Hey Arnaud

I think is is definitely worth testing for UX and CRO purposes, and I don't think you'll do your pages "harm", from an SEO POV.

If the overlays appear onclick when in the category, and the rest of the category page is readable and crawlabe, it shouldn't cause any problems.

What's great is that you've already considered how you could rank those individual products themselves by giving them their own URL. Those might struggle a bit though if the URLs are not linked to directly from within the product category silo, or elsewhere on the site.

However, I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing. Unless you have a specific product type that sells very well and has significant search volume itself, I'd wager that most of your inbound organic traffic would best be served by the category pages anyway (IE, if searching for blue widgets, the category shows all the widgets you have, not just one type). That itself is more likely to match the user intent of those people entering your sites.

I would just ensure that you nail the tech and onsite aspects of those category pages - and the rest should be fine.

Hi Mark

It certainly can make a difference, for some of the reasons that you've alluded to.  If we break hosting's influence on ranking down to its 3 core factors, we have:

1. Security
2. Location (which ties into:)
3. Speed

Security is pretty basic - the more at risk your site is to being hacked, the bigger the risk of that hack happening and a drop in rankings occurring (which can then be very hard to regain).  If you're managing the server yourself, make sure you take all of the necessary steps.  If you're using managed solutions, vet the provider as much as possible.

Location - this is a two-fold factor.  There is some correlation (albeit it is not a big one) that if you had two equal websites, one in the UK and one in the US, and you're trying to rank in Google UK, the site hosted in the UK might rank a bit better.  It's not huge, but worth keeping in mind.  What is more of a factor in server location is the actual location of the server itself and where your typical users (or target users) are based in the world.  The closer your users are to your server's datacentre, the faster the server response is likely to be.  Faster websites are happy websites.  That leads us to the main point on:

Speed.  As a (very general) rule, the more allocated RAM and bandwidth, plus the greater server's processing capabilties, the faster it is likely to be.  Typically, this means that dedicated servers (where it's you and only you taking 100% of the server's resources) will perform better than a dedicated VPS (100% of the resource, just less resource), shared VPS, or shared hosting.  The bigger your site becomes and the bigger bandwidth footprint it creates, as it were, the more you'll need a server that can handle that. **There is a good correlation between site speed and organic rankings. **If the server is slowing you down, it could be holding you down as well.

But servers are just the start - there are a number of server and site configurations that can have a big impact on site speed - stuff like a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Gzip compression, image size.  Swing over to GTMetrix and add in a URL and you'll get a speed analysis, plus tips on how you can improve your speed score and overall site speed.

Hope this helps.

To lift a quote from Keri Morgret in this thread from a few years ago:

"It refers to the part of the IP address that's different. The same class C address means something has the same third octect in the address. In the following, the first three IPs are in the same class C, and the fourth address is not.

192.168.1.1
192.168.1.2
192.168.1.3
192.168.100.4

...it's a hint to Google that the sites are all related to each other and on the same server, and that the links may not be very natural since there is the good possibility that the same person set them up."

Hi Peter

Both are viable options.

I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

Here is her international SEO checklist

Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

John makes some good points.

It's worth communicating those risks to your client and make them fully aware of what such activity could end up doing to your site.

Now, occasionally, you might get a client who is happy to run the risk - they're happy to try and test and live with the consequences.  While I would usually steer them to try other avenues first, it could be that they're looking to run a test with a disposable domain.  So something like a link broker could come into play.

But then why would you want to use a link broker?  If they're publicly selling links left right and centre, how good are the links going to be? What controls do you have in place? What other sites are on there? What if the broker takes the money and runs?

So in that case, you not only have the penalty looming large over the website, but also the fact that you could literally be throwing money away.

Sometimes trying new tactics can be rewarding - but link brokers? Cons always outweigh the pros, in my opinion.

I disagree with the post above.

The most important thing for your title tag is to make it compelling enough to click.  It's your biggest shop window - you need to use the space.  A "Keyword - Keyword | Brand" isn't going to do that.

You will, of course, want to include your primary keyword in there, but you tell me which of these you'd prefer to click:

"Blue Widgets - Red Widgets | The Widgets Co"

"Cheap Blue Widgets - Free USA Shipping! | The Widgets Co"

Try and get your key selling points in the title tag as often as your keywords.  Give the user a reason to click.

In addition, title tags are truncated/shortened based on character width, not the number characters.  Dr Pete at Moz put together a great preview tool that you can check your title tags in to make sure they won't be shortened.

