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Hi there,

I'd say that your first solution is likely to be the best one. It's far better to have a smaller number of high quality pages than a high number of low/questionable quality pages. I'd also recommend thinking about whether it makes sense to combine the content or not when it comes to the user. If the trip reviews would all make sense on one page and add value, then it's another reason to consolidate. If they aren't really relevant to each other,  you may want to be very selective with which ones you combine and possible add some new, fresh content to the pages at the same time.

Also think about keyword targeting for these pages and review how much traffic they already get and use Google Search Console to understand which keywords drive traffic. Whilst the pages may be low quality, if they drive some decent traffic, you may not want to lose that. So if the keywords that are sending traffic are the right ones for you, try to carry them over to the new, consolidated pages where you can.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

For what it's worth, pagination is a source of contention for many SEOs, so you're not alone here

I think part of the reason for this is that there isn't a perfect answer and I'm yet to see consistent, definitive proof of any one answer being right, particularly when it comes to different types of websites. As you say, for a blog, it may not be that useful anyway. Whereas for an ecommerce website, it's probably more important but even then, users are not likely to click through to hundreds of paginated pages, but search engines may need to crawl them.

Anyway, the timing of your question is funny because earlier I came across this tweet thread from Patrick Stox which does a great job of laying out the options. I'd recommend taking a read:

https://twitter.com/patrickstox/status/1370218363440537601

Ultimately, keep in mind what your goals are - I imagine driving more traffic to key pages on your website. I'd also look at how things are performing at the moment and make decisions based on that. If your paginated pages are getting lots of traffic, you may not want to tinker too much with that. If they aren't, then you can make changes far more easily because you're not risking too much.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi there,

You can check the Domain Authority and Page Authority if any domain by using the Moz Link Explorer or the MozBar.

You can read more about how Domain Authority works here.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Yes, you can. The execution will depend on your CMS and the server config that you have. Some will allow you to type the £ symbol as-is and it will render fine, others you may need to use character encoding because the £ symbol is also written as £.

I'd recommend testing it first and using Google Search Console to see how Google renders the page title and how it shows in search results, just to make sure that it's displaying correctly.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It is totally fine to update page titles and meta descriptions over time. I'd recommend to prioritise your most important pages first or where you see the biggest opportunities and start there. Then you can focus on the most important pages first and go through the rest when you have time. I would recommend trying not to change them too much unless you have a really good reason to though.

I'd also mention that you should try to write page titles and meta descriptions which are good for the user, focus on a keyword and read well - try to avoid just stuffing them with keywords if you can.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I don't think that there is a single tool which can claim to have the most accurate monthly search volumes, they all tend to use different sources and none of them will be able to replicate exactly what happens on Google.

Therefore, I think it's important to choose one that you're most comfortable with and use that consistently, then when you use it, don't focus too much on the actual volume of searches and instead focus on the volume of each keyword relative to another. For example, if one keyword has 500 monthly searches, it's unlikely to mean that you will get 500 visits a month if you rank number 1. But if you compare to a keyword where the same tool says that a keyword has 1,000 searches a month, then chances are that this gets more than the first one by a decent amount and could be worth prioritising.

I tend to use a combination of Moz and Ahrefs for this, along with the Google Keyword Planner.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

In short, it won't matter too much as long as the links that you're getting are good quality and as relevant as possible to what you do. It's natural to get links from a wide range of domain extensions and there are perfectly legitimate reasons for this. For example, you may get a link from a .com website which may actually be for a UK based website who have decided to use this domain extension instead of a .co.uk.

Overall, if they look like good quality and relevant, don't worry

With that said, there is a concept around getting "local" links meaning more if you're serving a particular region or market. So it may make a small difference but it's not something that I'd worry loads about.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Just to add to the current answers, guest posting can still add value but needs to be done for reasons that aren't just about the link. There needs to be more value added so that you focus on quality over quantity.

