Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi everyone,

I run a travel-related website and work with various affiliate partners. We have thousands of pages of well-written and helpful content, and many of these pages link off to one of our affiliates for booking purposes.

Years ago I followed the prevailing wisdom and cloaked those links (bouncing them into a folder that was blocked in the robots.txt file, then redirecting them off to the affiliate). Basically, doing as Yoast has written: https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/

However, that seems kind of spammy and manipulative these days. Doesn't Google talk about not trying to manipulate links and redirect users? Could I just "nofollow" these links instead and drop the whole redirect charade? Could cloaking actually work against you?

Thoughts? Thanks.

Hi all,

I run a travel site that specializes in hotel bookings. We're working with a third-party advertiser to launch a pop-under unit when someone searches for hotels on our site. (This unit is of the "also try your search on these competing sites" variety.)

I'm worried, however, that this might affect our SEO, especially in light of this on their site: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721313?hl=en

Would Google even see these pop-unders? (Are pop-unders treated the same as pop-overs?) And, if so, would G see them as unwanted and treat them as a nuisance? Could it lead to negative SEO consequences?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

Tom

Hi all,

I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this:

1. Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we...

2. Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to...

3. third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL.

My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right?

The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3)

Thanks for any insights on this!

Tom

Thanks for the great answer, Ray. We have been adding a note at the bottom of the post that it's been updated. I think we'll take your advice and give it a bigger call out at the top.

Hi everyone,

We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today?

If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site.

Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,

Tom

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for your answer. Perhaps I haven't been very clear -- we don't have 1,000 links on one page. We have 1,000 pages, each with a photo gallery that has about 50 or so photos. Each of these galleries uses "href" in the code to pull up the next image. However, Moz is counting each of these images as a link, and telling me that I should cut back on the number of links on that page. (Counting these "links" in the image gallery, most of these pages have about 100-150 links on them.)

My question is whether or not those images really are diluting page rank that is being passed on to other important pages on the site, and if we should switch our photo gallery widget to something that doesn't use "href" to show each individual image.

Many thanks.

Hi everyone,

On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it.

In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages.

I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue.

Is it worth the bother? Thanks.

Thanks for your answer, Tom. (great name!)

Will do.

Hi all,

We're trying to get our canonical situation straightened out. We have a section of our site with 100 product pages in it (in our case a city with hotels that we've reviewed), and we have a single page where we list them all out--an "all products" page called "all.html."

However, because we have 100 and that's a lot for a user to see at once, we plan to first show only 50 on "all.html." When the user scrolls down to the bottom, we use AJAX to place another 50 on the page (these come from another page called "more.html" and are placed onto "all.html"). So, as you scroll down from the front end, you see "all.html" with 100 listings.

We have other listings pages that are sorted and filtered subsets of this list with little or no unique content. Thus, we want to place a canonical on those pages.

Question: Should the canonical point to "all.html"? Would spiders get confused, because they see that all.html is only half the listings? Is it dangerous to dynamically place content on a page that's used as a canonical? Is this a non-issue?

Thanks,

Tom

Thanks, Ruth. I think I'll do this -- double check to make sure authorship is correct (which is, quite frankly, not easy to do!) and just take it easy on the links I put back to my site in any upcoming HuffPo columns.

I appreciate the helpful feedback!

Hi all,

I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this:

1. Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we...

2. Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to...

3. third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL.

My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right?

The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3)

Thanks for any insights on this!

Tom

Thanks for sharing your experience with this. So you didn't submit any reconsideration requests. I'll just sit tight for a few more weeks and hope for the best!