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Have you discounted URL parameters through Google Webmaster tools? This would be particularly prevalent for an ecommerce site as if you have not Google could be looking at /page, /page?p=x, /page?p=y etc and counting these as unique pages. This creates obvious dupe content issues and is easily fixed in WMT by going to:

Crawl>URL Parameters

Hope that helps.

When a site links to another it passes that site some of its authority and SEO benefit. Only links that are 'follow' will do this, a nofollow link will not. These values are set by the site owner, often on blogs etc all links are set to nofollow to avoid comment spam where people are trying to get links to their site.

If your comments and links are relevant and add value to an article by all means comment and drop a link, you will be able to check if they are no follow or not to. This post by Rand, although not written to answer this specific question, is useful to illustrate the difference between these links and their relationship in passing link juice.

A higher domain authority site as a rule of thumb is generally better yes, but there are other important factors involved that Google will take into account, then there are considerations about having a link in the comments section as opposed to elsewhere on a page. Again i recommend a read through this post by Rand, Not all links are created equal.

The two articles above should help familiarise yourself with the nuances of link building and the more advanced issues, but if you would like a simple yes no answer then yes, leaving a link in the comments section of a article that is a follow link, can help your SEO. But use this tactic as one part of a balanced link building strategy.

Hi Karl,

A similar question was asked the other day on this chain, and the SEOMoz staff left a very helpfull answer. I'd suggest having a look through this to see if you can fiqure out your specific case.

Hope this helps.

AndieF has certainly given you the easiest method there, and the one i would recommend myself. However if you do want the actual URL then you could use advanced filters.

This resource by Santa J Achille shows some pretty cool tricks you can use to get not only the Top Level Domain but also the Keyword and Campaign to show in analytics. I've used it before and found some useful insights. Just a note in the copy and paste code section there is a missing \ before the first question mark in the second referral field, so just add it in or analytics will tell you its an invalid regular expression.

If you like the look of this or fancy making a few of your own / editing it, there are also some very useful guides on how to use regular expressions from Moz and my personal favourite from Luna Metrics.

One more thing to note, if you do decide to implement this filter make sure you do it under a new profile.

Agree with David, if the sites relevent and having your site there will actually add value for the user, a single paid link will not really have any negative impact.

Is this in response to a notice from Google or general house cleaning? And you need to asses if those links are actually causing you any harm in the first place, for example are they nofollow?

First step in removing links is always to try and contact the webmaster and ask them to remove the links. this is important as this will then impact on all Search engines, not just Google which would be the case if you automatically went for Disavow tool. It also provides you an audit trail if in future you find you need to demonstrate to search engines, say through a reconsideration request, that you have made an effort to clean up your site and comply with webmaster guidelines, To find contact details for a website you can try contact details on the site itself or look them up with tools such as the whois directory.

If contact fails, or if they demand money for removal then you should consider using Googles Disavow tool. Again please note this will only impact Google's algorithm. It should only really be a last resort however. You can access this through Webmaster tools, just search for disavow tool in the help section to the top right and follow the links,

Agree with all of the above, it's probably best if you ask some specific questions of the community and we will likely give you the answer you are after and point you in the direction of an article or two that are still correct you will be able to find further information on.

The constant change will either drive you crazy or become one of the things you love about SEO

I'm going to start this response with an apology, i am unable to look at your site right now but the question title caught my attention and that's what i wanted to pop a quick response on here about.

You should not need to disavow an entire link profile, IF the ranking drop is link associated then it will relate to certain links, you need to identify the suspicious ones and remove these. now these may mean disavowing entire domains as explained in this post on SEO round table, but not everything.

Additionally the disavow tool should be used as a last resort. For suspicious links first attempt to contact a webmaster to get the links removed and document that communication. Only if this approach fails should you use the disavow tool. But there could be many reasons you are seeing a decline in rankings.

Hi Eugenio,

Without seeing the Moz reports not totally sure what you are seeing there but if they are as you described they pose no problem, i.e 'page | Brand'.

I took a quick look on Screaming frog however and think i may know what Moz is reporting as i can see a lot of Duplicate titles being caused by the fact you have two versions of each page on two different subdomains

• /en/tag/{Page}
• /en/{Page}

And another few where there is a /{page} and /en/{page}. I thought you may have solved it with Canonical tags as i can see them in the reports to but they just seem to be refering the same pages back to themselve (Not an issue in itself)

I would suggest then this may be the root cause of what you are seeing and should try to take a look at these, Heres a few resources on Dupe content, not sure how familiar or not you are with it, appologies if i am telling you stuff you allready know.

