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Hey there

Presume you're using WordPress here. From my past experience - no, that won't have a long-term detrimental effect on your site's ability to rank, once the site goes live.

If you're concerned, however, you could install a "construction" or "coming soon" page, which will allow the site to index, but prevent other URLs from being found/crawled (so long as you don't submit a sitemap until you're ready).

Seedprod's free plugin is highly recommended, and I've used it before to good effect: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/coming-soon/

Hope this helps.

This may have something to do with Google's recent change to show results as country-specific by default, rather than whichever TLD you use (.co.uk, .de, .fr etc).

This is causing a few rank checkers to throw off a few wild results. I've seen all the major ones be affected by this.

If you can't recreate the results and traffic is normal, don't worry too much, as the software people will be making fixes soon.

FYI - if you want to get round Google's change and still get specific results from a specific country, you can add:

&gl=us
&gl=uk
&gl=fr etc.

To the end of your query string. Replace the country code with whichever you need.

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.

I'd go ahead and 301 redirect those websites and pages.

With a 301 redirect you will also pass on any link equity the infringing websites once had, which in turn may help your organic ranking performance.

However, in order for that to happen, you need to ensure that you redirect the individual pages on those websites to the most relevant/equivalent versions on your own. Otherwise, you may see those 301 redirects treated as soft 404 errors.

Hope this helps.

Possibly. Internal links and their anchor text can certainly give Google a priority on what the page is about, and which preferred landing page you want to rank.

However, there can be more to it as well. How much does the sub-page 'talk' about the keyword? What is its content like? Do you have any canonical issues? How about the homepage, how much content is on there about the keyword.

You could be cannibalising efforts by having a number of pages all talking about the same thing. Content is quite often just as 'confusing' to Google as the internal links.

Hi there

In your dashboard, click "Add Widget".  In this case, I think selecting a "table" widget would be best.

For the dimension, search for the "page" dimension.  There's lots in there, but you just want to select "page" by itself in this case.  For the two metrics, you can add "pageviews" and another one - maybe "avg time on page" or "% of new sessions".  Whatever you think is most useful.

The most important step is setting up the filter.  Click "add a filter" and then select "only show".  In this case, you will want to only show "page" containing "/Sofas/", "/Beds/" etc. (minus the quotations of course).

You'll end up with something like this: http://i.imgur.com/0bPFfwL.png

Give the widget a title for reference, such as "Most popular Sofa Pages" and then click save.

You should end up with a report like: http://i.imgur.com/dFUHl0z.png

To rinse and repeat, all you need to do is go to the widget, click the edit icon, and then at the bottom of the popup will be a "clone widget" option.  Do that, adjust the filter for each category you have, and you're done!

Hope this helps.

0bPFfwL.png dFUHl0z.png

Hi there

Looks like when you've been adding the code, you've pasted in special characters or something like that.  This is why you're getting the “en-sg" error.

If you look at the source code in Chrome, you can see the code is italicised:

http://i.imgur.com/IfTwvpj.png

What I'd do is retype the code manually, or remove any special formatting from the text before adding it into your HTML.  You want to just get the raw quotation mark in there ("), rather than the special character.

Hope that makes sense

Regarding Q1) I'm just wondering - did you run these ads on both desktop and mobile?  And if so, can you see any correlation between the lm.facebook.com referral and the 'proper social traffic' and the device that they came from?

I think Matt's point was that he'd prefer to let Google generate meta descriptions - in the hope they'd be unique - rather than using the same one repeatedly.

My view? You should be writing unique meta descriptions for all of your key landing and sales pages.

Not for SEO - far from it.  But because it's the shop window that people will see before they reach your site via organic search.  You have a great opportunity to make it compelling, to attract the click away from others around (or above you) and to get your unique selling points across.

Google can never do a better job at that than you.

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.

Speaking from both a producer and a recipient of these reports:

The most important things for me are:

1. Revenue
2. Conversions
3. Traffic

In that order.

