It sounds to me as though most of the content from old site is staying but that 3 enigmatic 'tools' are being moved to a new domain.

In which case I would want to be sure that the functionality being moved wasn't the cause of the previously lifted penalty, especially from a Panda perspective (given that the tools on the new domain presumably won't have any links pointing to it, Penguin shouldn't be an issue) - as a penalty would be re-applied if the tools are not Panda-friendly.

So:

• if you want to have the tools on both sites, I'm with Pete - noindex the tools on the old site.
• if you are permanently moving the tools, review them for Panda-friendliness and then noindex the old site's URLs, probably worth blocking the old URL in robots.txt as well.
• If your previous penalty was nothing to do with the tools at all, and the link profile of those pages is good (or if there aren't any links) then 301 the old URLs to the new.

That's if between Pete and myself we've understood correctly what you're trying to achieve.

Good Luck!

Hi Stephane,

All the below assumes you feel there is some value in keeping the original website live at all.

My first reaction would be to do a full review of all your old content and carefully consider which ones may have been hit by Panda - is there keyword stuffing, content duplicated from other sites, thin content...etc? Then either fix or completely rewrite those.

After that you should avoid publishing duplicated content so my view would be
1. Remove the rewritten/fixed articles completely from the old site
2. Don't implement the 301 so you don't get any redirected bad Penguin vibe
3. Put a block on those URLs using robots.txt
4. Remove the URLs from Google's index in Webmaster Tools

Then you are free to publish your new, Panda-friendly content to your new website.

Not sure what other mozzers would say, but that's my view. This is not about 'spinning content' but removing poor content and republishing great content. Hope it makes sense.

You're welcome. Anything else I could help with? (If not could you mark this as answered, please?).

Thanks,

Martin

Does the website owner mind hotlinks like this? I don't think 301-ing them to a real web page would be bad in the eyes of Google. I think if purposeful pages that better describe the downloads and are useful resources for the visitors then that may be a better way to harness the links for SEO. As for whether links to .exe's is good for SEO, the file itself won't rank, but it may help domain authority. I'm not wholly sure so I'd like another opinion on this. And as an aside, the .exe's shouldn't be directly downloadable due to secure reasons, best to zip the files anyway as some anti viruses may block .exe downloads. So if you create some new downloads in ZIP files, redirect the .exe URLs to useful pages then you should benefit from the links. I'd like to see if others have tested this out however.

Can't answer the API question I'm afraid.

However on the other bits - if you don't specify robots directive, search engines are likely to behave in the default manner - i.e. index, follow unless you're blocking them another way (i.e. robots.txt)

A good test of this would be if you've launched a page since the 17th and it's not in Google's index and you know you've been crawled.

Check in GWT for your crawl data - and don't worry about the cache because your users will always be taken to the current version of your site. It's only a concern if you're no longer being crawled.

If it's an ecommerce site, then it should just be one site-wide tweak to put index,follow back in. Re-create and re-submit your sitemap.xml to GWT then Google will go after all your new content as well - i.e. it hurries up re-crawling.

Hoping something helped you there

Thanks for the endorsement! Glad you liked and thanks for adding to it to make it a 'fuller' answer

Not yet. I think there's a feature request to add more, but that's not currently the case. In the interim I suggest you diarise when you want to update your competitors and do a manual spreadsheet and load in data from http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ as you can get a 'snapshot' of competitor data at any time that way instead. Then make regular updates to your spreadsheets.

Hope this workaround helps.

Glad I could help! And thanks for the 'Good Answer' vote as well. Enjoy the rest of your day

Oh well if it's actual content - i.e. they've written something about your business on the page and it's not just a 'footer link' then I can't see any problem at all in that being the link.

I think you may find you get more traffic if the link is in the text or a 'View their website' style link after the content - as it's more obvious to users that it's a link off to somewhere. From an SEO perspective I can't see an issue with this, but in terms of traffic potential possibly a better place would be in or just after the content about your business.

I don't see how the H2 tag itself would be a problem. A bit strange from the linking site's on-page optimisation though.

What concerns me is that it's in the footer - unless it's not site-wide that could be an issue. And it may not result in traffic for you due to it not being seen.

The branded anchor text is good - as that's non-spammy.

So just check

• Not a site-wide link
• That they could change it from a H2 as that's not great for their SEO. (Add value to them!)

Hi Stephane,

All the below assumes you feel there is some value in keeping the original website live at all.

My first reaction would be to do a full review of all your old content and carefully consider which ones may have been hit by Panda - is there keyword stuffing, content duplicated from other sites, thin content...etc? Then either fix or completely rewrite those.