• Which page is canonical (Moz)
• Dupe Content (Webmaster help)
• Common SEO problems and how to fix (Moz, lot of focus on dupe content)

Thanks, Tom.

I forgot to include, keywords do not need to be exclusive to an individual page, they can be targeted on multiple pages, but having the specific landing page will likely be the most effective area on the site for concentrated on-page SEO tactics.

Data in analytics is depersonalised so you will not be able to associate behaviour to an individual user, unless as Michael says site usage is low enough for you te be able to spot the single user on your contact pages etc at the time of the contact form submission,

WhoIs tells me it appears to have been registered on the 8th May, it could just be benifiting from its 'Google holiday' and you will see it drop down the rankings over the next days weeks. Agree its a low quality site however

While bounce rate and page engagement would play a role i'd be surprised if this was solely down to the PPC campaign, particuarly if its low level as you mention. Whats the URL of the problem page and we may be able to case more light on the matter / offer alternate potential areas to investigate.

Are you posting the articles on your site? if so i believe you can probably do both here, the Business account can be linked to the website and you can also promote the posts through here, and you could use Rel author to associate the article to your personal account in order to build a reputatuion as an authority. If you will have multiple writers contributing that may move on then maybe using rel publisher and focusing on building the brand reputation may be better.

If you redirect the domain then the link equity of those pages shall be passed to the new domain.

The level of risk would be dependant not only on the composition of your link profile on the redirected brand site, but also the link profile of the site you are redirecting to. So if it allready has a large and healthy profile, it shall be more resiliant than if it was smaller and under developed due to the redirected links forming a statisticly less significant proportion of the total link profile.

I know thats not really a yes or no answer, but hopefully is usefull in making your decision.

One potential way around this is to capture the search term form the URL parameters of the refering URL when a user enters your site from a search engine. But then you need to store that and somehow pass it back to yourselves, and you will not be able to tie it into your analytics data that i am aware off.

Additionally im not sure of the top of my head that the referral URL is sent from firefox or people in private session / logged into Google so if that is the case then this method wont actually help you...

In respect to Google and other search engines they will determine the language based on the content. So other than having unique URLs for the different content normal site structure considerations come into play. I would also be inclined to use a subfolder and Google's webmaster guidelines for multi lingual sites show no preference.

Heres the relevant bit:

Google uses the content of the page to determine its language, but the URL itself provides human users with useful clues about the page’s content. For example, the following .ca URLs use fr as a subdomain or subdirectory to clearly indicate French content: http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html http://fr.example.ca/vélo-de-montagne.html

Signaling the language in the URL may also help you to discover issues with multilingual content on your site.

Hope this helps.

1.

Same reason as Chris although i think he put the wrong number down from your list I also like the need help telephone number as to me signals you’re a legitimate company with contact details and acts a clear trust signal as well as user resource. Although I prefer the URL structure of 2 but that’s only from a personal preference of not liking the question format. You actually have more Keyword targeting in the one you’re using.

Title wise – I think 5 things you need to know rather than everything you need to know works better. People like short concise lists, more chance I’m going to read it.

Hi,

Sonds like the issue you are describing is one of Pagination. There are several ways you can remedy this with Meta tags.

If all your pages are very similar and you only want one version of these pages to rank then you can use the Rel=Cannonical meta tag to signal to search engines that these pages are the same as your root page and to attribute all SEO benifit to this page.

So if you have www.mypage.co.uk/producta/page=2, /page=3, /page=4 etc you can place the following meta tag within the Head section of the Pages HTML

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="www.mypage.co.uk/producta/"/>

Users however will still see the paginated version. More information on this tag can be found here and here.

An alternate would be to let Search engines know that pages are part of the same list by using the rel=next and rel=previous meta tags. These are slightly more complicated to put in place but signify that from /producta the 'rel=next' page is /producta/page=2. And on that page you would state the next page is /page=3 and 'rel=previous' is /producta/ etc. This only really works for lists though and if you have many sorting options can get messy, in which case i would use cannonical. Again more information on this meta tag can be found here.

Hope this helps you out.

If you are using classic analytics you will need to make a small amendment to the code. you can find this information by going to:

Admin> (Middle Column) Tracking Info

You will see a little on/off switch next to the subdomains option, if you turn it on you will notice a single additional line of html is added to the tracking code:

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'example.com']);

If you add this to the code on the site you will be able to track subdomains in analytics.

If you then want to see the sub-domains in the reports you may also want to add a new profile complete with a special filter which will display the entire URL of a page, not just the section after the root domain. There is a guide on how to do this but cant find it right now (Admin>Filters (3rd column)). if anyone knows where that guide is please pop a link as i would like to credit it to the correct person, its incredibly useful.