For any SEO report, I would be expecting to see, above all else, how much organic visitors (or people who have visited from organic search in some part of their user journey) have generated in terms of revenue.  Some companies model this entirely within Google Analytics, others may have a CRM that stores the customer financial data that you'll need to sync up with analytics.  But basically, show them **how much money **organic search has made them last month.

After that, I'd want to see how many organic search visitors converted on the site (bought something, signed up etc).  It's worth reporting this separately from revenue, as you can get an idea of which conversions are more "valuable" to you.  Show them how many conversions organic search has given them.

Next, look at traffic.  This is important to report as you need to show them how much organic search is contributing to their overall traffic, and hopefully show them it is increasing.  It can also help you identify other issues - for example, if traffic increases but revenue or conversions do not, is there a problem with the quality of the traffic or, more likely, a problem with the website's user journey or design?  Remember, organic search is inbound marketing, and so searchers are actively looking for the thing that drives them to your web page.  If you can get organic traffic but can't get it to convert, it is usually a problem with your website's design or UX.  Show them how many visitors organic search has given them.

Anything else, to a company receiving an update on how SEO is progressing, is just fluff.  My clients don't need to see things like error rate, crawl indexing, canonical reporting - even rankings (a sub-KPI of traffic, but ultimately not what the client is interested in).  For a top level report - something that says what has our money got us - I stick with these three principles.  If I'm producing a technical audit on the website, then of course you want to give more detail, but for a general monthly report it's overkill.

There are caveats to all of this (such as breaking down branded vs non-branded organic traffic), but this should be the starting point.

Hope this helps.

Yep, that makes sense.

In that case I would create a dashboard to show a report of goal completion by source for all of the goals the site has.

Go to dashboards > new dashboard - and then add a new widget.

Select the table option. For your "Display the following columns:" select:

Source/Medium for the dimension

For the first metric, type in "goal" in the search bar, it will then list all of the GA goals in the account and the different options you can show.  For the first metric column I like to use "Goal X Completions".  And for the second column I like to use "Goal X Conversion Rate"

Save the widget and you should now see each goals conversions and conversion rate by source/medium (you can change that to just source or medium if you prefer).

Duplicate the widget and change the goal metrics to each goal that you'd like to track.

At the end you should have a dashboard that shows you all of the goals by channel in one view and click.  A bit of work to set up, but definitely the quickest way to check back in later.

Hope that helps.

Hi Dmitrii

Would the standard Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels report in GA be able to satisfy your request?

If you go to that view, the last three columns look at goal completions:

http://i.imgur.com/a24wCyM.png

You can filter this column by all goals or individual goals.

That way you can compare goal conversions by channel quite quickly, but also if you click into the channel itself, you can select the goal in that drop-down menu to get the number of conversions.

You'd also be able to set this up in a dashboard.

Would that do the trick?

First thing's first:

Is the current city page getting any traffic?

If yes - don't change a winning formula.

If not - let's weigh up the options.

By going with a separate domain, you're making the assumption that you'll be able to target the site specifically for the region + product/service and that users might be more likely to convert on a domain that contains the city (which may or may not be true).

By adding to the existing site, you're helping to reinforce the site's brand and you're collecting link equity in one place.  If you have a solid on-site SEO structure, that link equity can be efficiently passed around to rank other pages on your site.  Potentially, you'll get a stronger link equity with this method than you would with a dedicated city site, as you have several cities and products all with the potential to win links.

The citynamehomesforsale.com (unless it has historical links) is unlikely to have any SEO equity itself, meaning you'll be starting from scratch?  Is that really worthwhile, or would you be better off building up your existing web property and brand, utilising the strength it may already have, and attempt to rank your city keywords that way?

I'd be more inclined to look at that method, unless the site is under a form of algorithmic penalty.