After that you should avoid publishing duplicated content so my view would be
1. Remove the rewritten/fixed articles completely from the old site
2. Don't implement the 301 so you don't get any redirected bad Penguin vibe
3. Put a block on those URLs using robots.txt
4. Remove the URLs from Google's index in Webmaster Tools

Then you are free to publish your new, Panda-friendly content to your new website.

Not sure what other mozzers would say, but that's my view. This is not about 'spinning content' but removing poor content and republishing great content. Hope it makes sense.

It sounds to me as though most of the content from old site is staying but that 3 enigmatic 'tools' are being moved to a new domain.

In which case I would want to be sure that the functionality being moved wasn't the cause of the previously lifted penalty, especially from a Panda perspective (given that the tools on the new domain presumably won't have any links pointing to it, Penguin shouldn't be an issue) - as a penalty would be re-applied if the tools are not Panda-friendly.

So:

• if you want to have the tools on both sites, I'm with Pete - noindex the tools on the old site.
• if you are permanently moving the tools, review them for Panda-friendliness and then noindex the old site's URLs, probably worth blocking the old URL in robots.txt as well.
• If your previous penalty was nothing to do with the tools at all, and the link profile of those pages is good (or if there aren't any links) then 301 the old URLs to the new.

That's if between Pete and myself we've understood correctly what you're trying to achieve.

Good Luck!

Not yet. I think there's a feature request to add more, but that's not currently the case. In the interim I suggest you diarise when you want to update your competitors and do a manual spreadsheet and load in data from http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ as you can get a 'snapshot' of competitor data at any time that way instead. Then make regular updates to your spreadsheets.

Hope this workaround helps.

Heya there,

Thanks for asking your question here

My first point would be that human visitors don't like to be given forms when they first visit a site, so would suggest you don't do this.

My alternative strategy would be to provide a home page of good content talking about the data etc that is available on your site and then provide a button for people to register if they want to.

Don't detect the user agent and provide alternative content as, however good your intentions are, that could be considered cloaking. Google is against you providing Google different content to humans, so don't do it.

Do things differently

Okay... two main points I think here

1. Yes, which domain/sub-domain the links are pointing to makes a difference - so if you have a www version and your links point to the non-www version then it's not quite as great. (Still has value for your site, though, it's important to remember). So you need to decide which is the most important and keep the canonicalisation (is that a word?) consistent throughout.
2. In Wordpress you should be able to change the direction of the redirect, have a shuffle around the 'settings' section and you should be able to find it.

Hope this is helpful.

I don't see how the H2 tag itself would be a problem. A bit strange from the linking site's on-page optimisation though.

What concerns me is that it's in the footer - unless it's not site-wide that could be an issue. And it may not result in traffic for you due to it not being seen.

The branded anchor text is good - as that's non-spammy.

So just check

• Not a site-wide link
• That they could change it from a H2 as that's not great for their SEO. (Add value to them!)

Oh well if it's actual content - i.e. they've written something about your business on the page and it's not just a 'footer link' then I can't see any problem at all in that being the link.

I think you may find you get more traffic if the link is in the text or a 'View their website' style link after the content - as it's more obvious to users that it's a link off to somewhere. From an SEO perspective I can't see an issue with this, but in terms of traffic potential possibly a better place would be in or just after the content about your business.

Hi there!

What you need to do is note down which two pages are causing the duplicate META DESCRIPTION and then log into Wordpress and go and edit those posts or pages.

At the bottom of the page editor are boxes for title and meta description, so you will need to change one or both of them and then republish the page.

Let me know if you need screenshots as I have a couple of clients who we use Yoast's SEO plugin as a part of managing the on-site SEO.

Thanks,

Martin

Can't answer the API question I'm afraid.

However on the other bits - if you don't specify robots directive, search engines are likely to behave in the default manner - i.e. index, follow unless you're blocking them another way (i.e. robots.txt)

A good test of this would be if you've launched a page since the 17th and it's not in Google's index and you know you've been crawled.

Check in GWT for your crawl data - and don't worry about the cache because your users will always be taken to the current version of your site. It's only a concern if you're no longer being crawled.

If it's an ecommerce site, then it should just be one site-wide tweak to put index,follow back in. Re-create and re-submit your sitemap.xml to GWT then Google will go after all your new content as well - i.e. it hurries up re-crawling.

Hoping something helped you there

Maybe for now then, use the Description you can provide via the theme you're using and use Yoast for the other bits?