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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).

Well, a TLD will carry a certain amount of trust and relevance.

For example, being from Canada, if I'm looking for a product online (shoes, clothing, computer, etc) and I do my typical search in Google, I will visit the .ca pages first simply because they are a registered Canadian business.

However, this doesn't seem to carry well into the US as you really don't see anybody using the .us TLD at all.

.com means ".Commercial", but is grossly overused IMO.

TLD's don't carry any different level of authority in the eyes of googlebot (well, maybe there are some like .cn that are known for housing spam sites, but I cannot confirm that).  People go for .com because it is so widely known, and people are not used to seeing .net's nearly as often as they are typically used for 'net' related activity.

.org would not be a good fit for your site as .org is for organizations, ie. http://www.humanesociety.org/, and are usually for non-profit efforts.

To summarize: .net and .com have no difference in the eyes of crawlers.  It just boils down to the preference of users.  If you create a website that is appealing and looks reputable, you shouldn't have any problems.  However, a .net might be more suitable for a website such as (pseudo): ComputerDiscussionTopics.net

It's a tough one.  Maybe some others will chime in.

"The only time you should use a no-follow is when you are linking to a external site that has a bad reputation, suchas a porn site or spam site, that you do not want to be associated with."

In which case, you shouldn't be linking to those sites anyway.

the 'nofollow' attribute was created many years ago to be used within comment systems, and not within a website link structure.

In my opinion, I fail to see any time in which you feel you should be adding nofollow to any external link.  If you are linking to an external site, it should ONLY be to a site that is relevant to your site and of a reputable nature.  Adding nofollow to that seems redundant.

If you add nofollow to all your outgoing links, I could only imagine that Googlebot starts thinking, "why are these guys adding all these links to sites they don't trust?"

"other than possibly bringing you some traffic"

Which is something a lot of people never consider when trying to land backlinks.

If your website has backlinks that bring an endless amount of traffic, you can avoid any hiccups due to Google algo changes.

Thanks Jason.  I still wonder, though.  Google has said one thing and done the other in the past.

This thought jumped into my head because I have managed to land some very lucrative backlinks to my site from several (~25 or so) major players in my niche.  DA's of 90-100, and bang on for what I deal in.  However, my backlink gets zero clicks to my site which got me thinking that perhaps Google does use the GA data to determine the more popular links on a page.  And upon checking, the majority of the sites which my link sits on has Google Analytics installed.

To put it into perspective, the relation between my site to the sites in which I have backlinks on would be like a company who owns a search engine getting a backlink on google.com, or an independent news outlet getting a backlink on CNN.com.

It's been about 6-8 months now since I landed ~80% of these backlinks, but have yet to notice any significant changes in the SERP's for my site.  I'm giving Google the benefit of the doubt that new backlinks can take some time to set in, in fear that they're temporary backlinks so as to not reward a site prematurely in case that backlink comes down.

Thanks for the reply!

I had a strange thought waking up this morning, and was curious to hear other people's opinions on it.

In Google Analytics, under Content > In-Page Analytics, Google shows what links on your site pages get clicked and how many times plus other metrics.  Do you think they use that data for ranking back links so-to-speak?

What I mean is, say I had a back link to my site on example.com, and example.com had google analytics installed.  Google can see through google analytics whether my link has been clicked on.  Say that my link gets no clicks, do you think that Google would use that metric against my site deeming it "not popular" or "not a good resource", even if example.com was a very popular site?

And it could work the other way.  Say my link got thousands of clicks on example.com, do you think that Google might use that to promote my site?

I couldn't find any other discussion on this anywhere, so am not sure if people have already thought about this.

I wouldn't bother changing the URL's.  The difference in terms of SEO is rather negligible.

Of course there are points to be made on both sides, most of which have already been pointed out; however, you are bound to miss some 301's (it's natural), and in my opinion, is just not worth the hassle.  Google is perfectly capable of crawling/indexing parameter-filled URL's like yours.  You're basically looking to re-write the site and give it back to Google.

Any/all backlinks pointing to the existing URL's will forever lose their full power (as long as the backlink URL on the external continues to point to your old URL structure).

If you must do it, take notes from most of what has been said already.  You must be very meticulous in your 301's, and even ask some of the websites that have your link up to change it to the new URL to decrease the overall permanent hit you will be taking.

Is it a relevant website?  Or would your link just be in amongst a bunch of other irrelevant websites hoping to reap some PR?

The name of the game is relevance.  When approaching a site for a backlink, check their backlinks too to see where they are coming from.