I wrote a post on this a few months ago which goes into lots of detail which may be helpful to read.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

The first thing to say is that DA/PA are Moz metrics and aren't connected directly to Google and how they rank your website. So the actual answer to your question is that having your DA/PA increase will not directly effect rankings because Google doesn't use DA or PA.

Having said that, Moz have designed DA and PA to try to predict how well a domain or page could rank in search results, so generally speaking, the higher the numbers, the more chance you have of competing.

Overall, the focus when it comes to authority should be for you to generate relevant, quality links from other domains to yours which will mean that Google pass authority to your website and give it a better chance of ranking. Alongside this, DA and PA may also go up which gives you a rough measurement of your own authority.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Sometimes it can take Google some time to crawl and index changes to a page, including the page title. It looks like Google last cached your homepage on 14th September according to this cache date. So it looks like Google hasn't recached the page yet.

Usually, I'd recommend using Google Search Console to ask Google to recrawl the page but this feature has been temporarily disabled but should come back soon. When it does, you can submit the URL to Google for a recrawl which may nudge them along.

It's still possible for Google to crawl and index your new title in the meantime though so it may happen before that point. If your site is new, it can take longer.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question. Moz have a really good guide on types of redirects here which is worth reading, but in summary - a redirect is designed to send users to a new URL if the old one has changed for some reason. It is also there for search engines to follow so that they can understand if a URL no longer exists and to pass ranking signals to the new URL. They basically reduce the need for a 404 page which can be a bad user experience, but redirects are best used to redirect users and search engines to similar pages.

When it comes to backlinks, it's pretty normal to have some backlinks pointing at your website which may be redirects, so I wouldn't worry too much. The main thing to avoid on your own website is having "redirect chains" which is a series of redirects put together. So for example, you may have:

Page A >> redirects to Page B >> redirects to page C >> redirects to page D.

This is a redirect chain and can cause issues for users and search engines. With the example above, you'd want a set of redirects:

Page A >> redirects to page D

Page B >> redirects to page D

Page C >> redirects to page D

This achieves the same effect but is far more optimal.  On your own website, I'd recommend changing internal links so that they point directly to the correct URL where possible so that you avoid using redirects on your own site. They're fine to use, but not as optimal as linking to a page directly.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Just to add to Ross's answer, it is best practice to have a canonical tag on every page - either self-referencing or referencing another page if that is correct.

However, if you don't have them, you won't necessarily see any big problems unless you also have duplicate content problems.

Cheers.

Paddy

In addition to the links and relevance, I'd also consider if your keywords would be distinct enough from each other if you created two pages and two sets of keywords. If they are quite close to each other, then Google may get confused as to which one to rank which can lead to keyword cannibalisation issues.

Generally, I'd only recommend creating two pages and allowing Google to index them if they are distinct enough from each other to avoid this problem. It sounds like this may be tricky if your new page is the same product but simply a free trial.

Also remember that you could create two pages and then just stop the new one from being crawled and indexed by Google. This would prevent any ranking problems but allow you to have two pages. I'm not sure if this is worth it in your situation to be honest but I thought I'd mention it just in case. I'm sure that you could use some good design/UX and have both a free trial and a buy now link on one page - it's fairly common.

Hi there,

Whilst it's worth keeping an eye on your DA, I woudn't worry too much about it. I'd recommend focusing more on seeing if your organic search traffic is improving that making sure that it's improving over time. DA can be affected by many different things and it could be that you've created good links but Moz hasn't discovered them or processed them yet. This is likely to be the case if DR from Ahrefs is going up but DA isn't.

Also, DA works on a logarithmic scale which means that the higher your DA goes, the harder it is to make it go up.

Overall, keep an eye on it but as long as you're building good links, doing good on-page SEO etc and seeing your traffic increase, don't worry too much.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

As Martijn has said, I wouldn't worry too much about th DA drop from 16 to 13, there are a range of factors that can affect DA and they're not all within your control.