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 Milan

I can't speak for Moz - but I would imagine that because those links have only just been discovered prior to the update, they weren't actually incorporated in the update itself. The index may have updated on the 15th, but the cut off point for URL entries may have been a few days before, possibly before it had discovered your links.

I'd be pretty confident that now Mozscape has seen your new links they'll be fully incorporated in the next update.

Hope this helps.

Hi Luke

As you have correctly assumed, that particular robots command would be pointless.

The Googlebot does follow allow commands (while other ones do not), but it should only be used if it is an exception to a disallow rule.

So, for example, if you had a rule that blocked pages within a sub-directory, with:

Disallow: /example/*

You could create an allow rule that indexes a specific page within that directory to be indexed, like:

Allow: /example/page.html

Couple of things to point out here.  "At a group-member level, in particular for allow and disallow directives, the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule." (Google Source).  In this example, because the more specific rule is the allow rule, that will prevail.  It is also best practice to put your "allow" rules at the top of the robots.txt file.

But in your example, if they have allow rules for JS and CSS files without having disavow rules for those directories/paths etc - it's a waste of space.  Google will attempt to crawl anything it can by default - unless you disavow access.

TL;DR - You don't need to proactively tell Google to crawl CSS and JS - it will by default.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

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!

Hey

At the very least, if you're removing links to try and revoke a manual penalty, showing evidence that you have directly contacted webmasters and had some links manually removed is essential.

Google wants to see you repent attempt to take action against your action.  I have not seen one manual penalty removed just by disavowing links straight away.  They want to see a documentation of your work, which includes manual outreach.

There is also the possible argument that physically removing a link will be 'quicker' at getting the link out of your backlink profile, with it being reported that a disavow file can take between 3-9 months to be processed.  Wouldn't surprise me if Google are trying to speed this up dramatically - but we know that Google crawls, caches and indexes links relatively quickly - and by that same notion it would also process removed/broken links quickly as well.  So there could be an advantage there too.

Hope this helps.

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!

Hi Sarmad

On the whole, the health niche is very competitive.  You may have found a nice little pocket to target, but the likelihood is that you'll be going up against some big brands and operations, so whoever you choose to work with should be obliged to give you an frank estimation - which may involve a budget bigger than expected.

Be wary of those PMing you promising the world at a low cost.  If it sounds too good to be true - it probably is.

"Ideally, we wouldn't want to exclude these pages from being indexed because they could have some long-tail search value.  But, obviously, we don't want to hurt the overall SEO of the site."

You say that, but I'm not entirely sure it's true.

I understand the theory - if you have 20 Citroen C1s listed on the site, you could potentially have 20 pages of yours ranking for relevant terms, right?

Well, unique content on those pages or not, I think it would be extremely unlikely that Google would want to present all of those results to the user.  Furthermore, if the pages expire or go "out of stock", as it were, when purchased, would Google want to rank it?

So I'm not convinced having all those pages indexed and treated as unique (whether they are or not) would result in traffic (please prove me wrong though - if you have lots of entrances to the site via organic search to those pages it'll show what I know!).

My preference, regardless of the above, would be to have a main page for your Citroen C1 products - a hub page - that then links to all the different products you have as and when they're available.

This has many advantages - you just need to focus on ranking one page in the category instead of several, you can collect all the link equity you earn to one page, you can ensure the page is well optimised for search engines and users, and the page will be evergreen - meaning your links would be too.

The short version:

Homepage > Hub Page > Product variant 1, variant 2 etc

Rank the homepage and the hub page.

Hope this helps.

Picking up on Dirk saying:

I prefer to know if people scroll to the end of the page (so I assume they have read the article) rather than just put an arbitrary time to fire an event.

This was shared the other day - it's a way of pulling in scroll-depth data into your Google Analytics reports.  Incredibly useful:

http://scrolldepth.parsnip.io/

Hi Adam

First of all - very sorry to see this.  Hope you can get them back on their feet.

