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I wish! The affiliate program is new. It's an unknown entity for me. 7 figures is just normal sales. The in-house software has the capacity to allow the blogger to choose a product and create custom code and a thumbnail for it to put in their site, like Amazon does, but they'll have to add the nofollow by hand or I will need to pay to have the software modified, which is what I'll probably end up doing. I have no desire to get a manual penalty for manipulating page rank and I'm surprised it's not a part of the software already.

If you're an Amazon affiliate it is.

By having millions of links to their website where people are being paid to do so, they're encouraging the manipulation of Google PageRank. I don't see why the rules should be any different for them because they're reputable. My site is reputable too. It's an online store with a 7 figure annual turnover, I'm just not 'Amazon'.

So I was just curious as to why they take the link juice from their affiliate links when the rest of us are encouraged to nofollow them. Everything I have read so far suggests that if you run an affiliate program, all the links where people link back to your store should be nofollow, and if you're running a blog that's got lots of affiliate links on it, you should protect your blog by adding nofollow links to all your advertising.

My in-house software doesn't nofollow by default, so I'm either going to have to get it re-written or give my affiliates manual instructions on how to alter their code. I chose not to use ClixGalore or anyone else like that so I don't have to pay their fees.

I am setting up an affiliate program using software built in to my shop already (x-cart). The links generated by the software do not have the rel="nofollow" in them. I'm assuming they should have?

When looking at Amazon, there must be millions of links out there pointing back to Amazon and all those links are followed back to them for link juice.

Am I missing something? Surely best practice here is to re="nofollow" so you're not seen to be manipulating Google PageRank?

I have an SEO pack installed on my shop that produces the ....product.html portion of the URL.

However, a layout feature on the site calls on javascript and adds some 'junk' on to the end of it. I am going to have the coding on the page removed, but I now have people linking to ....product.html?&cat=0&featured=Y instead of .....product.html

Likewise, I am about to set up an affiliate program and while I will be directing my affiliates to nofollow the links, I want to also set up an affiliate account for 'in-house' use and use them in blog posts to see whether my blog posts are converting in to sales. These URL's will also have a parameter at the end of them ie: ......product.html?partnerid=1234 (for example)

Will I get the internal keyword link juice from the URL's with the partner ID on the end?

I have a couple of quirks in my online shop that I'm ironing out. One of them is adding some URL parameters to product links.ie: website.com/product.html?&cat=0&featured=Y

If someone links to this URL, will I get the link juice as if it was website.com/product.html ?

I have URL parameters in Webmaster Tools and robots.txt set up to ignore them so they're not in the Google index, but I have found a few websites that have linked to us using these longer URL's and I'm wondering whether to write to them and ask them if they mind changing them or not.

When I manually fetch, the /images folder isn't on the list anymore.

For now I have just reuploaded the images in to a new folder and I'm creating my feed by hand, so that should get around it for now.

Thanks for your help.

I had created a manual Google Shopping Feed that was working fine, and then someone well meaning put a block in my robots.txt file so Google couldn't read the images folder. because of this, Google now won't accept my feed.

I changed the robots.txt file to allow them to read the images again, but it's been 3 days now and I'm still getting the error saying my products are disallowed because the robots.txt file won't let them scan for images.

Does anyone know how long it will take for Google to see it again?

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

I think I will add the https to WMT and remove them that way.

I will take a look through the .htaccess file and the creation of the ssl robots file. A while back, it seemed that Google was indexing a lot of my site as https and then the dropped it and went mainly back to http. I will get that sorted to make it clear.

I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week.

I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front.

For example, I add to the removal tool:-

https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition

On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:-

http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition

I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look?

AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION

If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request?

www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_...

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

Looks like I can only do the first thousand. It's a start though. Thank you for the information.

Many of the URL's on my list, when put in to Google search, are giving me 80-100  other variants I can remove by hand.

http://www.mathewporter.co.uk/list-a-domains-indexed-pages-in-google-docs/ for anyone else following.

Finally getting around  to doing this and noticed that when I change the start number to anything above 900, it doesn't work - ie: it's only letting me look at the first 1,000 results for some reason.

The list of 1,000 has given me some good URL's to search off for the filtering thingy that was generating all the garbage URL's but I'd love to get past 1,000 if I can.

Does anyone know how?