One thing to note in addition is that if you do use the disavow tool from Google to tell them about bad links, this isn't connected to Moz which means that your DA may still go up or down. The disavow tool is good to use if you have links which are clearly bad and that you want to tell Google about, but Moz will not factor this into their DA score.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

As Sanka has said, it can take a few days before Moz adds links to Link Explorer after it has discovered the link. It's really important to remember that the Moz crawler won't be the same or even as powerful as search engine crawlers. So try not to worry too much if you're building good links but Moz hasn't discovered them yet.

It's worth using Google Search Console alongside Moz which can give you another data set from which to see where you're getting links from. Again, it may not report everything, but it can give you another source of data to use.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the question.

When you use the disavow tool, it's still possible for the disavowed links to appear in Google Search Console and never be removed. The disavow tool just means that Google may choose to disregard the links from their link graph for ranking purposes. There isn't really any sure-fire way to know if the disavowed links are actually ignored or not, unfortunately.

The time it takes to process the file is also a bit of an unknown but generally speaking, it may be whenever Google recrawl those links and then they can decide whether to ignore them or not. Either way, when the file is processed, the links may remain in your Search Console reports.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi there,

DA and PA scores are recalculated by Moz based on the links that they find pointing at your domain. So there could be a few good reasons why your score hasn't gone up yet:

• You may not have enough links to cause the score to go up
• The links may not be of a high enough quality
• You may have links and good quality ones, but Moz may not have discovered them yet

It's something that I'd recommend keeping an eye on but focusing on other metrics too such as the traffic you get from organic search and things like impressions and ranking positions.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

The answer really comes down to a couple of things:

• Is there a clear reason for the author of the page to add a link? Will it add value to the page for the user to be able to click through to your website? If so, then this is a positive sign for asking for a link.
• Is the page too old and dated now to warrant being updated by the author? It sounds like there is little chance of this given that you've said it's an old page and old event.

Overall, if you can give a legitimate reason to make the mention into a link and feel like you stand a chance, then go for it. If not, then you should see if there is another angle you can use or move on to another opportunity.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Your focus should be on removing pages which are not adding value to the website and for your users. For example, if you have pages which contain old and inaccurate content which is no longer useful, then you may want to consider either updating the page with better content or removing the page completely.

Adding a noindex tag may make Google drop it from their index, but users may still be able to find the page on your website, so consider whether you want to remove the page completely using a 404 or redirect it to another relevant page with a 301.

In terms of metrics, it really comes down to what you want your users to do when they visit your website. If you want them to spend time reading your content and then clicking through to other pages, then these are important metrics to measure. Then if your pages aren't doing this, then you either need to improve them or consider removing them if they aren't good quality.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Alberto,

I don't believe that losing internal links will affect your DA, so losing those internal links shouldn't have made your DA drop. Although I'd make sure that you intended to lose those 50k links and that you still have a good internal linking structure.

DA is calculated by Moz using a bunch of different metrics, so a score going up or down could be caused by a number of things. There is more information on Domain Authority here, but here are the reasons why DA may go up or down:

• Your link profile growth hasn't yet been captured in our web index.
• The highest-authority sites experienced substantial link growth, skewing the scaling process.
• You earned links from places that don't contribute to Google ranking.
• We crawled (and included in our index) more or fewer of your linking domains than we had previously.
• Your Domain Authority is on the lower end of the scoring spectrum and is thus more impacted by scaling fluctuation.

Overall, it is the volume and quality of external links to your website which will affect your DA, rather than internal links.

Having said that, I wouldn't worry too much about DA dropping by a point, this can happen sometimes and I'd focus more on the long-term.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Paddy

Hi Jeroen,

PageRank still exists, it's just not public. DA/PA etc are 3rd party metrics which are designed to replicate PageRank for the benefit of marketers who want a rough idea of how strong a given page or domain is.

I agree about the importance of relevant links and good content though and I wrote about this extensively in this chapter of The Link Building Book if you'd like to read more.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Sean,

I'm afraid that isn't correct. There are many, many sources out there confirming that PageRank scores are no longer publicly available. Google Chrome, other browsers and 3rd party tools all pulled the data from the same source. I'm not sure where that tool pulls numbers from.