For something so dramatic, for me it's only ever one of three things:

1. A manual penalty (as notified in GWT)

2. Website has been hacked

3. A penguin penalty

I think with points 1 and 2, you might have already ruled this out, but be absolutely sure. Run every check under the sun to see whether the site was compromised, look for odd URLs that have been created, check Joomla/WP updates (and plugin updates to make sure they're not injecting malicious code) - just anything.

So that leaves us with point 3 - and I know you've mentioned you've looked at the backlinks already, and apologies in advance if this advice is like teaching you to suck eggs.  Have you tried every backlink source, not just Moz, but WMT, Majestic and Ahrefs?  Have you used tools like Kerboo and URLProfiler for quick classification of the sites?  Have you checked the anchor text distribution?

The big calling card for me is the brand name drop - and that the majority of the time relates to a link/spam penalty.  If you want, you can PM me the URL and I'll quickly pop it into Majestic and Ahrefs for a bit of further analysis - if anything just for a bit of sense checking.

I love URLProfiler for this - here's a blog post and video on how you can use the tool.

As they say, nothing is a substitute for manually reviewing the links, but if you want some quick classification and identify those links that have toxic 'signals', this is the tool for you.

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.

Very much of the same opinion.

It's one of those 1 percenters. Won't have a big impact, but accumulatively with other things, it's a good idea.

If you can control that element of your SEO, no reason not to do it.

But if you're working on a CMS/Ecommerce system that maybe interferes with this and generates its own title names out-of-the-box, I wouldn't spend too many hours trying to fix it.  Your time is probably better off elsewhere.

Hi there

Just to make sure I understand you correctly:

• You have a yellow pages style of website
• You'd like to rank each category/keyword page when someone searches for that category in Google
• Currently you list the companies in that category on the page - but the rest of the page doesn't have text (or 'rankable content')
• You're thinking of ways to add more content to the page to help it rank better

Would you be able to add a bit more information about each keyword/category?  Maybe information about what those companies do, how they could help someone, what they typically charge etc?  That would allow you to add a bit more content to each of these pages.

I would say, however, that the style of website you're trying to rank might be seen as a doorway site or a directory site, which Google isn't too keen on rewarding when it comes to search.  To combat this, I would look to add additional content ideas to the website in the form of a blog or other information.  Maybe you could interview a business each week as a featured company?  Perhaps you could write articles for small business guides on issues like finance, marketing, tax etc.  Or maybe even do research and whitepapers for the state of certain industries in local areas - if they're booming or in a crisis.

The idea is that you'd be adding additional value to your website for the user - which would not only increase the perceived 'quality' of the website in Google's eyes, but could also help you rank for some long-tail content as well.

Hope this helps.

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.

Has your website ever been hacked?

That looks like the kind of thing where someone has compromised your site, built a new page and then redirected users.

If you go to your htaccess file, do you see any rules in place for that redirect?

If you take the URL and put it into OpenSiteExplorer or Majestic, do you see any spammy backlinks going to just that URL?

If the answer is yes to either - it would suggest your site has been compromised.  Remove the redirect/disavow the links and do a clean sweep of your website to make sure it's all OK.

If none of the above is true, it might just be an error on Google's side.  As this post suggests, Google's site: command isn't entirely reliable.

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.

Hi Joshua

From personal experience (won't cite external sources here) working with a number of sites:

The mobile friendly update - I've definitely seen an impact in mobile search.  I think there's quite a clear handicap in mobile search if the webpage you're trying to rank for isn't mobile friendly (while desktop search looks to be unaffected).

Regarding SSL - I'm yet to be convinced.  I've yet to see a strong correlation - or any correlation for that matter - between websites switching to HTTPS and seeing their rankings improved.  I've followed my own sites, competitor sites, and industry trackers like SerpWoo on this and I don't think the impact is quite there (yet).  In fact, I've seen more cases of companies migrating to SSL seeing rankings drop than improve, because of the problems they have faced in the migration.