Note: Make sure you add the filter to a new profile or you'll lose your historic data.

Found the code in an article here, scroll a litte down to see the screen shot of how the filter should look.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Tom.

We use bing and see the same as Stephen and Branden report, however for our market segment (Financial) we also find this chanel to be better risk with lower bad rates. Evidently not sure how this would correlate to other segments but an interesting behaviour for us.

A second one you may want to check out (Think its free, forget) is Concept Feedback.

Ok, well that case it just may not be cached yet, i know that being indexed and cached do not necessarily happen concurrently, and the cache should catch up in a few weeks.

Im trying to find some resources to back this up now.

Just realised that link was the same one ChadC posted, teach me to pay attention rather than crawling through all my saved bookmarks!

No worries. A canonical is not the same as a 301 however. You should be able to keep the translated pages and allow users to view them, a canonical will signal to search engines only that these pages are the same. A 301 will redirect users to one version of the page too which removes the value of the translated content for your users.

Here's another Q&A thread i was involved in yesterday focusing on Cannonical tags that should make this clearer.

Please do keep me posted, always interested in the outcomes.

Thanks, Tom.

I would also agree with Baldea and David here, be careful not to Keyword stuff the Home page.

You can include your desired terms within elements of the page if they are relevant / to help the home page rank for those terms, but a product specific page is always going to give you the most scope to target all page elements effectively.

The Page title is only one element, SEOmoz's on page optimisation tool should be useful for you in working out how effectively you are targeting the phrase and what trade-offs are available to you.

The question mark sign signals the beggining of URL parameters. This will not impact your keyword however if the URL parameters do not significantly alter the content of you page then this could cause duplicate content issues as Search engines will see each parameter variation as a unique URL.

Search engines will try to identify these but to help them out you should Discount URL parameters in Webmaster tools for the respective search engine (Not just Google), and to avoid link equity being lost or dilluted implementing the Rel=cannonical tag to the page and referenceing back to a sensible root page version will mean all your inbound links work together.

Hope this helps.

Option 2, redirect chains should always be avoided and should go straight to the final destination URL.

Short answer no.

To use the disavow tool you need to be logged into webmaster tools, and you need to use the disavow tool under the profile of the relavent site. As such Google will know that any links you are trying to disavow are associated with, and only authorised for, the site you have signed in under.

Ok, well in wordress you can access the HTML by going to Appearance>editor and you will see the options on the right hand side. However do you use any SEO plugins such as Yoast?

Hi Tim,

Yes a canonical tag is useful for resolving duplicate content, and acts in a similar fashion to a 301 from the perspective of search engines and passing of link juice, yet allows users to view the original page. So the use depends on the context of your duplicate content issues.

For example say you have a common issue, multiple versions of the home page under /, /index.aspx and /home these are all versions of the same page, no content has changed, what the user sees is not reliant on anything in the URL. In this case a 301 is your best bet back to the root version of the page you want, it shall also help prevent people building links to the various versions as when they take the address from the URL bar it shall already be the version you have selected.

Now say your a retail site selling frogs (Don’t ask, i have a fondness for using frogs in my examples) and you have a product listing page of all the frogs you sell. this could stretch over multiple pages and be paginated. For example /frogs, /frogs?page=1, /frogs?page=2 etc. In this case you don’t really want all these versions of what is effectively the same page ranking, particularly as content won’t change much and can be seen as duplicate. Additionally you don’t want any link equity being split between all the paginated versions however you DO want the user to be able to view these pages. In this case the use of Canonical can be perfect (or rel next/prev but I’ll ignore that for now)

Now it gets a little more complicated and we begin to get to the areas where you can hurt yourself from an SEO perspective. Say your customer can sort by clolour of frog aswell, this adds another parameter to your URL and more duplicate content. i.e /frogs, /frogs?colour=red, /frogs?frogs=blue. Here you can do the same as above and canonical back.

This is where the potential danger lies - The URLs you have canonicalled back will not be ranked in search engines, now say Red frogs are a massive seller and really popular with customers, you may want this page to rank, and canonical tags can prevent this. This is the kind of situation that can cause you a mischief. Have a read of Dr Pete’s 'What page is canonical below' for a more detailed explanation.

Hope this helps you out.

Thanks, Tom.

Heres a few extra resources you may or may not have already discovered:

• Canonical the new 301?
• What page is canonical
• Canonical URL Tag, most important development in SEO since sitemaps

When you say they are URLs do you know what their content type is? Which crawling tool did you use? Images need to be hosted somewhere so shall be called through the HTML etc. but they are normally ended by a .png .jpg or whatever is applicable (again this varies). Screaming frog is my personal favourite for crawling and this shall tell you the type of content these images being identified as.