Here are some sources to confirm this:

1) https://searchengineland.com/google-has-confirmed-they-are-removing-toolbar-pagerank-244230 - confirms that this is tools, not just browsers where PageRank will no longer be available.

2) https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-pagerank/ - mentions commentary from Gary Illyes that PageRank still exists but not outside of Google.

3) http://www.thesempost.com/google-removing-pagerank-from-toolbar/

4) https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-pagerank/159112/

5) https://searchengineland.com/rip-google-pagerank-retrospective-244286

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Sean,

Just a note on your PageRank comment - the public version of PageRank, often referred to as Toolbar PageRank and used by tools such as the one you've referenced, stopped being updated by Google a few years ago. This was confirmed in 2016 and you can read about that here.

PageRank is still very much a thing that Google uses, but we no longer have a way to know what the PageRank score for a given URL is.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the question.

The spam score tool from Moz and the disavow tool from Google are not connected to each other, which is why you won't see any changes in a spam score after you've added a link to a disavow file.

The tool from Moz is designed to give you an indicator of a low-quality link, whilst the disavow tool from Google is designed to help you tell Google which links to your website which they should ignore. So I wouldn't worry that a link is still showing a high spam score in Moz - as long as you've disavowed it with Google (I'd recommend only disavowing links that are clearly spammy) then that's all that you should need to do.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

There are a few reasons why your Domain Authority may still be the same, despite more backlinks being built to your website:

• Moz may not have discovered all of the new backlinks to your website yet, so they may not have been factored into the DA score
• If they have discovered them, then there is a chance that some backlinks may not improve your DA score quickly and it may take more links in order for your DA to go up. This is particularly true the higher your DA is because the algorithm that DA uses is logarithmic which means that the higher you go, the harder it becomes to increase it
• The DA of other websites may have changed and could be skewing the DA of the websites that are now linking to you

You can read a bit more information and watch the videos here for more information on DA

I'd also just mention that you should remember that whilst DA/PA are designed to give some direction on how well you can rank in Google, they are not connected to the Google algorithm, so definitely keep an eye on DA, but don't forget about other metrics too.

I hope that helps!

Hi there,

It's unlikely that ranking for low difficulty keywords on one URL will directly help another, more competitive page rank better, but there could be an indirect effect. If you can build up your traffic and authority over time by starting small and ranking for lower difficulty keywords, then the cumulative effect of this may lead to more traffic, more positive user signals and possibly more links which may help the domain as a whole rank better.

So overall, it's something that may help but I wouldn't worry too much about the cause and effect of this and just focus on getting your SEO and content right, then over time you may see a positive effect on both types of pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Flavius,

Thanks for the question.

The main thing that you need to do is to disavow any spammy links in Google Search Console. There isn't really anything else to do beyond that, however I'd suggest keeping a close eye on a few things:

• Organic search traffic to the pages on your website where the links are pointing just to make sure that traffic doesn't fall
• Your most recent links in Google Search Console, Moz and any other link tools that you use, then try to catch any more of these spammy links that appear and add them to your disavow. Just make sure that you're only disavowing the links that are clearly spam

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

It's pretty normal to see some fluctuation when you go through a website change of some kind. The key thing to focus on at the moment is comparing "before and after" for your pages on things such as organic traffic and rankings. If some pages are massively down on either of these, then you should take a closer look and see what may have changed from the old page to the new one. For example:

• Has content changed or been reduced?
• If URLs have changed, are the 301 redirects working correctly and not being chained?
• Have on-page SEO elements such as titles, internal links and keyword usage been changed?
• Has the structure of the site changed so that pages may be pushed further down the architecture?
• Has the new page design or copy meant that the intention of the page may have changed from Googles perspective?

