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I wouldn't just go ahead an do it without looking into it further, maybe waiting for more comments on here to weigh it up. It sounds counter-intuitive to me.

Sorry Johannes I think I confused matters... I didn't mean there is spammy content now, I mean the spammy content that you removed. I'll be cursed for saying it but it's quite possible some of that spammy stuff was working if there were exact matches in there then which aren't now. Google isn't perfect yet so unfortunately some spam does still work (for now) though it will likely hold risks too. My suggestion with that was to look at the spam that was removed and figure out how to incorporate some of it back into the site in a non-spammy way.

With regards to the link numbers, yes if it was me I think I'd remove at least some of those footer links too.

My mistake with the rel canonical, I didn't spot it but just noticed it was a bit lower down.

The duplication could well be the issue, but if that's the case and the dupe is no longer there then it should sort itself out pretty quickly.

You must still have bad links that you weren't able to get rid of it, try this: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/link-networks/ tis awesome

If one were better than the other (and I'm not sure of any research comparing the two), then I would guess at .cn, since that's as top level as you can get with it (I know their both top level but that was the original).

Did you always have as many links going out of each page? There's quite a few... plus that spammy content, whilst I hate to say it, might have provided the longtail exact matches you were ranking for. Maybe get those keywords back in to their pages in a non-spammy way?

There's no rel="canonical" tags which would help if it is down to dupe issues.

Also, you're cannibalising a lot with the keywords... not just content and links but for a quick demo look at your page titles, the same keywords cropping up in a few of them.

Hiya, no it's fine to keep the global nav on all pages... you should do anyway. What I mean is, trim the number of links in that global nav down by placing some of them only within their category areas instead, in a secondary menu maybe. But... you can still use flyouts in the main menu so that the menu items are listed and then a hover-over of a category brings out more items, and again for a sub-category, etc... in which you could use a technology which isn't crawl-able/followed. That way users can still access all menu items from the main nav but Google will only see the top level links, with further links not followed (without using NoFollow) and bypassed. Not sure the best way to do it though since JS and Ajax are by all accounts a lot more crawl-able now.

My recommendation would be to do whatever you can to get as much experience as possible by submersing yourself in with anybody there who deals with the SEO, and get the theory by reading, spending time on here, and doing an SEO course such as MarketMotive, SearchEngineCollege, or Quirk... they're three of the decent ones, and it's kind of like having interactive books with deadlines, coursework and tests to ensure you're doing things right. They're kept nicely up to date too

Try these:

http://www.marketmotive.com/internet-marketing-training-and-certification-signup?top=how&topic=SEO

http://www.searchenginecollege.com/certified-search-engine-optimizer/

http://www.quirk.biz/courses/course/seo?utm_expid=47245799-5&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.quirk.biz%2Fcourses%2Fhome

And get these:

http://www.artofseobook.com/

http://www.dannydover.com/lp/seo-secrets.html

My mistake, I wrongly assumed demoting all that currently show would effectively turn them off.

According to this, there's no way to do it: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/removing-content/GrV8Axa81Ec

It's still on there under "Configuration"... there's instructions on how to turn them off at https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

NoFollowing internal links won't save you any link juice... Rand did a WBF on it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak

You're far better off going broad to narrow with your menu and trying to incorporate the pages those hundreds of links go to into categories and sub-categories, so try to combine what those pages are about in the main nav and then give options to go into more detail once users are within the category area (not of the main nav).

That stuff is the fundamentals which still hold true in my opinion... the report card never encouraged over-optimization and the stuff within it is still relevant today in my opinion. An A Grade is certainly not over-optimized... really the whole over-optimization thing has been around for a long time it's just there's a lot of buzz about it at the moment, but when it comes down to it, it's still just the same stuff but maybe a little stricter... so as long as your not keyword stuffing, etc... or breaking any of the other old rules from back then, then you're still not breaking them now

If it's algorithmic then they just need to fix it fast, if it's manual... they still need to fix it fast and then do a reconsideration request.

I would guess that as long as you don't have other bad signals it won't really affect your site, but maybe remove the links temporarily just to be on the safe side.

SEL just did this, which may be of interest: http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463

Note that part where it states "In particular, pointing bad links at a good site with many other good signals seems to be like trying to infect it with a disease that it has antibodies to. The good stuff outweighs the bad."