In short:

Mobile Friendly - I do see this as a must for SEO.

SSL - treat it as a business decision, not an SEO one.  If you're looking to integrate an onsite payment solution, for example, it makes sense for the site to be SSL.

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.

If you do this - do it for the reader, not Google.

If the article has been refreshed with some great value and you think your audience would benefit from seeing it again, then I would update the date.  However, if you're trying to game Google by making out that the content/URL is new and fresh (by trying to take advantage of its freshness algorithm), not only would that be frowned upon, but I think I'm right in saying Google has clamped down on that effectiveness quite a lot since 2013.

Hi Hitesh

Just to double check - did the Coffee page use to be a separate URL that is now redirecting the homepage?

If so, you could demote the old coffee page URL using the above tool and that should do the trick.  However, if the page has been redirected, the URL should automatically be removed from the Sitelinks eventually, once Google has caught up and processed it fully.

Hi Mike

I'm looking at your link profile now and there are quite a few links in there that could be perceived to be unnatural (what betting site doesn't have these though, right?  Used to work for a big brand in-house myself), however, I'm with you in being concerned about these Russian links and anchors.

It looks like your forum has been getting spammed massively.  I can see russian anchors with anchor text like "useful links" and "useful products" - I can even see some Minecraft anchor text in there.  It almost looks as though someone is using your forum to build forum links to rank their spam site.

Have you had trouble recently with spam hitting your forums?  I worry that some people have been ploughing your forum with spam - and thus your site with spammy links - and it may have had a negative effect.

Hi Nikola

It certainly won't be the case that, if you have a big rankings drop, that might have a ripple effect on other rankings.  There's no way the two will be directly related and Google won't adjust your other rankings because of one falling.

However, the reason behind the ranking drop might well have contributed to other keywords falling, particularly if they are related keywords.  So, if a competitor has had a successful link building campaign and risen above you, you yourself have lost links, made onsite changes etc etc.  Those ranking factors can all increase or decrease your keyword positioning - and if all of your keywords are related and possibly ranking for the same page, that might explain why other keywords have fallen as well.

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 Amelia

Would a subfolder not achieve the job equally as well?  If we take out the SEO perspective (I think any links the forum eventually gets you would have virtually the same benefit in a sub domain or sub folder), let's look at it from a user POV.

As you say, your audience responds very well to forums.  How do you think those users usually find them?  Would they be more likely to type in www.example.com/forum/ or would they type: forum.example.com?  My gut feeling (based on no data) would be the subfolder solution - as it's the same way you might go about finding a contact page or an about us page.

You could attempt to quantify that by doing a google search.  Try this Google search:

inurl:forum "keyword"

Replace keyword with your industry keywords, of course.

Take a look at some of the results that come up and note which ones use a /forum/ structure or a forum.site.com structure.  Both variants have the chance of turning up (like in this search).  That will give you some idea on what the typical structure is.  Now, that doesn't mean you have to be typical!  But it might give a slight correlation between what structure users in your niche might expect.

Ultimately, I don't think it would make a huge amount of difference - so maybe giving the devs an easy ride could be a good shout!

Hi Richard

Honestly, I really don't know.  A lot of me wants to say that: "Surely Google will know this isn't deliberate and manipulative duplicate content".  You could take a couple of those URLs and do a Google search with them.  Do:

site:www.example.com/page?query1
info:www.example.com/page?query1

With the first result, if your URL hasn't been indexed, that's a good thing.  For the second result, if the info search returns the original URL (without the parameters), that's also good, as it means Google will be counting the one with parameters as just a variation and to be ignored.  However, if it's returning the result with the parameters, that would indicate that the web crawler is indexing the version with parameters and treating it as a separate URL - raising the duplicate content risk.  Silly Google!

Regardless of those results, I would look to implement the canonical tag anyway as it takes any guesswork out of the equation.  And ultimately, a lot of this work with Google is guesswork as we can't see the algorithm - although it's an informed guess due to experience etc.

