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!

Parasite hosting is when someone places a webpage on a domain that is not theirs and intends to rank it organically.

You might want to do this if you want to ensure that anyone searching for your brand, for example, reaches a page that you own or created.  For example, you might want to rank a Yelp page, Facebook page or others to control your brand results.

Conversely, others may want to rank for keyword terms by creating a page on a website with a high authority (let's say domain authority), as the page they create will inherit some of the trust and strength of the root domain.  Some people rank those pages in a white hat way, others may choose to aggressively link to those pages - as they don't have to worry about their own site being penalised for it.  You can see there where it becomes a gray area for SEO.

The most extreme example would be people in very spammy health niches, eg viagra, compromising a site and creating a new page to sell their products or promote their shop for a quick rankings boost.  This is just outright black hat SEO and illegal, as it involves hacking into a site to create a page.

So you can see there are different degrees of parasite hosting, each with different levels of ethics. Hope this helps.

That makes sense, it's good to test first.  From personal experience I can tell you that Crazy Egg was very easy to set up and gave me some great information and insight, so it is possibly worth the fee in the future.

Also, if you're a Moz member you can get Crazy Egg free for 90 days! Have a look on the Moz Perks Page.

Hi there Alex

One premium heatmap plugin, Crazy Egg, has a 30 day free trial.  It comes quite highly recommended.

If you're running Wordpress, there is a free heatmap plugin you could use.

Finally, Clickheat is an open source (and therefore free) software that gives you heatmaps as well.

Hope these help!

While I can't help with the second part of your question just now, I can help with the first.  There have been a couple of studies that have argued that 302 redirects are eventually treated as 301s.  Here is one example.

Hi Amelia

I can't help directly with the Mozbar issue, but I can provide an alternative in the meantime:

http://www.impersonal.me

That site lets you carry out non-personalised, geo-specific searches for your keywords.  There's a UK setting on there by default (plus others).

One of my top tools and has been on my favourites bar for years now.

Hope it helps

Hi Brian

If the domain has expired, it should only be a matter of time before Google recrawls the page/domain and sees that the link is no longer present, therefore discounting the link from your link profile.

You could have a look and see if this has happened by typing into your address bar (if using Chrome) either:

cache:example.com
site:example.com

The first one will check to see if the URL is cached and the second one if it is indexed.  If a cached version of the page no longer exists, the link has almost certainly been discounted, whereas if the domain is no longer indexed it would be safe to assume that the link will be discounted soon by Google as well.

I hope this helps - sorry to hear of your previous agency resorting to such backhanded tactics.

Hi Oscar

I think this could be a very good idea.  Not only does the new URL structure look more SEO friendly for bots and also more friendly for users, creating a category page can be a great way at ranking an ecommerce site.

One of the main problems with an ecommerce site is the requirement for each product page to have its own unique content on it of some substantial length, let's say 200+ words.  If you have hundreds or thousands of products, this quickly becomes a problem.

Conversely, creating a category page that covers your main search terms - eg "sunglasses", "sunglasses for sale"  - can also cover some long-tail keywords as well: "best sunglasses for summer", "sport sunglasses" and so on.

In order to do that you should make your category page as rich as possible - include a healthy amount of content and even things like reviews and videos of some of your top selling products.  Make it informational as well as promoting your shop, so that it could also be seen as an educational resource as well as your shop front.

I think having a static category page over a search result page to promote in organic search is a very good idea. Make sure it is content rich and worthy of ranking and that any necessary redirects are taken care of.

I can't give you any quantifiable data I'm afraid but all I can say is that "they work" from my experience - both for the local map/carousel listing and for the normal vertical search.

One thing that I have seen is that they are more successful when you a) make every citation exactly the same (address, number etc) and b) when you include those details on your website, preferably sitewide in a footer or header.

It's pretty much Google's way of seeing if you're a local authority - looks for your address and phone on your site, looks for that same stuff on places on yelp, yell, qype etc. The more of those citations you have, the better really.

I've yet to see citations like that have a negative effect, providing all of the sites are reputable and legit. That's why I'm slightly hesitant about some of those local/business specific directories - are some of those really "authority" websites? But for citations, it's all good and you don't really have anything to lose.

Plus you throw in the fact that some people do start their searches on some of those sites, particularly yelp, and all of a sudden having a listing there is a decent traffic channel itself.  I've seen a few sites where some of the top referrers are these citation sites.

Just make sure you really are who and where you say you are. If it's virtual offices/VOIP phone numbers, you're gonna have a bad time. Wouldn't surprise me if Google can already detect these automatically.

Would make for a good case study if done en masse for sure.

Hi Gary

I think what Bright Local are looking to do here is earn you more business citations, rather than directories.  It's funny, because the difference is only a subtle one, but rather than getting you on websites that are more "traditional" directories, they instead will look to get you listed on places like yelp, yell, forsquare, bing, yahoo, qype and so on.

Those kind of citations definitely do help.  It does look as though Bright Local offer directory listings on moderated, niche specific and local directories, which is less of a risk (but valuable? I'm not so sure). In the package you can also hand-pick which ones you want - so you could opt out of them all if you chose to, which might not be a bad idea.

Looks like it automates/outsources what can be a pretty laborious process, so it might be worth looking into if the price is right. Bright local are a pretty reputable brand so I'd say the quality would be there.

Of course, you could build those citations yourself and good place to start is right here on Moz.  Moz has the best ones by city, and best by category, while BrightLocal has an international list, as does WhiteSpark. You can probably find more by searching for "best citations for [country]".

Hope this helps.