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Pretty much the same here! Now we know to which company all the wikipedia donations are going to...

Thanks for the idea of using a PHP redirect script instead of the affiliate URL, I like that one!

Cheers

Hi,

For a holiday/travel website including hotels and holiday packages from affiliates I am currently using the rel="nofollow" attribute to link out to the affiliate's website and wanted to know if this is the right way?

To be more precise: there are distinct pages for each city and on a city specific page there are ~50 available hotels listed with some other information such as price and address, etc. Each of these hotels have an outlink to the affiliate's hotel website which uses private branding and as such is running on a subdomain hotels.mytraveldomain.tld. So in order not to pass on the link juice to the affiliate's website I thought I would simply use rel="nofollow".

Would you also use nofollow? or are there any other opinions out there about that?

After having read your post and all the linked articles you have recommended I understand the issue and have adapted the robots.txt accordingly. Basically only leaving one single Disallow for the WordPress plugins. I hope this will help but I suppose I will see this in the next few days...

Now regarding WordPress I would suggest them to adapt their documentation as it is really misleading. Also I think they should implement all these noindex meta tags where necessary natively into wordpress and not by having to use a plugin for that, but this is another story.

I thought it would be no use for google to index and cache small icons, logos and cached resized images which have no meaningful name or so. So now I have at least removed the Disallow for these but for WordPress blog I want to keep the Disallow rules as recommended by WordPress itself for SEO purposes as documented here http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization assuming they know what they are speaking about.

Anyhow I don't have the feeling this is really the problem why my website doesn't show up anymore in the google search engine results...

Many thanks Alan for your answer!

Regarding the robots.txt, basically I just would like to block/disallow some cached images and small icons/pictures from the website as well as some stuff for the associated WordPress blog which is also host on the same website. For the blog I am disallowing the admin pages, feeds, comments, trackbacks, content theme files etc. Here wold be the complete list just in case:

Disallow /wp-admin

Disallow: /wp-includes

Disallow: /wp-content/plugins

Disallow: /wp-content/cache

Disallow: /wp-content/themes

Disallow: /trackback

Disallow: /feed

Disallow: /comments

Disallow: /category//

Disallow: /*/trackback

Disallow: /*/feed

Disallow: /*/comments

Disallow: /?

Disallow: /*?

So maybe I should change my question to "what URLs should I disallow for a WordPress blog?"

Also where can I see all the pages which are blocked by my robots.txt file?

Thanks to both of you for your answers. I will then leave my rewrite rules just in case. I guess they are not slowing down access to the website as they are really simple and quite standard. I suppose that google takes longer to "learn" the new URLs through the redirects.

I have modified a the URL structure of a whole section of a website and used mod_rewrite 301 redirect to match the new structure. Now that was around 3 months ago and I was wondering how long should I keep this redirect for?

As it is a new website I am quite sure that there are no links around with the old URL structure but still I can see the google bot trying from time to time to access the old URL structure. Shouldn't the google bot learn from this 301 redirect and not go anymore for the old URL?

I have launched a new website beginning January this year and have seen slowly more and more traffic coming from google to the website until the 20th of March where suddenly there are no more visitors from the google search engine. The only traffic left is from google images, social networks or other search engines. Without visitors from google search this reduces our overall traffic by ~66%.

I can't easily find anymore our website in the search results of google by using terms which we usually ranked quite well. Nevertheless, the website is still indexed as I can find it using the "site:" search query. In google webmaster tools there are no messages and we have only been doing a bit of link building on website and blog directories  (nothing excessive and nothing paid neither).

Is there any way to find out if google penalized my website? I guess it has... and what would be the best thing to do right now?

The website is hellasholiday (dot) com

Thanks in advance for your idea and suggestions

Hi,

For a holiday/travel website including hotels and holiday packages from affiliates I am currently using the rel="nofollow" attribute to link out to the affiliate's website and wanted to know if this is the right way?

To be more precise: there are distinct pages for each city and on a city specific page there are ~50 available hotels listed with some other information such as price and address, etc. Each of these hotels have an outlink to the affiliate's hotel website which uses private branding and as such is running on a subdomain hotels.mytraveldomain.tld. So in order not to pass on the link juice to the affiliate's website I thought I would simply use rel="nofollow".

Would you also use nofollow? or are there any other opinions out there about that?