There are a lot of factors at play but those are the kinds of things that I'd be focusing on whilst things are still early on.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

It looks like the website is pretty new and even with rankings as specific as someone's name, it can take a bit of time for rankings to get onto page one and then position one. I took a quick look at the site and it looks to be indexed fine, so I don't think you've done anything wrong in that regard.

It looks like current search results for Tim's name have lots of relevant results for him which is good - Google understand that he is a person and there are plenty of non-competing results. I'd advise trying to build some links to the domain from the websites where he has profiles/mentions etc. This shouldn't be too hard given that this is his official website and therefore there is a legitimate reason for people to link.

The only other thing I'd recommend aside from general SEO is to keep an eye on Google Search Console because this is where any errors or big issues will appear.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Anchor text is one of many signals that Google uses to determine the topic of a page - mostly the page that is being linked to. For example,  if a link to a website uses the anchor text "coffee beans" then it's a reasonable assumption for Google to believe that the page being linked to is about coffee beans - without visiting the page. Essentially, it can help Google figure out what a page is about. The important thing to remember here though is that Google uses many, many signals to determine what a page is about - anchor text is just one and can be used in a number of ways or even ignored, so my advice would be not to worry about it too much for external links because you often don't control the anchor text that someone else uses.

If you do control the anchor text, then I'd advise being cautious with overusing keywords as the anchor text because it could look manipulative if you do too many.

Moz has a great intro to anchor text and best practices here which I'd recommend.

In terms of your question on which case will rank better, it's impossible to say because as mentioned above, there are many signals that Google uses beyond anchor text and many of them are ones we don't directly control.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

In short, it's usually highly recommended that during a migration, you keep the old website live right up until the point that the new one launches. At that point, you put the necessary 301 redirects in place and launch the new website.

If you go the other route and take the site down and add a landing page as you've described, it's almost certain that you'll lose any traffic that the current website is getting. This is because any pages that are currently driving traffic will not exist any more. I'd highly advise against this!

The only caveat would be that if the current site is not getting any traffic at all at the moment, then there is an argument that you have nothing to lose by taking it down. However, I'd still advise to keep it up and redirect the pages at the time of the migration because this will help preserve any existing equity that those pages have.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

No problem, glad it was helpful.

Having a country specific IP isn't a deal breaker when it comes to ranking in specific countries. I've heard that it can have some effect i.e. if your website is hosted in the UK and your primary audience is the UK, then it may help a little. But I haven't seen this first hand.

I think the primary focus should be on getting solid hosting and uptime, regardless of where it's located. If I have a UK focused domain, I'd rather have a solid hosting company where my website is fast and based in the US, than a UK based IP address that is slow

Hi there,

You have a great answer from Chris, so I'll just add a few other points:

• Bad links can often have a high DA because someone may be leveraging a high DA website to spin out spammy links. For example, someone may drop spammy links onto a high DA forum. So be sure to look outside of DA when looking for low-quality links.
• DA is a Moz metric and whilst it is designed to help mimic what Google may use to score the authority of a website, it isn't what Google uses. So keep an eye on Google Search Console to see what links are reported by Google and do a manual check of these to see if you have any bad links.
• If you're building links, then using a minimum DA score can be useful when sorting and prioritising link targets. For example, if you have a list of 100 potential link targets, you could narrow that list down by sorting from high to low DA. But as Chris said, keep an eye on relevance too.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

There are a bunch of ways to answer this question and things will change depending on your situation, but I'll give you an overview which will hopefully help your situation!

The first thing to say is that a ccTLD is only designed to help you target a location - not a language. For example, example.co.uk would naturally default to target users who are in the UK. Within this, you may target the English language or other languages, but it will generally only show to users in that location.

If you are looking to target multiple locations and want to use the ccTLD approach, then you will need a ccTLD for each location that you want to target. There can be advantages to this such as users being familiar with their "own" ccTLD and you can focus 100% on one domain and keep all of the content focused just on one location. There are disadvantages which include the maintenance, upkeep and marketing for several domains rather than one. Which leads into the subfolder question...