Hope this helps.

I would set up a new profile for your Philippines pages in Google Webmaster Tools.

Whether you're on a country sub-domain and sub-directory structure (ph.example.com or example.com/ph/) won't matter - you can set up a new profile in WMT.  Go to WMT and add a new site, then enter the URL for the Philippines part of your site.

Once this is done, you can then instruct Google that those pages in your subdomain/directory are targeting Filipinos.  From the International Targeting section, choose the Country tab - then Check the Geographic target checkbox and choose your country target.

Hope this helps.

Alick

It wouldn't surprise me if Google already discounts the major coupon sites in their algorithm for this very reason.  It doesn't want to reward link building like this (if some were inclined to do it this way), while equally it wouldn't want to penalise legitimate sites that use them.

I think you'd be fine.

Hi Astrid

I've made the assumption here that the site you are talking about is the one in your Moz Profile, where you're a business owner.  I won't post it here just in case, and please correct me if I'm wrong.

I've been looking at the backlinks that have been built to that site and I'm sorry to say that it is not good news.  The links they have been building are pretty awful.  They all seem to be autoblog spam on websites with hundreds of outbound links per page, linking to all different kinds of sites, with no contextual relevance to your business at all.

I'm not surprised that what they've been doing so far hasn't been working because, frankly, what they've done is crap.

I'd look to terminate your service with them ASAP and move on.

Hi there

The DA and link equity will need to be there.  In fact, the TLD (.org, .com. net etc) has no impact whatsoever.

Yes, it may 'appear' to look more 'natural/authorative' if you had 100 links from .org websites as opposed to, say, .info websites - but I'm as certain as I could possibly be (without looking at it myself) that Google's algorithm doesn't look at a website's TLD when deciding it's authority and strength.  Nor would Moz's metrics.

The website needs to have many more quality factors for it to be considered worthwhile, such as links, social metrics, high quality content, user engagement, age and more.

Hope this helps.

To lift a quote from Keri Morgret in this thread from a few years ago:

"It refers to the part of the IP address that's different. The same class C address means something has the same third octect in the address. In the following, the first three IPs are in the same class C, and the fourth address is not.

192.168.1.1
192.168.1.2
192.168.1.3
192.168.100.4

...it's a hint to Google that the sites are all related to each other and on the same server, and that the links may not be very natural since there is the good possibility that the same person set them up."

Hey

Could be web crawlers and othet bots.  You can jump in and take a look for yourself:

In GA, click on the Audience Tab, then Technology, then Network.

This will then list all of the ISPs that have visited your site.  I'm pretty confident that you will find the culprit in there.

Now, if you're thinking - this is skewing my reporting, I don't want it in there - you can block that referrer in your GA report.  Here's how you do it:

First - always make sure you keep an unfiltered version, just in case something goes wrong.

In your filtered view, go to the Admin Tab, select the view you want to edit, and then click on filters.

Click "add a new filter", then add a new filter like this:

http://i.imgur.com/6WBhyJA.jpg

Here, I am blocking Google's crawler. To block any other, all you'd need to do is to take the service provider name that you find in the technology -> network report and add it into that filter field (the brackets and ^ icon make it an exact match filter).  You can verify the filter before you apply it, and from therein that ISP will be removed from your report.  It won't retrospectively apply the filter, however.

Hope this helps.

Tom

I disagree with the post above.

The most important thing for your title tag is to make it compelling enough to click.  It's your biggest shop window - you need to use the space.  A "Keyword - Keyword | Brand" isn't going to do that.

You will, of course, want to include your primary keyword in there, but you tell me which of these you'd prefer to click:

"Blue Widgets - Red Widgets | The Widgets Co"

"Cheap Blue Widgets - Free USA Shipping! | The Widgets Co"

Try and get your key selling points in the title tag as often as your keywords.  Give the user a reason to click.

In addition, title tags are truncated/shortened based on character width, not the number characters.  Dr Pete at Moz put together a great preview tool that you can check your title tags in to make sure they won't be shortened.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Umbraco is a solid CMS and a good choice.  It may not be as user-friendly out of the box as something like Wordpress, but it's certainly capable of being very SEO friendly.  No CMS has one SEO 'advantage' over the other, Umbraco is as customisable as Wordpress and Joomla, for example.  The problem would be how the CMS creates content for your site.

The one thing I would always consider is: if you're planning on using category/tag pages etc. for your blog content, make sure those pages are noindexed.  You don't want Google to flag the pages as duplicate content.

