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Hello, is there a way to allow a certain child directory in robots.txt but keep all others blocked?

For instance, we've got external links pointing to /user/password/, but we're blocking everything under /user/.  And there are too many /user/somethings/ to just block every one BUT /user/password/.

I hope that makes sense...

Thanks!

I'm really not sure what subscribing to a product feed means... but if you're referring to product data feeds you submit to shopping engines like Nextag or Pricegrabber, I would definitely worry about bounce rates.  You're paying them for these referrals after all.  You want them to count.

I recently removed a particular product line for a data feed, thereby reducing traffic, simply because the bounce rates were around 85%.  This tells me they were not good leads, for whatever reason, and I don't want to waste money on that anyway.

The "other merchants" that don't worry about bounce rates are clearly ignorant, or possibly the "feed provider" is ill-informed.  If you can take a hit revenue-wise from removing these leads, I would do it.  Bounce rates are very important for e-commerce sites .

I would predict you will continue to rank well for your duplicate pages.  I further predict they (because of Panda) will bring down the rankings of the rest of your site.  If you can add some good unique content to 50 different colors of a product, then by all means, make 50 pages.  But if you can't generate the content necessary to establish each individual page as "quality", then I would remove them, and simply not go that route at all, and 301 redirect all those pages into the main page.  If you think it still holds value to users, then keep them up and just use a canonical tag.

You could also try getting relevant backlinks from related sites to point back to the article you did.  It takes some work, but if it's a good article, you can totally get great additional mileage out of the article.

I had an article published on a PR7 site.  I then contacted other sites that had written on the same very niche topic and many of them added an "UPDATE" to their article with a link pointing to my article.

I agree with Gareth, it's extremely difficult to impossible in many cases to have these backlinks removed from other sites.  I had the same thing happen to a company and have spent countless hours emailing websites and their hosts with little success and to this day have probably only had 10-20% of them removed.  I've had to force myself to forget about them and simply try harder to achieve high quality backlinks to neutralize the negative effects of the bad ones.

Needless to say, it's a sucky position to be in... be careful about hiring an SEO company.  There are more bad ones than good.

You would more than likely lose more than you would gain by migrating to a more keyword friendly domain name.  I think Google is going to only downgrade the importance of keywords in domain names from here on out.

Hold the phone.  Turns out, they're doing Beta testing, you have to click on the Exit Beta up in the top right.

The links you get on category pages are still followed.

My Bad!

I've seen nofollow in a bio at the bottom of guest articles, it can happen

I believe yes.  If you have multiple product reviews that are easily accessible (maybe a link at the top that will shoot you down to the bottom of the pg where the reviews are) to a user that just appeared on your product page, then it could improve visitor performance and decrease bounce rates.  I think simply improving the quality of your page with real, legitimate customer reviews, will increase that pages rankings in the SERPs due to an improved perceived value by the search engines.

Do Bounce Rates increase rankings?  Search reps say "YES" - http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/03/02/the-late-great-bounce-rate-debate/

Nope, was considering it strictly for link-building.  It's actually more like $2k for many links to deep pages, FYI

Ok yea, that's exactly what I saw.  It's $2,000 yr minimum to get listed in this industry directory.  If they're blocking their entire site, I can't say I'm going to be signing up.

Thanks

I think the quick answer is two links (if you can do that) with varied anchor text and varied deep/pages.

I'd link with your exact anchor text 1 in 5 guest posts, MAX, then I'd use variations in the other 4 w/ my brand name in the anchor in a couple.

All this depends on what you have going on currently though.  If you have 500 root domains linking in to the site, with 490 of them pointing to your home page, then I'd say you need to link to a category page or other deep page on your next guest article.

Similarly, if your top 5 anchor text links coming in to your site are keywords (non-branded), then I'd use your brand in the anchor text on your next guest article.

Is it just me or does http://www.thomasnet.com only have nofollow links across the site now?

UPDATE - Rankings and Traffic restored beginning this very morning for us.  If something like this has happened to you...

**I got a very authoritative link yesterday afternoon.  Not 24 hours passed before rankings and org. traffic was restored.  **

This was after 2 weeks of "penalty".

What a relief!!

I have a client where 95%+ of their backlinks are from low-quality directories, articles, and automated link-exchanges.  They built all of these before I came on board.  This has caused long-term damage to their backlink profile and the rankings are not better because of the time/money spent.  Their quantity of links is high.  Quality LOW.  Not only am I building high-quality, legit links to the site, but I've been actively trying to remove some of low-quality links they had previously obtained.

I work with another site that is newer, music related.  We do NOT have a high "quantity" of links coming in, but they are all extremely natural and relevant with lots of branded anchor text.  We have pages with 25 domains linking in and we're outranking other pages (for very competitive terms) that have 10 times that.  We've never done any automated link-building of any kind.

So for me personally and the things I've witnessed, it is a complete waste of time and money to be going for low-quality links.