Subfolders are generally easier from a maintenance perspective because it's a single domain, often running off a single CMS and any equity or authority that you build up in one domain will help all subfolders for each country/language. Subfolders also make it easier to target variations of location + language.

For me, my advice is usually to go with a single domain + subfolders if you do not have the resources to build, maintain and promote several domains at once. If you have a team and expertise for each location and language who can each "own" a different domain, then ccTLDs or gTLDs make more sense.

It's also worth a read of this Moz post for more detail:

https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-international-seo

Hope that helps!

Paddy

YoastSEO should do the job for Wordpress - it allows you to define the canonical page URL on each of your pages/posts:

https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/

Another option which I usually find effective which I initially skipped over is the URL parameters section in Google Search Console. You'll find it in the legacy tools section and you can set these parameters to "No: Doesn't affect page content:" which is the option for tracking code parameters:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?hl=en

Hi there,

This is quite a common issue and happens because technically, the addition of those parameters at the end of the URL mean that it's a new URL from Google's perspective. These kinds of parameters are very common and Google often figure it out and drop these URLs from their index and focus on the correct version. However, they don't always do this and may not do it as quickly as you'd like.

One way to deal with this is to add a rel=canonical tag to any duplicate versions of the URL and have that tag point back to the correct URL. Based on your question, this would mean that the canonical tag would look like this:

This would go into the section of this URL (and any other duplicates):

https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Chris,

I'm not sure I fully understand your question:

"The question now is, How with so many ranking keywords do you come up with a solid back link plan."

Do you mean how many keywords you can target with link building?

If so, that's not really the way to think about it because most high-quality link building won't use your keywords as anchor text and may not link directly to your commercial landing pages. The approach should be on getting links into the domain which are high quality which 1) help the domain as a whole and 2) can be filtered to your key pages via good site architecture.

Going back to your first question, if you are going to focus on link building, then you do need to prioritise and focus on key landing pages first. But you have two options for this:

1. Try to get links directly to those pages - this is hard unless those pages are link worthy in some way or you're prepared to pay for links to those pages which I wouldn't advise.

2. Try to get links to your domain/content and then use internal linking to filter link equity to your key pages.

Link building with a focus on improving 15,000+ keywords individually isn't going to happen and probably why you're struggling with this a bit. Focusing on a few at a time by doing the things above or trying to improve the domain as a whole is going to be more helpful I think.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Chris,

Link building can be very manual, particularly in the early days of a website and when you're trying to get going. Ultimately, you should be trying to come up with ways to make your website naturally link worthy so that you end up getting links which you didn't ask for.

This can come a few ways:

• Your product or service being genuinely useful to your target audience or within your industry so that people recommend it/reference it etc
• Creating content which genuinely answers questions and solves problems for your target audience
• Creating content which has some kind of an angle which encourages top tier sites or bloggers to links to it such as informative guides or statistics/data related to your industry

You may find it hard to get links to lots of your product or sales pages unless they are link worthy in themselves. So also try to focus on getting links to your content and then distributing the link equity from these pages to your key pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Christine,

As Alex said, this shouldn't be a problem. I'd just advise keeping things consistent where you can, if only from a maintenance/debugging perspective so that if something breaks, it's easier to diagnose.

You should also make sure that markup is consistent between mobile and desktop sites if you have separate sites or change content based on each one.

Cheers.

Paddy

That's a good question and I'd agree - I imagine that references to your website in published books online could be treated similarly to mentions across the web. Whether Google gives it any extra weight or not is unclear, but I'd agree that the implication is that a mention in a published book could carry some weight.

Hi there,

I'd suggest a few things:

1. If you have old analytics data or log file data to show you which content performed best when the site was last live, take a look at that and prioritise restoring and updating the content which worked well previously.

2. Go through the content and update with fresh information, data, images, links etc to give everything a freshen up. Don't worry if content is still relevant and evergreen, but just do some checks to make sure.