Thanks. I'm going to err on the side of caution and nofollow ALL of the links from my personal blog to my business. In the grand scheme of things, it makes up such a small percentage of links to our store. Our pagerank won't suffer. The sponsorships are literally 10 or 12 logos on a sporting club or surf club website. For those we made ourselves that I have easy access to, I have also done the nofollow as they're all living on the same bank of servers. (we donated the hosting space and websites as our sponsorship deal).

Others where we have just given money or time and have no control over, I'm comfortable that they're legit and wont' get penalised. Asking a volunteer at a surf club to nofollow a hyperlink will be met by strange looks

Staying away from dodgy $5 deals with a 40-foot pole.

I'm a web developer, and as such, we run a bank of half a dozen dedicated servers.

I have 2 questions with regards to nofollow links

1. There's half a dozen sites linking back to us from the same bank of servers (across 3 different IP's but all in the same facility) because we have donated our web design services and we're a sponsor. It's not a paid link, it's a sponsorship. Should I still nofollow the link?

2. I run a couple of personal blogs on the same bank of servers. There's an absolute tonne of original content and a handful of links back to my shop. Because I own both sites, should I nofollow these links as well?

I am doing a massive cleanup before the Penguin pops his head out again.

I'm wondering the same / similar thing.

I have been invited to regularly write for a blog. I am tossing up one of two options.

1. Having myself set up as an author and attach it to a Google+ account to claim authorship.
2. Having the site owner post under their name and give me credit at the end of the post as the author.

Either option better? If I choose option 1, do I need to nofollow the links because I'm the author linking back to my own site?

All posts will be original, relevant and helpful content, I'm just being overly cautious.

Much appreciated. Thank you.

Correct. I have gone in to URL Parameters already and set them to Crawl 'No URLs' for those we don't want crawled.

We haven't added those parameters listed in there in to the robots.txt file yet, but I will do that now. I had an initial consult today and we ran way over time when we discovered all this stuff so I have another appointment in a couple of weeks.

We have a sitemap of all the category pages and relevant static pages on the site already and Google has those indexed nicely. We just need to get rid of the 240,000 pages it has indexed that we don't want in there (frightening I know - it's a really high number).

I greatly appreciate you taking the time to respond. Thank you.

Thanks. There's a lot of auto-generated content, duplicate pages and we've set the robots.txt file up to exclude a large number of them. Now we wait.

Very helpful and greatly appreciated. Thank you.

HI Jane, further to the comment about M&S and Debenhams, I now understand what you mean by using a JS-powered navigation. While we can see it as users, the search engines can't see the endless links in the mega menu.

While having a phone consult with an SEO person today, he mentioned the same thing, using AJAX to hide that kind of information from Google so the users still get the experience of the content but Google isn't reading endless pieces of information it doesn't need.

I am a web developer, but not a high level programmer. Could you point me in the direction of where I should look as far as tutorials go so I can implement this in my site?

The links in the mega menu that I'll want to hide with AJAX are all readily available on main category pages and in breadcrumbs.

I'm doing a detailed analysis of how Google sees and indexes our website and we have found that there are 240,256 pages in the index which is way too many. It's an e-commerce site that needs some tidying up.

I'm working with an SEO specialist to set up URL parameters and put information in to the robots.txt file so the excess pages aren't indexed (we shouldn't have any more than around 3,00 - 4,000 pages) but we're struggling to find a way to get a list of these 240,256 pages as it would be helpful information in deciding what to put in the robots.txt file and which URL's we should ask Google to remove.

Is there a way to get a list of the URL's indexed? We can't find it in the Google Webmaster Tools.

Thanks again. I've just noticed our rankings climb for a few phrases & keywords purely by doing internal keyword linking and writing quality blog posts.  I'm sitting on the fence as to whether to ditch my mega menu or at least greatly simplify it. It provides ease of use for the end user to jump straight to the category they want, but if I'm losing traffic, then they're not on the site to use it.

Catch 22.

I've been watching a pile of Matt Cutts videos but haven't found one on this particular topic yet. I'm pretty sure my Panda issue was cough 20 million pages listed in URL Parameters from a poorly set up internal refine search feature that's been given the flick. We're down to 2.6 mil now and some of my rankings are slightly improving already.

Fabulous answer Jane. Thank you so much

I think the thing I'm concerned about now is how well my internal keyword linking is going to work with 300+ links on each page. We're going to the trouble of rewriting a lot of content and doing some very specific internal keyword linking to help people move around the shop better and also for SEO purposes.

