in the htaccess file to ensure we don't lose all the links currently pointing to the http version of the website?