And when I say "low-quality", I don't mean a low Page Authority or a Google PageRank of zero or only a handful of backlinks pointing in.  I'm referring to web pages that have...

SPAM!!

• links that are easy to obtain
• links out to sites having anything to do with sofware stuff, web design, computer whatever, directories, loans, ppc, anything with "ads" in it, employment sites, insurance sites, etc etc
• backlinks based on automated services

But I have to say, if you do go this route, make sure you get plenty of branded anchor text, it will help you in the long run.

This is just my opinion.  There are lots of people using automated services.  Maybe an SEOmoz member can chime in with a recent success story regarding automated article submission?

What are your thoughts on blocking (in robots.txt) and/or noindexing low-quality pages to defend against Panda, assuming you can't remove, redirect, or add quality content to it?  Also, assume there are no external links pointing to these low-quality pages, no social shares, and zero incoming organic traffic.

Has anyone had experience with this as a solution to Panda?

Well, you say "back in the index", but we are being indexed and in fact are in the SERPs still, but the rankings have dramatically decreased across the board.  Are you saying the give them time to fix this penalty that's been placed?

Earlier in the year when we had a couple of DDOS attacks, our rankings never dropped.

Our rankings just plummeted on Tuesday across the board.  There was a DDOS attack on Tuesday and since then the rankings went down and have stayed down, even though the DDOS attack has been resolved.   Also, this is the 3rd or 4th attack they've encountered this year.

How long could this last?  How can we deal with this?

Thanks

Right, but in the post it says "The Page Authority model takes these link metrics as input (plus 36 other link metrics not shown) and predicts the SERP ordering."  Do you know where I can find these?

Thanks

Where can I find a list of all Page Authority Metrics?  I'm looking for an exhaustive list of all link metrics that calculate Page Authority?

Thanks

Post-Panda, should I worry about adding a bunch of geo-targeted landing pages at once?

It's a community, people have added their location on their profile pages.  I'm worried if we decide to make all the locations into hyperlinks that point to new geo-targeted pages, it could get us extra traffic for those geo-specific keyword phrases but penalize the site as a whole for having so many low-quality pages.

What I'm thinking is maybe to start small and turn, say, United States into a hyperlink that points to a page (that would house our community members that reside in the United States) and add extra unique content to the page.  And only add a new location page when we know we'll be adding unique content to it, so it's not basically just page sorting.

Thoughts?

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks!

Hmm, maybe they were using trackPageview.

Thank you.

The company I am with shows traffic coming in to .zip files in Google Analytics.  The traffic being recorded stopped a while back, but I know people are still downloading/visiting these .zip ULRs. I'm not sure how they were recording/tracking the .zip URLs (in Analytics) before, but I'd like to track them once again.  Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks

How can I use site explorer to find out which sites are linking to us thousands of times.  It says we have over 300,000 total links pointing to our site.  I'm thinking there are some sitewide links from other site(s) making up most of that, but I can't seem to locate it/them?

But why would the SERP preview screenshot appear different than the cached page?

We've got pages that, when I search for them in Google and click on Cache, show NO styles, nothing from the CSS.  Is there any way that could effect rankings?  I don't think so, but it does fall into the category of showing one thing to the bots and another to the user, which is bad.

Also, could blocking /scripts in robots.txt be preventing bots from accessing the CSS?

Thanks

Yea, I've seen that before.  Will that show me how unwanted pages are being referenced?

What if I need 150k pages crawled, rather than 20k?

What is a tool to use so that I can visualize all links to all pages on the site so that I can discover how certain duplicate content URLs are being created?

Yea, you don't have to login in this case.  I think it could provide benefit to someone if the View Cart page were to come up in the Sitelinks when someone searches for the particular brand.

I think I'll go ahead and remove from robots.txt.

Thanks

Is it weird to remove the View Cart page from being blocked in robots.txt if it has links pointing to it?

Right, but have you noticed seomoz has nofollow all over the place?

I was wondering how many of you are still nofollowing the Home button or anything else for that matter?

I thought NoFollow was getting a little outdated, but I still see it lots of places.

Thoughts?

To follow up on this, the backlinks were in fact hurting rankings.  We removed some paid backlinks and immediately saw large increases in rankings.  I hope this helps someone else.

When I asked this question I really did not believe that removing backlinks would improve rankings, but it did.

Thanks!

I'd go into www.opensiteexplorer.org and see if you can find this backlink.  If you can't, then it probably doesn't count.

Check it out, it's cached with your link - search this...

inurl:www.nyc.gov "cars for kids"

Yes, it was intentionally distributed.  I would like to know whether the duplicate content on our site is being seen (by Google) as copied, not original, scraped, pulled from another source because we're so lazy we can't come up with any material of our own??

If this is the case, I will be removing the content, as the quality of the content sucks and there is quite a bit of it.  Please, do not respond "if the content sucks, then why have it on your site..."

Then how do you determine if Google is seeing content as scraped?  As you know, Google has made it very clear recently how they feel about scraped content.