Christoph put a really decent video out on how to identify spammy links, that should help

http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/link-networks/

I would say to look at it from a business perspective... how much revenue is generated from your existing site and will does it justify fixing it for just a short period of time, or would you be better off using that time planning and researching to ensure the new site is as good as it can be?

Thanks Istvan,

What are the solutions you're thinking of if you were to go against best practice?

Hi guys,

Now I have always been against this, and opted to noindex internal search results pages to stop the waste of link juice, dupe content, and crawl loops... however, I'm in a discussion with somebody who feels there may be a solution, and that the pages could actually be optimized to rank (for different keywords to the landing pages of course).

Anybody come across such a thing before?

My only solution would be still to noindex and then build static pages with the most popular search results in but that won't suffice in this case.

Any recommendations would be much appreciated

Thanks,

Steve

lol sorry I see what you mean now, I'd taken it out of context a bit there instead of leaving it as comparable to the other items in the question. My bad.

"There are several determinants for where you will rank in Google SERP's, but the most important is PR." <-- I've gotta disagree on that

Yeah it counts but relevance counts a lot more than just juice.

Decent content + promotional effort = quantity & quality of links (combined with the decent content) = rankings.

I wouldn't think too much on the PR or you might get sidetracked into thinking about that, more than thinking about the above

This will always be the case... there are different sources, and different interpretations of what constitutes errors. I wouldn't go thinking that just because GWT is Google that means it's the most efficient though, Google have a lot of other business to be thinking about and are unlikely to be too concerned if everything isn't perfect in their free GWT product, so I doubt it would take priority over other services of theirs. Where-as Moz of course is more focused in that particular area. I would just combine the two and iron out as much as you can from each... you'll never get them to match up though.

We had a site-wide (I know) in the footer of a huge site which seemed to propel us to P1 of G for a competitive term. Of course I accept that there's more to it than just that but of late I have been wondering how much of the things we stopped seeing value in, still actually hold more value than we think.

There are two camps on this, those who say to have a separate site and those who say use the same site... the former are wrong, the latter are right.

That's exactly what I'm saying, just have one really well designed and coded site that works perfectly on every platform. Why double your link building/acquiring workload by doing it any other way?!

Cool

I hope it keeps heading in that direction then... and now you know all about link juice too

Make sure when you are placing links first make up good anchor texts with your keywords in it.

Or not, a tonne of incoming links with exact match keywords might raise a few flags. Natural links tend to have brand names, web addresses, etc... in them, and generic things like "click here".

I'm not saying it's not a relevance signal but it's certainly a lot less of one than it was. By all means get a few exact matches, partial and phrase matches but I'd mostly go for the relevance through the site/page content and the fact that it's relevant, trusted sites/pages that are linking in... and not so much concern with the anchor text.

If you use automatic submission you're faced with a problem. Duplicate content. If you want to get around the duplicate content problem then you're faced with another problem, you have to use article spinning. Both of which are not good. Aside from that, the majority of the sites the auto software's submit to won't end up giving you any links and your article will still read with visibile, non-working html code in it, of the ones that do give you a link it will be either nofollow, or pass zero of anything to you because it's spammed to hell with millions of articles for being one of the few article sites that allow follow links.

Now, there might be a few sites that pass juice, but that will be because of quality levels in what they publish. So submitting to them would have to be manual only, as there's no way any auto software would get your article into a site like that.

I would certainly think it will help what you've done already but looking at the site again, I'm swayed to suggest that some of the links come out of the body as well... I can't say for sure that I'm correct but intuitively I just have a sense that Google wouldn't be too keen. It's almost like there's more linked content in there than there is non-linked content. So to an extent, it's not even about the link juice in this case but Google's view on page quality. Hopefully somebody else will chime in here as I'm far from sure.

Aside from that, I'd still look at other possible factors too.

Have you used the crawl error report tool on here? If not, certainly check that out: Crawl Tool

Google can do better than 100 links per page now, but it's not about the crawling that I'm referring to, it's the spread of equity.

Your homepage has x amount of equity, which it passes through to other pages via links. Due to the sheer number of pages linked to, that x amount is only able to pass y amount to page a, where-as if there were less links then page a would get z amount of equity.

Look at this:

Old Moz Image

Disregard the stuff on that page about NoFollow helping to retain linkjuice though, that turned out not to work that way and you still lose that link juice anyway even if it is nofollow.

