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Thanks for the insight.  We were also leaning that route.

Just a note: Site B isn't receiving much traffic anymore (maybe 1K visitors a day).  Has been in a steady decline for quite some time simply due to lack of time and effort towards it.

OK - so we currently own two websites that are in the same industry.

Site A is our main site which hosts real estate listings and rentals in Canada and the US.

Site B hosts rentals in Canada only.

We are shutting down site B to concentrate solely on Site A, and will be looking to redirect all traffic from Site B to Site A, ie. user lands on Toronto Rentals page on Site B, we're looking to forward them off to Toronto Rentals page on Site A, and so on.  Site A has all the same locations and property types as Site B.

On to the question:

We are trying to figure out the best method of doing this that will appease both users and the Google machine.  Here's what we've come up with (2 options):

When user hits Site B via Google/bookmark/whatever, do we:

1. Automatically/instantly (301) redirect them to the applicable page on Site A?

2. Present them with a splash page of sorts ("This page has been moved to Site A.  Please click the following link <insert anchor="" text="" rich="" url="" here="">to visit the new page.").</insert>

We're worried that option #1 might confuse some users and are not sure how crawlers might react to thousands of instant redirects like that.

Option #2 would be most beneficial to the end-user (we're thinking) as they're being notified, on page, of what's going on.  Crawlers would still be able to follow the URL that is presented within the splash write-up.

Thoughts?  We've never done this before.  It's basically like one site acquiring another site; however, in this case, we already owned both sites.  We just don't have time to take care of Site B any longer due to the massive growth of Site A.

Thanks for any/all help.

• Marc

This is what I'm really leaning towards.  At the end of the day, and one of the first "tips" I ever read regarding SEO and Google/crawlers, is: "does whatever you're doing look natural?"

SEO has become very, very complex over the years in terms of what you can/can't, should/shouldn't do.  I don't even know what's natural and what's not anymore it seems.

Thanks for the prompt reply!

And we're talking ~100,000 backlinks as that's how many pages on my site that will be using their content.  The content is actually mortgage rates that they offer, and is ultimately an affiliate program.

Their link would be a standard brand name backlink with no targeted, rich anchor text.  Literally, it will be the exact same anchor text/backlink URL on every single page their content is used.

I have looked at how many big players on the net handle this kind of situation, and it appears that they all have nofollow on the backlinks in identical situations, but with other companies.

Pseudo question:

I have a website that has 100K pages.  On about 50K of those pages I have information that is fed to me via an outside 3rd-party website.

Now, I like to give credit where credit is due, so I add a backlink to the website that is feeding me this content.  A simple backlink like so:

Information provided by: Company ABC

Now, this 3rd-party website wants me to remove the nofollow tags from the backlink, but I am very, very skeptical because to me, sending ~50K dofollow backlinks to a single site might make the Google monster upset with me.

This 3rd-party site is being very hard-headed about this, to the point where I am thinking of terminating the relationship all together.  I digress.

Scoured the net before writing this, but couldn't really find anything directly related to my issue.

Thoughts?  Is a nofollow required here?  We're not talking 1 or 2 links here; we're talking tens of thousands (50K is low; it will probably be upwards of 100K when all is said and done as my site has many, many pages).

Thanks in advance.

Google will value the 'trust' factor of a site as a whole.  If you manage to get a backlink on say, newyorktimes.com, on a page that is well buried, that is still considered a good backlink because it's coming from a trusted source.

I have stopped looking at pagerank (toolbar) altogether, and focus on the overall quality of a website now when doing my link building.

I was hesitant to even mention Pagerank; it is beneficial to you if the website is relevant to your niche.  Are you (your website) in the 'business of selling travel'?  If so, then it doesn't matter what the DA and PR are of that site, it's a smart business move.

Not all web crawlers honour the rel="prev" and rel="next" attributes, but I always use them because they cannot harm you and are especially helpful for crawlers that do take them into consideration.

I made the mistake, ages ago, of placing the canonical tag on my pagination pages that pointed to the first page.  I didn't have a firm grasp of the canonical tag at that time, and i paid the price for it.  Now I find that the canonical tag is grossly over/misused as you don't even need to place it on any of the pagination pages.  Google knows what page it's on and will usually just disregard the canonical tag.  It will only take it into consideration if the URL and canonical tag don't match.

Make sure to change up your title/meta tags to accommodate the various pages, ie.

<title>Car Parts - Page 2/3/4/5/6/etc</title>

Adding a page reference to your <h>tags is not necessary as the content of the page is still the same, just another page.</h>

Consider adding the title attribute to your paging links as well as a notifier:

Page 2

There are additional rel attribute values that can be helpful, too: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links

Regardless of the authority, there is no reason that you should not join.  It is relevant to your business, and therefore is always a good idea.

