I think there's potential for rich snippets to help drive click throughs and perhaps make the user more likely to convert for these products.

If your site is a credit card comparison site, it may be worth linking the review with a rel=author tag of the person who added commentary and analysis, as well as giving the user the key details, such as rates, benefits etc.  I'm reminded of Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert (moneysavingexpert.com) - I can imagine a credit card comparison and review from him being linked via rel=author to make his face appear in the SERPs.  That would be an appropriate use that would drive click throughs - while also giving the link a bit of authority and gravitas, as Martin Lewis is respected in his field here in the UK.

If you have individual product pages for each credit card, containing rates and an analysis, you could implement the star-rating rich snippet. Look at this Google search and scroll to the Aviva result to see what I mean.

Those are a couple of ways I can see rich snippets being used. So long as they don't appear to be 'forced' or manipulative, I'd say use as many as you can, as they can dramatically increase click through rates. Hope this helps.

Hi Iain

If you have at least one core keyword you can translate easily (let's use tennis for this example, which is "tenis" in Spanish), then Ubersuggest might be of use to you.

Popping in "tenis" in ubersuggest and setting it search Google.es will give some keyword suggestions.  The best thing about ubersuggest is that these are the keywords that other people are actually searching for - they're real user queries.

With this, you can see what people are searching for when typing in "tenis" as part of their query - it lists the results alphabetically and numerically.

Hope this helps, would also like to hear of other ways from other people.

Short answer is definitely yes.

If you want to pass on the link equity/juice/strength, you'll want to implement a 301 redirect ASAP.

However, some studies have shown that over time a 302 may pass equity.  So it's not a completely lost cause, but we're looking at months (possibly years) for that to pass with a 302, so where you can just use a 301.

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

I'll start with question 2 first as it's a bit easier to answer.  Robots.txt blocks the crawling of a page, but not necessarily indexing.  Of course, if the page cannot be crawled it will be deindexed eventually anyway, but if you're getting that description for one of your URLs, Google has not been able to access it and will stop trying to.  So that is usually enough, although if you want to remove it as well, you can by all means.

For question 1 - GWT is a bit awkward in the sense that it treats http and https versions of your site as different webmaster properties.  Furthermore, if you want to remove a URL on your site, it will always prefix it with the http/https version of your site, no matter how you enter it.

If you added another WMT property that was https://www.yourdomain.com - you would be able to manage that domain as well and thus you would be able to remove any URLs under that prefix.

Incidentally, if you want to block all HTTPS pages from being accessed, you can do that with a special instruction in your htaccess file and robots txt.  You can instruct the Googlebot and other bots to read a specific robots.txt file if they visit an HTTPS URL.  To do that, you would first add this to your htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} ^on$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/robots.txt$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /robots_ssl.txt [L]

This command basically says "if the URL has https, read the robots_ssl.txt file".  You then upload a file called robots_ssl.txt to your root domain.  In the txt file you just add:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

So now, if a bot reaches an https URL, it has to read the robots_ssl.txt file and upon reading that, they are denied access.  That would prevent all of your https URLs from being indexed.

That might be useful to you, but if you go ahead and use it please take care to backup all your files in case anything goes wrong - your htaccess file is very important!

Hi Ethan

In theory - yes it could.  We know that Google looks at a domain's Class-C IP level (at least - now that Google is a registrar it may extend to the full IP) when judging its quality.  If a site is in a "bad neighbourhood" - ie sitting on an IP range with a number of 'spam' sites - then theoretically it could be affected, as a kind of guilty by association.

However, in reality I have some doubts as to whether this would happen.  The fact is that the vast majority of the web uses shared hosting (particularly sme's) and so good sites are invariably always going to be mixed in with 'bad' sites.  And what's stopping me from deliberately making a bad site on your IP in order to 'poison it'?  I'm no way near that evil, but someone might be.

What I'm getting at here is that it seems extremely unlikely that there is a manageable way to differentiate these sites efficiently - which leads me to believe that having your spam site on the same IP as some 'good' sites _shouldn't _make a difference.

What you can do to reduce this risk even further would be to make sure the 'spam' site doesn't link to any properties of yours that you want to protect, to nofollow those links if feasible (not sure what CMS you're using but WordPress has a few plugins that would do this on bulk) and, if it isn't required, noindexing the site would pretty much get rid of all risk completely.

Hope this helps!

Hey there

I've seen this before and in almost all cases the rankings were returned to their previous state, give or take maybe 1 or 2 places (which would be normal SERP flux).

Unfortunately, I've found that this can often take weeks and there's no real sure-fire way of getting Google to update it quicker.  Theoretically, to speed things up you want to get the crawler revisiting the URLs more and more often.  Fresh backlinks would do this, but obviously you can't game that sort of thing for web spam reasons.  You could also try pinging devices, such as GooglePing, but I'm not convinced by their effectiveness.

The most frequently crawled domain on the web is Twitter.  If you could legitimately get your key URLs tweeted, either by yourselves or others, this may encourage the Google crawler to revisit the URLs, and consequently reindex them.  There won't be any harm SEO wise in sending tweets with your URLs, it's a quick and free method and so may be worth giving it a shot.

Hope this helps you - I've often found you can't control these things but hopefully some of these theories might work.  In the long-run, however, the rankings will return and so for normal SEO purposes, create content and links as per usual.

Hey there!

There's no benefit or negative effect of this either way - so there's really nothing to worry about here.

Furthermore, if you type in http://www.consumerbase.com/ you get redirected to the .html version and it's the same for internal pages.  This means you've not got any problems with duplicate URLs or content.

In short, everything is in order and from an SEO point of view there's no reason to make the change - all is well!  The only reason why you may want to make the change is from a user experience point of view - but I don't think visitors to your site will be concerned with .html extensions at all.

Hope this helps to put your mind at rest!