Hi,

there are many reasons why these sites may be ranked above you, without doing an audit of your site and your competitors i cant advise exactly what this may be, but this white board friday by Rand may be of use to you. theres also this suplimentry article although this focuses on going beyond Moz metrics.

The ones with no links may be new and enjoying their 'holiday' period, you can check out things like that using the Who is directory among other tools to see when the domain went live.

I wouldnt expect its solely URL structure, although generally the further down the URL structure your keywords appear the less weight they carry, this is only a single and relativley small factor. having no social to may not be a deal breaker, its certainly an important up and comming factor, but could be compensated for by other things. Take a nosey at the latest pole on 2013 ranking factor weightings to see what the comunity see as important at the moment.

Sorry i have not given you a definative answer, but hopefully given you a few more things to consider and look into.

Thanks, Tom.

Ok, well you can set canonical tags in Yoast. Without seeing you site set up or the offending pages i am hesitant to give more detailed advice. Best of luck.

You should be ok, Google is ok about this type of boiler plate text, the fact you are also adding unique content to the pages to is even better as you are not replicating the entire page. There has been a recent video by Mat Cutts on the issue which you can find a write up on in Search Engine Watch.

Hope you find that useful.

Easy way to be sure is to do a quick search on Google to see if they are ranking. If you know for sure the Parameters make no difference its usually better to specifically signal that through the WMT console. While Google tend to be pretty smart at these kind of things they can always make mistakes so may as well give as much info as possible.

Which particular URL are you looking at?

I have just crawled the site and the Meta titles being reported are the same i see in the HTMl (that i looked at, the crawl is 6.5k pages allready and only half way through). When i searched for your URL in Google got the home page back as you would expect and see Hull mentioned in the title, but it was in you meta title too.

You have several options, while you can never stop someone coming to your site and actively taking your content you can attempt to trip them up, particularly if they are using automated tools like scrapers. There a are a few article out there (like this) that go into details but common recommendations you will see include things like adding links to your text and images that go to other pages in your site, often the sites stealing the content will then inadvertently include  link back to you in their pages. To avoid issues of low quality link from these sources you should probably make these no follow to be safe. Then there is authorship etc. although that’s not quite right for product descriptions etc., though you could investigate the feasibility of this.

Other than that there is enforcing your copyright but to do so you need to locate the stolen content. Again multiple tools out there such as copyscape that Remus mentioned, but again a quick and easy one would be to set up Google alerts to look for that content. Then you can contact the webmasters and utilise DMCA takedown requests etc if necessary.

But if you are looking for methods to physically stop people taking your content im not aware of a fool proof one i am afraid.

Hope this is helpful.

In addition to Lynns point it would be worth discounting these URL parameters in Google webmaster tools and bing in order to avoid any possible duplicate content issues, rather than leaving it to them to work out which will also avoid the case Lynn mentions for organic search (A case we also expoerienced with a client!)

We had exactly the same issue with a client. They had simply re-hosted their site under at least 10 other domain names they owned in the misguided perception that this would improve their SEO.

They were all hosted on the same server as your latest response seems to state, and we tracked them all down by doing a reverse IP lookup using this tool.

We then had to ammend the clients DNS records for the duplicate sites and 301 them to the true site. The same site later recieved a link penalty and we then parked those domains ratyher than redirected.

I would recommend trying to get things right and going to the lower case format. As you mention it will save you headaches further down the line by keeping to a simple convention.

You can reduce the impact of the redirects by amending your previous ones to point to the new directories, this will prevent a redirect chain and you will lose less. You should then additionally redirect the new URLs of course.

Dependant on the types of inbound links your site has (and volume) it may also be worth a little outreach to other sites asking them to amend to the new final destination format.

Good luck however i know what a pain it is, I've done many site migrations myself.

You should be ok just to replicate it, but by all means use the opportunity to refresh the content, 6 pages shouldn’t take too long. If you want to be extra safe then you can of course just rewrite from scratch. The Penalty will be at the domain level so you should be ok to redirect the existing pages to the New URLs, this will signal to Search engines that the pages have been moved and not to count the redirected pages as unique content, avoiding Dupe content issues. You can also use a cross domain Canonical tag.

If you don’t want to do any redirects to totally severe your links to the old domain profile then remove the original pages from Google’s index in your webmaster tools account and ensure you return 410 status codes to individuals that request the page. If you do still want the users to redirect however 302 the page to the new location as this won’t pass link equity.

Hope this proves useful.