I'm assuming these internal keyword links are a lot more effective if they're only competing against 100 links instead of 400+ ?

I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait.

I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer.

I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation?

It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised.

The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au

Thanks for all that. Really valuable information. I have gone to Parameter handing and there were 54 parameters listed. In total, generating over 20 million unnecessary URLs. I nearly died when I saw it. We have 6,000 genuine pages and 20 million shitty ones that don't need to be indexed. Thankfully, I'm upgrading next week and I have turned the feature off on the current site, the new one won't have that feature. Phew.

I have changed the settings for these parameters that were already listed in Webmaster tools, and now I wait for the biggest re-index in history LOL!

I have submitted a sitemap now and as I rewrite page titles & meta descriptions, I'm using the Fetch as Google tool to ask for resubmission. It's been a really valuable lesson, and I'm just thankful that I wasn't hit worse than I was. Now, it's a waiting game.

Of my 6,000 URLs' on the site map submitted a couple of days ago, around 1/3 of them have been indexed. When I first uploaded it, only 126 of them were.

I've seen a couple of people leave comments about keyword linking being too specific.

If I"m doing a lot of internal keyword linking and I want to rank well for 'widgets', is it better that most of the links just use the word 'widgets' or should some of the links have more words in them.

ie: 'red and blue widgets' - 'buy these widgets online' etc.

I feel like I'm being damaged by Panda because of duplicate content as I have seen the Googlebot on my site indexing hundreds of URL's with ?fsdgsgs strings after the .html. They were beign generated by an add-on filtering module on my store, which I have since turned off. Googlebot is still indexing them hours later. At a loss what to do. Since Panda, I have lost a couple of dozen #1 rankings that I've held for months on end and had one drop over 100 positions.

Over the last couple of weeks,  I have noticed that Google aren't showing the page titles for my online shop anymore. They're set up with a third party plug-in piece of software, and while it's an old version of the software, the developer said it wouldn't be causing issues.

They have suggested that I re-write my page titles to be less spammy. The thing is, Google haven't attacked just spammy looking titles, they're just taking a swoop through my whole site and not showing any of my page titles in their search results.

I'm getting "Category Name - Shop Name" showing.

Here's some of the page titles no longer appearing and I honestly have no idea how to rewrite these to not be spammy. Are there any good articles on what's spammy and what isn't?

"Coconut oil - best tasting in Australia. Buy online from <my business="" name="">"</my>

"Discount Vitamix Blender. Best deal in Australia. Buy online from <my business="" name="">."</my>

"Natural & Organic skin care for the face | buy online in Australia from <my business="" name="">."</my>

There are others that are showing the real page titles, but I think it's only a matter of re-indexing before they're all not showing.

Any clue?

Thanks for the responses.

Within 12-24 hours, I actually bounced back on to the front page. In the last 2-3 weeks I have seen this particular ranking be anywhere between position 3 and position 7 and then not even in the top 200 for a couple of hours.

It seems to be quite a bouncy & unstable ranking. Most of my others sit very solidly and don't move around too much. I now don't think it's the internal linking, but just some weird thing happening and I guess I'll just have to wait for it to settle.

I have an online shop and 3 blogs (with different topics) all set up on sub-domains (for security reasons, don't want Word Press installed in the same hosting space as my shop in case one gets hacked).

I have been on the front page of Google for a keyword, lets say 'widgets' for months now. I have been writing blogs about 'widgets', probably about 1/4 of all my blog posts are linking to the 'widgets' page in my shop. I write maybe 1-2 blogs a week, so it's not excessive.

This morning I have woken to fine that the widgets page in my shop has vanished from Google's index.

So typing in 'widgets' brings up nothing. It hasn't dropped in the rankings, it's just vanished. A few weeks ago I ranked 3 or 4. Then I dropped to about 6. A couple of days ago, i jumped back up to 5 and now it's vanished.

If you type in 'buy widgets', or 'widgets online' or 'widgets australia', I have the #1 spot for all those, but for 'widgets', I just don't exist anymore.

Could I have been penalised for writing too many posts and keyword linking internally? They're not keyword stuffed and they're well written. I just don't understand what's happened.

Right now I"m freaking out about blogging and putting internal links on my website.