Take a good look at how Umbraco generates pages, folders and categories - right down the architecture of your site for all URLs.  Make sure none of those URLs could be seen as duplicate content.  If they do, follow this guide to help remove the problem.

Here are some other useful links to get you going:

Our.Umbraco Forum - http://our.umbraco.org/forum

Umbraco Wiki - http://our.umbraco.org/wiki

Umbraco Projects - http://our.umbraco.org/projects

Umbraco.TV - http://umbraco.tv

Nibble.be - http://www.nibble.be

And here are some useful Umbraco plugins:

Google Analytics for Umbraco

301 URL Tracker

WWW Forcer

Cogworks CogPageReview

Broken Link Checker

Robots.txt Editor

AutoTag

Canonical Meta Link Package

Google Sitemap for Umbraco

Auto Link

Presuming they have html tags enabled, as well as <a>tags, this should work:</a>

<a></a>

<a></a>YourWordsHere

To make the link appear in a new window, add target="_blank">

Just a quick bit of advice, I'd seriously only recommending blog commenting when you're adding value to the blog and the discussion, and never for pure backlink purposes.  However, relevant blog commenting can be a great traffic and conversion tool.

There's a couple of reasons why people might want to do this (and why I do with all my websites)

First of all, the page/site might be scraped and replicated by a bot, particularly if it's an authority domain.  Having your canonicals in place to begin with will help reduce the chance of your content being seen as duplicate, should a bot scrape your site.

Another reason would be if a website might generate any additional versions of the page through queries, eg www.domain.com/page.php?query2 - Having a self referring canonical will also tell Google that you want to rank the URL without any other queries, which can help prevent any of those queries appearing in the Google index and/or SERPs.

Reciprocal links get a pretty bad rap, for pretty solid reasons.  Link exchanges with masses of sites, whatever the relevance, does look pretty unnatural and may flag up as a link network. We definitely don't want that.

However, if done sparingly and kept to really relevant and related sites, then it's a nice traffic sharer, link builder and authority builder.  SEOMoz and Distilled pretty much have reciprocal links on the go, but that's because they're highly related and offer great content and work for one another.  In turn, as a user you may be more inclined to visit either one from the other's website, while the endorsement can serve as an authority check.

I'm quite a fan of legitimate testimonials where link reciprocation occurs. That can look natural and, again, is a nice trust builder.  I'd never go too crazy with reciprocal links and I'd only ever keep it to websites who are related to, have preferably worked or collaborated with you on a project and that you, yourself, would be proud to endorse professionally.

Follow that, and I think some reciprocal links can be OK. But there's no doubt that the tactic has been abused by some. Don't give Google any reason to think you've fallen into that bracket.

Hi there

Assuming that the affiliate URL points to the same page (http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar), so there is only one page that exists, then adding a rel=canonical tag should fix this problem.

On the http://www.ourdomain.com/racecarpage, add this code to the tag:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar" />

This will tell Google that any other versions of this page should not exist and that the http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar page is the original that should be ranked.  It is considered a strong signal (not a rule) by Google, but I've very rarely seen it not work.

Now, if the affiliate URL actually goes to a duplicate version of the page (so there are 2 pages), I would simply add some meta data to tell Google not to index the page.  You can do that with this in your page's code:

Hope this helps to answer your question.

Hi Gina

You're pretty much spot on in your answer.  It's more syndicated content rather than duplicate if its put across multiple domains - but syndicated content would be heavily devalued by Google as well (to the point that it would pass little to no value on the additional sites it appears - which I believe is the Google argument behind press release services like PRWeb etc.)

But you're secondary point is more poignant with me, as it is more of a courtesy to your blogger connections not to replicate the content across other domains.  Similarly, you're missing out on the chance of writing specifically for that audience, which would increase the engagement and through traffic to your site as a result.  You should definitely take advantage of that.

A slight deviation is that I'll include a short snippet of the post when sharing it on social media. It's nice to give a quick flavour and an eye catching quote to use when sharing and I'm sure the webmaster would appreciate both the social signal and potential increase in traffic.

In summary, I wouldn't go so far as to say you could be outright penalised for doing this (although definitely wouldn't rule it out), but I would say that your syndicated content will have little to no SEO value, while it potentially irk your blogging connections.

Hope this helps!

I'm a fan of http://www.seo-browser.com/ - use their simple search and it's totally free.