Ages ago, before I really knew what I was doing (and I'm still learning after all these years), I managed to get my website a link on a homepage that was a PR9.  I was pumped.  However, the site had absolutely, and I mean absolutely nothing to do with the niche of my site.  All-in-all, that link did nothing for me.

After learning from that mistake, I only seek out sites that are in my niche, and have have links pointing to them that are also in my niche.  Keeps it in a nice trusted grouping of complete relevancy.

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.

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.

"Google SERP changes run ahead of what they actually show us in site: or cache updates"

Precisely.  Those tools are not real-time by any means, and are to be used as a guide, at best.

301 redirects do not pass 100% of page equity/authority.  I have no idea exactly how much is passed through a 301, but you're always going to be in for a wee drop during a re-build.

"rel="external" does nothing except notify the browser to open a new window, like target="_blank". The only difference is that rel="external" is xhtml valid, and target="_blank" is not."

Here is a good discussion on the subject... a little dated, but still holds true: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=61308

That's just it.  These kinds of sites are the reason the Panda update was created.

Build relationship's with other relevant websites in your niche.  Also, create content that is trustworthy and worth linking to, and the links will roll in, in time.

I don't think there is anything you can really do to prevent this.  That's just the nature of the beast when it comes to pages that can only be seen by privileged users.

Typically, sites I've created, all the "member" pages are located within the own directory, ie. /my-account/, where I place a block on the folder within the robots.txt file so crawlers can't get their hands on privileged information.

As Alan said, a 301 would not be the best thing to do.

Consider the link from ABC as being a valuable backlink to XYZ for that keyword/niche, and continue with a link-building campaign for both sites.  Since ABC is already ranking well for that keyword, you should not stop optimizing it.

It happens

But yes, it's easy to recover the next time the crawlers visit the site, fortunately.

My thoughts exactly (and other great points by other comments here).

There are many factors that go into this issue, and of course, I'd love to have say, houses.com or realestate.com for a website that was offering real estate for sale.  But that doesn't mean that I should create some long-winded, keyword-stuffed domain name (real-estate-and-homes-houses-for-sale.com) as that will not do anything for my cause.

I'm sure, as everybody has pointed out, that there is still some consideration into the domain match for the genre in question; however, domain name are basically impossible to come by nowadays for any popular/common item you are planning on building a website around.  I'm sure the search engines have also thought about that.

But in all honesty, look at a lot of the major players in any niche, and majority of them have a unique, highly-branded name that doesn't have anything to do with the industry.  Not to say you shouldn't do it, but with a legitimate link-building campaign and top-notch SEO tactics deployed throughout the site, you can rank for anything under any domain name.

Remove this immediately:

You are correct in that "exact match domain names" are dying out, and that is due entirely in part to spammers (don't they just ruin everything??). It's all about branding now, which means you can basically have any domain name you want and rank for anything you want. Mind you, you're not going to see cars.com trying to rank for telephones anytime soon, but you know what I mean. While it might be tempting, it is not necessary to have your niche keyword in your domain name anymore. Last I heard, Bing was the only search engine actually taking these things into consideration, and that was over a year ago, so I'm not sure whether they still do.

Well, is it content only available to French-Canadian's?  For example, would your company's services be relevant to somebody from, say, Dallas, Texas in the US?  Is any of your services relevant to English speaking people?  And if so, what is the percentage?

Build your site for your clients/customers/users, and whatever makes sense to them.  If only French speaking/reading people will be visiting your site (for the most part), then build everything in French (including URL's), as it will be legible.  For the same reason you a Hindu site might not be relevant to you, regardless of their services (taking a stab in the dark that you might not know Hindu; I apologize if I'm wrong

You know what I mean?  Bottom-line: build for your users and what is going to generate the greatest ROI.

Well, yes and no.  Like I said, it's indirect.

It can have an effect on the algorithm in that using certain elements from Schema.org (and others like it) to create, for example, proper breadcrumbs on your site, which will in turn be picked up by Google and display those breadcrumbs within the SERP's.

For example (and a little shameless plug), here is my site in the #1 position in the SERP's with Schema.org created breadcrumbs: https://www.google.com/search?q=2728+23rdwyandotte#hl=en&sa=X&ei=J_3YTrr8Neb20gGQ0JnSDQ&ved=0CBcQBSgA&q=2728+23rd+wyandotte&spell=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=1ee69a25240f81e5&biw=1920&bih=979

Others you can see will have an image of a video show up, or even an author and such.  Schema.org is more of a way of creating a unified method for crawlers to crawl and properly index ones website based on the usage of the Schema.org schematics.  THey can help draw attention to your listing within the SERP's, but to my knowledge, do not influence your position within the SERP's.