Hi Richard

It is something you should address ASAP.  While I believe that Google is a lot better at recognising 'accidental' duplicate content - IE URLs with URL parameters - and distinguishing it from 'deliberate' duplicate content - just outright stealing someone's work or trying to rank several pages for multiple terms - that is only my assumption.  To be completely sure, let's stop any chance of Google penalising these pages.

I think, in this instance, a rel canonical tag should do the trick.  You can read more on the tag here in Moz's guide. Basically, on the page(s) where you're having this problem add a "self-referring" canonical tag.  For example, if the page was http://www.example.com/blue-widgets/, the tag would be:

Make sure that, when you implement this, the pages that are generated with the URL parameters aren't also creating canonical tags like:

They should all have the original canonical tag.

What this will do is tell Google that "If you see any pages with this tag, we're aware that they might be duplicate, but please only count and index the http://www.example.com/blue-widgets/".  It works just like a 301 redirect in that sense.

I think this would be the simplest solution for you to implement.  If you're having problems, there would be a way of blocking access to pages with certain query/URL parameters by using the robots.txt file, but that could get quite messy.

Hope this helps

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.

Hey Simon

So, the anchor text itself won't be seen as spam, as it's a brand name.  So there won't be any "anchor-text" trigger here.

Having a follow link in an embeddable widget has been identified in the past as an unnatural link scheme by Google.  Of course, that doesn't mean that it doesn't work - in fact it continues to do so for big websites who abuse it on a much bigger scale than just 10 times.

However, that doesn't mean that it would not trigger a penalty for you.  If your question is implying that you are filing a reconsideration request because you currently have a penalty, I am quite confident that Google would want you to remove those widget links (and for you to testify that you have done).  When it comes to reconsideration requests and link audits - if in doubt, take it out.

I feel any frustrations that you may have as it can often seem to be one rule for the big boys and another for everyone else.  But my advice here would be to remove those links, as much as it pains me to say.

Hope this helps.

Tom

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

It certainly can.

The argument here (whether you agree with it or not) is that you would be trying to make the link blend in with the rest of the text.  You are, in essence, blending the link in and concealing the fact that it might be a link.  Google wants all the links to be visible and obvious.

I've had one example where links were deemed to be hidden because the CSS file of the website made the links appear in the same way as the normal text, same colour, decoration etc. I was pretty miffed by it, as it involved CSS changes which I'm never happy about, but it happened.

Hope this helps.

Hi

I'm pretty sure that it cuts out from the 801st onwards from your list - so 1-800 will be processed, the rest will be ommitted.

As you say, uploading a list will get round it.  Alternatively, just bring up the URL in Chrome, duplicate the page 3 or 4 times, insert a line break in your list on line 800, 1600, 2400 etc and just upload the blocks in the different tabs and run.

Hi Gavin

I hope Zoopla is big enough for you!

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml

And here is a downloadable version:

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz - found from within their robots.txt file. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/robots.txt

Hope this helps!

Hi Justin

As the old saying goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

If you're ranking well already, I'd keep things as they are and give yourself a pat on the back!

The TLD itself (.com, .com.au etc) has very little, if any, impact on how your website performs.  Other factors such as the onsite optimisation, link profile, NAP presence and citations etc would all have a greater effect.

Each site migration comes with its element of risk.  My main thought here is that you won't want to jeopardise your rankings unless there is a compelling business reason for wanting to do the migration.

Hi Ben

First of all, that's a good solid approach.  I like SEMRush a lot.

Just to clarify for you - the "competition" metric in the Keyword Planner tool is strictly for paid search competition.  The search volume is for all search volume (searches that resulted in a paid or organic click, or no click at all).

Moz's tool gives you a competition score based on organic competition, so it is a good supplement.

You might also be interested in Term Explorer - as it gives a topline competition based on organic competition and is a bit more indepth.  I'm a big fan of it.

Hope this helps.