I know the pagerank toolbar is not a true indicator of authority, for the most part, however, the site you have listed is a PR7.

Go for it.

For the record, I do not get an adsense ad.  I only see internal Monster ads.

Once you become a big boy adsense publisher, like Monster.com, you get the doors opened for you into a world of many different types of adsense units for your website.  You get much greater control over the units (can set target to new window, colours, sizes, and more).

Remove this immediately:

There are quite a few factors at play here.

1. I've always preferred, as a developer, to have end-pages split up into categories and sub-categories for ease of development.  However, it also let's the user know where they are within the site simply by looking at the URL.

There really is no right or wrong.  You just have to do what makes sense for the site.  If we're talking a micro-site here, with only a handful of pages, then you don't need to create categories and sub-categories.  Just make a straight up URL, ie. /vacuum-services.html instead of doing /services/vacuums/

Remember to try and keep your preferred keywords to the foremost left of the URL to ensure some significance is placed on them.  Not imperative, but if you can, I'd suggest it.

2. Always use hyphens to break up a word.  Underscores are seen as a form of concatenation by search engines, whereas hyphens are seen as separators.  Using neither is not recommended as it's not legible to the end-user and ultimately just forms one large word comprised of several keywords.  No good.

You are correct in thinking that. Nofollow links are used to say "we do not endorse this external reference", which means no PR value is passed (although, Google still reserves the right to actually pass some PR if it feels the external reference is worthy), but the external site will be crawled.  Nofollow does not stop the bots from accessing the referenced URL.

With that said, you need a proper ratio of dofollow to nofollow backlinks to keep your incoming links looking organic.  For example, if 99% of your backlinks are dofollow, Google might see that as being a little fishy.  The biggest mistake people make is to not go for a backlink just because it has a nofollow tag on it.  With all the social media out there these days, and the large majority of them applying nofollow tags on all external url's, it doesn't make sense to not get your links out there regardless.  Google still sees these backlinks and recognizes them as a reference to your site/company, and there is a large signal in their current algo for that.

So don't dwell on it, trust me.  You will find you're just investing too much time for something that you cannot control.  Just focus on creating relationships with relevant sites and the rest will fall into place.  Pay no attention to the nofollow tag.  Take it from a guy who used to be OBSESSED haha.  I read more source-code than actual page content for years!

End note: when it comes down to it, to help put things in perspective, consider a _nofollow_backlink to your site coming from wikipedia.com or something like that.  And then consider a dofollow backlink coming from some no-name, or less reputable site than that.  You're going to see a significant increase in popularity from that one nofollow backlink than any other dofollow backlinks, no what I mean?

A step in the right direction for whom, Google?  Of course.  But not necessarily for the end-user by any stretch of the imagination.

To be honest, my care for Google, it's products, it's advice on SEO, and so on, have completely sizzled over the last year or so as they continue to practice the very black-hat techniques that us webmasters get in sh*t for.  Sorry Goog's, but I won't use your second-tier G+ anytime soon, that's for sure.

Even Google's search has lost its relevance for me as they're opting to give more SERP real estate to big name brands (which is just a nice way of saying that they're giving more SERP real estate to companies that spend millions in AdWords, let's not kid ourselves here).  Just because a company has a recognizable brand name, and spends millions on advertising, doesn't necessarily make their product any more relevant, or of better quality, than the little guys.

To the original post... of course G+ directly influences the SERP's.  Do you think for a second that Google would have it any other way?  Like I said, they are desperate to get people using their Social network, and this is one way to at least get webmasters involved.

Side boob: Google should re-focus their Google+ into a business oriented social network.  Their reach does not extend to half of FB's user-base in that your typical, non web savvy (ie. my Mother) is not ever going to use Google Plus, so why market it to them.  They're lucky if they have a FB account, and that's as far as they'll go because their entire family is already setup on it.  These are the people that actually click on the adwords sponsored ads at the top of the SERP's, even thoughm the majority of the sites in adwords are irrelevant to the search term in question (at least their landing page is).

Watch for more Google (in)direct user-influence tactics coming soon... too bad for them it's race they lost the day Mr. Zuckerberg bought the Facebook.com domain name.

Well, to begin, Yahoo search is now run off the Bing algorithm (algo).  So while there may still be a "Yahoo Slurp" crawler out there, it's based on a different algo than once before.  Bing now completely runs Yahoo search.

Search engines have their own algorithms.  There is no specific algo that they all must adhere to.  So while rankings for your site might go up in one engine, they might very well go down in another (or not move at all).