3. Once you've updated the content and you're happy with it, generate some new XML sitemaps and submit to Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl the pages again and get them into the index.

4. In addition, perhaps submit the homepage and a few key pages to Google Search Console for crawling and indexing.

5. Once the pages are indexed, keep an eye on Search Console to see how pages are performing and use this data to update the most popular pages.

6. In terms of links, if you can restore any valuable lost ones by reaching back out to the websites, letting them know that the site has relaunched and seeing if they can restore the links, that may give it a nudge too.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

It's not the nicest task in the world, but unfortunately, it's best to manually review websites before you add them to a disavow file. You can use metrics such as Moz spam score to filter them and start with the worst score which may speed up the process a bit. You could also try and prioritise multiple URLs that are from the same domain. For example, if you have 50 URLs linking to you from one domain which looks suspect, you probably only need to review a few of those URLs in order to understand the quality/type of link they are and take action.

I'd avoid putting a hard rule in place such as disavowing anything below a certain metric score. You may accidentally disavow links which are perfectly fine.

There is also some debate as to the impact that the disavow tool has unless you have a manual or algorithmic penalty in place. If you don't see any evidence of a penalty, my advice would be to only disavow links which are clearly low quality/spammy.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

There is a lot more to this question which probably goes outside of Q&A, but here are a few points on the links that you've shared:

• The blog posts don't appear to be written by real authors, they appear to be blogs that are made just to link to Results Plan, so while they may pass some link equity, I'm not sure that they are going to be seen by Google as high quality
• The anchor text used on all links is clearly keyword driven. This in itself isn't necessarily a big problem (the whole link profile would need looking at to assess that) but again, it implies that the blogs are built just for link building purposes
• The blogs don't appear to be getting much engagement such as social shares and comments which indicates that they may not get a lot of traffic, so you're also unlikely to get real traffic clicking through to the website

Overall, as I said, more work would be needed to make a full assessment, but looking at these sample links, I'm not sure I'd be recommending building lots of links like this.

Hope that helps.

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd agree with the other replies in the thread in that these links are likely to be risky. They may well work, but they're not the kind of links that Google necessarily value, so the amount of time they work for could be pretty limited.

Reading the description of the ad, it sounds like they are submitting to the business directory section of UK newspapers which is actually not a bad tactic. But paying someone to do it for you without knowing fully what you'll get in return is where the risk lies really.

More broadly, I think that buying links is always going to be risky and therefore moves it into the grey hat area of tactics. It can still work and in some niches, it's almost necessary, but I still wouldn't advise it for most people.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

In summary, you won't be penalised by Google for this. They tend to penalise sites for manipulative techniques and having links from websites in different locations isn't really a problem. The main thing to worry about is that the links you do get are good quality and relevant.

As long as you focus on that, you will be fine

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

I'm afraid that I'm not too familiar with "Hoth" link building so I can't answer that directly. Regarding subdomains though, from a technical perspective, they are different websites and therefore are capable of passing link equity in the same way that any other website could. It really comes down to the quality and relevance of the subdomain.

I'd recommend looking at them in the same way you would any other link and assess them for quality. The one thing to maybe flag is when you have lots of subdomains which are on the same root domain. There is a chance that these may not pass as much value but again, it comes down to why they are there and the quality of them.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the update.

The screenshot showing the 301 is correct - all good there.

Regarding the sitemap, sorry I should have been clearer on this - can you exclude that from the redirects so that when Google crawl it, they don't get redirected and instead find all of the URLs from the old site?

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Eric,

I'd set up a profile for whichever version of the URLs 301 to your main site. So if the https version redirects, then use that one.

I don't think you need to submit every single URL, I'd recommend submitting a handful of the main ones (in terms of traffic or site architecture) and asking Google to also crawl all links on the page.

On the sitemap, you'd enter the URLs that have redirects in place which is your old site. In your example, this would be sites B,C and D which all need their own Search Consoles + XML sitemaps for the pages on those sites with redirects.

Cheers.

Paddy