Hehe, I think you might be preaching to the choir there a little

".... I am betting all of my money on links being rapidly depreciating assets."

That terrifies me, I'm not kidding I lose sleep over thinking about that regularly.

I think you're right about too many on-page links, I'd address that first for sure... spreading that link juice way too thinly

And yeah it's a little shy on links & link diversity, etc... and of what it has got, there's no deeplinks.

I used to use half of them before I started spending more time on here and edging away from that stuff a year or two back, and honestly they did used to work but they really don't anymore. You have to spin content if you want anything out of them, LinkVine was the best of the bunch but their effect went down and down. I have friends that are still a little darkside lol, My understanding is that they're of even less worth now, once Panda hit... well, from what they say you might as well just go out and comment spam for all the good it'll do you.

Humble and modest EGOL, but we all know you should be on that list too!

Thanks

Title says it all really... if a site has a normal H1 and a bunch of:

class="h1">...... tags as well, does this count as more than one H1 tag even though it's not really an H1 tag??

Yeah that does clear things up in my head... do you think it's always the case though. I mean with blogs yeah I reckon it is massively, but on normal informational sites you tend to see a lot of links to "useful information" types stuff in sidebars... i.e. A website about planning permission for houses that would link to the local council for regulations, etc...

I'm just wondering if the slurry of poor content blogs with contextual links that ensued the discussions on block level a few years back has resulted in the whole idea being scaled back.

Again I would rule out the footer altogether as it will I'm sure always be considered a place where no decent link would be put. But to me, a sidebar link could be of more importance to the user than one within the content... in a sense like it's more something a site is offering users to see, standing out from the content if that makes sense.

Kind of like what you said with the list of great resources, would you usually find that in the content window? I often see them in the sidebar.

Just to clarify though, I think "When crap links to crap the position of the link does not matter." is totally right but would you say "When quality links to quality the position of the link does not matter." was absolutely the case, or do you think it does matter a bit, just not loads?

I got to thinking earlier... I know obviously footer links are always going to be the bottom of the barrel but does the rest of block level analysis still mean as much... I mean, everybody went nuts with getting in-content links only so there's a billion and one badly written spammy blogs with useless content on just for the sake of getting in-content links instead of blogroll/sidebar links. I just wonder if maybe due to that, things might have levelled out a bit for link location and we hadn't noticed... or at least there's not been much discussion over it lately.

Thoughts anyone?

It's okay... I should have deleted this question. I brought it up in another thread and Rand was like "Wha?" so I checked again and it turns out I was being moronic and must have dreamed the issue up from nowhere lol.

Thank you anyway hehe... see, you guys are that good with support you're even there to fix problems that imagined!!

Yeah they're just not top level TLD's. I don't think it's a huge no-no as I've got those TLD's to rank before but there's certainly some disadvantage due to the amount of spam sites that use them. If your content is good enough though then it shouldn't matter

Hmm, I was going to say it might be a little difficult to get first for that though... especially with a .info

But then I looked at what is first now (in the UK) and it's an ad-heavy awful site: http://teaser-trailer.com/movies-2012.html

So I will eat my words... thought you'd be up against RottenTomatoes, IMDB, Wiki and all the production companies like Warner Bros, MGM, etc... but apparently not lol

Double post... I only clicked one though so... random!

Also, yukky windows servers hehe

Hehe I was going non www to www wasn't I, I should learn to read properly, well spotted!

You've just missed the "on" at the end of the first line and have it at the start of the 2nd I think (not sure if that matters). So,

RewriteEngine On

And then take the www off the second line. So,

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com

Majestic = Lots of quantity, some quality
OSE = Some quantity, lots of quality (although it's more than just "some" quantity now really)

With the sample sizes there are, the quantity from OSE is usually more than sufficient so you don't actually need all the links to get a picture of what's going on. Plus if OSE isn't showing particular links then those are likely to be pretty low quality links anyway because if the site the link is coming from is worth anything then OSE will have crawled it (because enough other sites would have linked into it)... also OSE is getting bigger and bigger all the time.

I do use Majestic too, but you can get a lot more insight from OSE results.

Plus, some of the links Majestic pulls in are things like other little search engine's indexes, more pages than is necessary from any one domain (sitewides, etc...) and other stuff that's not of that much use anyway.