And I can assume Bing watches for black-hat SEO tactics, although I don't have any physical data to back that up.  But it's safe to say they do.

Huge mistake website owners make is to optimize their sites for Google only.  Google only makes up 65% (?) of the search market, so by optimizing for Google, and Google alone, you're cutting off a potential 35% of traffic.

There is a ton of forums, documentation, webmaster tools for Bing, just as there is Google, so you need to put in that extra effort to see what makes a site rank well in Bing.

As long as you stick to the fundamentals, ie. proper internal link structure, attain solid/safe, relevant backlinks to your site, use your Webmaster tools (and SEOmoz ;)) to make sure site errors and such are taken care of, and get your HTML error free with proper H1-H6 tags (where applicable)/title tags, meta tags, etc., then, and only then, should you start tweaking your site for direct optimization for each engine.

Perhaps the GA code isn't executing in time?  Do you have a slow loading page?  Where is the GA tracking code placed within your page?

The numbers shouldn't be that far off, that's for sure.

I worry about setting up a canonical tag that points to a URL Google can't access (as it's just being redirected via 302 back to the non-www version anytime it will try and read the canonical URL).  And since a canonical tag is kinda sorta like a 301, you'd ultimately be 301'ing (kinda sorta) back to the www version, only to have a 302 header sent, 302'ing Google back to the non-www.  And endless loop, so-to-speak.  I'm not sure how Google would handle this.

How about just working 24/7 to resolve the "technical problem" that is causing this?  I know, easy for me to say

Hey, leave my mama outta this

What I'm saying in regards to that, and I thought I was being quite clear, is that Google would stand a much better chance of dominating the social networking niche if they re-adjusted their priorities, and lost the boner they have for conquering Facebook.  Unless they can figure out a legitimate way of allowing people to copy their entire FB profile over in one click, they won't ever be able to grab the entire, existing, FB user-base.  It just won't happen.  People have invested waaaaay too much time uploading thousands of photos and videos, engaging in countless conversations/emails/messages, and creating their network of friends and family.  I'm just saying that their initial thought process of trying to convert people was hopeless from the get-go.

I don't disagree that they might be on to something in terms of the future of social networking; however, for every new idea they add to G+, FB can easily integrate the same idea to their site and they're back to being even.  The same way Google does to every little competitive company that is even but a spec of dust on Google's radar.  Google leaves no room for competition, so why should Facebook?

For the record, I could care less either way.  My days of being over-actively involved in my own personal Social media have come and gone.  And I offer both solutions to any clients that inquire.

Oh, and, I do quite well in the SERP's, actually.  Google, Bing, and so on.  I've seen a ~500% increase in traffic over the last 2 months to several of my websites, so let's not go there.

Come on now... Google has been caught a handful of times doing the very things they penalize websites for.  Case in point (and these blackhat tactics are as recent as this past week!):

http://www.seobook.com/post-sponsored-google

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223135/Google_downgrades_Chrome_ranking_after_paid_link_monkey_business

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-caught-for-paid-links-14539.html

I could post many more resources/articles to other's they've done in the past, but they're be no fun in that

Their shady tactics don't stop there, however:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/07/25/google.street.view.now.known.to.have.seen.devices/

http://www.4u-2.com/computers/computers-networks/computers-networks-wireless-networks/google-caught-stealing-personal-data-from-wireless-networks/

Just because I don't use Google+ personally, doesn't mean it's not offered to any clients of mine.  But the reaction of theirs is overwhelmingly the same: "Ugh, another social network?  When is it going to stop!?" in reference to FB, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, and so on.  'Cause you can't just replicate your content over them all to be successful, so that's where the "Ugh" comes into play.

Well, I don't think there is any denying that using special characters/symbols help anything stand out more.  And while I cannot help you with any definitive answers, as I have not run any case-studies myself, I can tell you that people are becoming more sensitive to spammy looking sites and such within the SERP's.

With that said, if you choose to use any special characters within your title/meta tags, tread lightly, as preceding your actual site/page title with 5 moons or stars might look a little fishy to some.

But I agree, as an end-user, your eyes are definitely drawn to things that stand out first and foremost.

Last thing you'd want is to be ranked for a symbol by the major search engines.

Sorry, that probably not much help... just my 2 cents on the matter for what it's worth.

Hehe.

Generally speaking, and I've actually come across this quite a bit lately, it's better to just put your efforts towards fixing the technical issues than to try and manipulate the site using redirects and canonical tags.  But it's easy to say when it's not my technical problem, nor my money/time on the line to fix it!  However, that is always the best-case scenario in my opinion.