Hope that helps.

No, not at all.

I would say that it has an indirect impact on ranking, so-to-speak.

This is because, following a structured schema, like Schema.org, will help ensure you have legible code within your site for the crawlers.  Know what I mean?

Just because you have it on your site, however, does not mean you will automatically go up in rankings.

Yes, you should add "Page x" to the title, meta description tag and H1 header tag to avoid duplicate errors.

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.

Agreed.  For $6,000 you can build quite a solid SEO campaign with a reputable company for sure.  They'll make sure things are done right, unlike these 3rd-party seo companies that just fire your link up in comments and other questionable websites.

Exactly.  I don't think there is much SEO value to be honest; however, on a highly-trafficked site it will definitely help spread the word of your affiliations.

But like I said, don't try and get sneaky with the keywords.  In my opinion, stick to the brand name anchor text.

It's perfectly legit in my opinion, as long as it's honest.  Rule of thumb is only make changes/additions to your site where if penalized, you have a valid, honest explanation.  If you can't explain yourself, well, they'll have no mercy on you.

BTW, here's another example: http://oldnavy.gap.com/

My only suggestion to stay on the safe side would be to not use keyword-stuffed anchor text.  I would recommend using the brand name when cross-linking instead.

Take this site for example: http://www.hometrader.ca/  Go to the footer and see how they link to each of their sister sites under Partners.

Well, you said it "Either way, in my mind, it's useful to the user and that trumps everything"

Optimize for the end-user, and the rest will fall into place.  Don't be scared to link out if it's useful information for your user.

These days, nobody wants to link out to anybody.  It's ridiculous.  The internet is supposed to be a complete world of information, but every site on the net wants to keep everything to themselves.

I've come across articles in the past about how Bing takes this into consideration.  They share the same ideology as you in that your website should be a 'one-stop shop' for the user.

And there's sure nothing wrong with linking to any government agencies as their content is usually 100% legit and accurate.  Nothing to worry about there.

Go for it.

Don't link build for PR and PR only.  That will never work out as desired.

Instead, get your link on relevant websites where you link can/will act as an extension to their website by way of added quality/services to their users.  Those are the links the crawlers really give value to.

The saying still stands true... one single, valuable backlink from a reputable, relevant website is equal to hundreds/thousands of backlinks from irrelevant, lower-grade websites.

Hehe, you answered my question.  I was a little late.

Still though, just redirecting one site to another (and not a 'change of address') might confuse the heck out of the crawlers.

What's the plan, anyways?  Just 301'ing every page on site a to the homepage of site b?

Are the two websites related?  If they are in completely different genres, then it won't do much good in redirecting one entire site over to another.

Well, what are your concerns?

I mean, you're using Wordpress, so the majority of the SEO structure should be taken care of.  What keywords/phrases are you looking to rank for?

And I believe you have misspelled habitat wrong in your logo.  You have 2 b's when there should only be 1

"I don't think Google is sophisticated enough to breakup a string into words without hyphens"

I wonder though... they might very well use the same algo that they use when you misspell something in the search box on google.com

Try typing in two conjoined words and it manages to separate them asking, "Did you mean..."

You brought up an interesting point.

"good mix of link directories and natural links"

Exactly, that's what I was missing in my first reply.

You're still going to need those legitimately earned backlinks to go within your link portfolio.  Just replying on 50,000 directory submissions might get you a burst up front, but that will fade away very, very quickly.

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.

I am yet to find any harm in these (assuming you don't post to ones that carry bad links, ie. outbound links to gambling sites, xxx sites, etc).

If link directories were so bad, how come some of them are as respected by Google as they are (PR7/8/9's).

Just don't go overboard, and don't expect a whole lot from them.  Get your keywords right, and use approx. 10 different keywords/phrases throughout.  Also throw in your brand name as a set of anchor text.

So, let's say you found a package to submit to 1,000 directories.  Chop that into 10 different anchor text's (max, and 10 might be pushing it), so you'll now get approx. 100 links to different pages of your site with different anchor texts.  And don't forget to use your brand name for 100 of those.

Like you said, every time I do research on competitor's backlinks, they always, and I means always, have thousands of links in link directories, and are top 3 in the SERP's.  So I have found it hard to believe that it's a bad practice, even though every SEO guru on the planet will try and tell you otherwise.