Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Marina,

If I understand your question correctly, you just don't want your Tumblr blog to be indexed by Google. In which case these steps will help: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/keep-tumblr-off-google-3061.html

Regards,

George

Hi Carly,

It needs to be done to each of the pages. In most cases, this is just a minor change to a single page template. Someone might tell you that you can add an entry to robots.txt to solve the problem, but that won't remove them from the index.

Looking at the links you provided, I'm not convinced you should deindex them all - as these are member profile pages which might have some value in terms of driving organic traffic and having unique content on them. That said I'm not party to how your site works, so this is just an observation.

Hope that helps,

George

Sites that have algorithmic or manual penalties can still have sitelinks. I have no idea if your site has a penalty or not, I'm just saying there's a real risk from looking at your backlink profile that you may have an algorithmic penalty now, or will get one (or manual penalty) in future. It depends on a number of factors, including the accuracy of your disavow.

If you're starting to rank well for competitive keywords, then that would be a case for staying put. Your visibility is yet to update in SearchMetrics, which is still low though obviously jumped when you launched the new site.

If you moved to the .net, you would have to give up on the .com, as redirects from it would pass the toxic link equity to your new domain. In a worst case scenario, if you stuck with the .com and build lots of quality content, got links and promoted the brand, then your bad link past caught up with you then it would be very difficult to cut free and move to a new domain.

That said, if you moved to .net now there's equally no guarantee that this is completely necessary (as you said you're starting to rank). You're clearly aware that It's a huge decision to make and not one that you would want to take lightly.

Since you're at the point where you're just setting up a new site and probably about to pump money into marketing it pays to be aware of the options. I don't have enough information to say which one you should take.

Hope that helps,

George

Hi again,

The horse may have bolted on this particular issue, but here's what I would have done in your position:

If there's no existing traffic to the domain that you want to keep, and the .com isn't critical to the branding (it's not in your logo) then personally I would have put the site on a another domain that you own already (e.g. moneysite.net - assuming that is clean) and just killed the .com.

Having fought through a few Penguin penalties for existing brands, I can't imagine anything worse than launching a new site/brand that has someone else's dirty link laundry attached to it. There's still a chance you might get a manual penalty in future which will hang over like an axe.

It really depends on how much resource you have to start building real quality content that gets links and shares, and keep ontop of your disavows and potentially ongoing link removals.

It also depends on how critical organic traffic is to your business. If you have $50K a month to throw at PPC or affiliates then it may not matter.

George

Your site appears to be indexed OK, but your visibility is low. I checked that "money site" is a low competition keyword you should be ranking better for.

Taking a look at your backlink profile (opensiteexplorer.org), it appears that there are a ton of toxic links pointing to the domain. This is almost certainly going to affect your rankings through Google Penguin, unless someone's already gone through a stringent disavow process.

Before you launched a new site on this domain, was it vetted to see if your predecessors had done any link building badness?

George

I would throw HTTP 410s for them all if they don't get traffic. 410 carries a little bit more weight than 404s and we're not talking about a small number of pages here. I wouldn't redirect them to the homepage as you'll almost certainly get a ton of "soft 404s" in WMT if done all at once.

Matt Cutts on 404 vs 410: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp5Nf8ANfOw

If they are getting traffic, then it'll be a harder job to unpick the pages that have value.

George

Hi,

You'll need to provide the site details if you need help in diagnosing a penalty.

As a starting point I would log into Google Webmaster Tools to see if a manual penalty has been applied, I would also look in Analytics to see if your organic traffic overall has dropped across other pages on your website.

An algorithmic penalty is harder to diagnose, but can usually be recognised by aligning traffic drops with dates of Google algorithm releases.

George

Hi Monica,

It's almost certainly an issue related to the Backlinker plugin given that error message, though clearly it's not a straightforward solution. I found this post on the wordpress forum, perhaps this is your issue too (by member pee_dee):

"Look in header.php inside your current theme and find this line:

http://www.4llw4d.freefilesblog.com/jquery-1.6.3.min.js

This server is no longer able to provide the .js file linked to your theme. I found it mine at:

http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.6.3.min.js

Get a hold of the .js file (or google the heck out of the .js file you need) and point to it on your server."

Hope that works

George

Hi,

I see a couple of assumptions in your question - I would say that having a "keyword rich domain" is becoming a less significant ranking factor in SERPs so I wouldn't base the migration of an existing website that performs pretty well on the potential of a new domain targetting certain KWs.

Secondl assumption is that your existing domain is ranking purely because it's older. There are likely to be other factors at play here - particularly backlinks.

However, I realise that you need to restructure the website and moving to a single domain with the complexes on subdirectories makes sense architecturally. You might well see a drop in rankings certainly in the meantime while you do this migration so if this is a key acquisiton channel, then investigate PPC options to bolster your traffic.

As for the 301 - I agree it makes sense to 301 to the complex subdirectory for a user, however in Webmaster Tools Google doesn't support the migration of one domain to the subdirectory of another domain. This means it won't be as seamless as if you migrate to the root of the new domain.

One way around this would be to redirect the old domain to the root domain, but provide very clear navigation on how to get to the relevant apartment complex to a user. As far as a user is concerned, I would see this as an acceptable solution.

George

It looks like this error is caused by a plugin you have installed and enabled on your wordpress site that probably isn't compatible with the version of wordpress you're running. If you disable the Backlinker plugin it will probably go away.

As for SEO impact - it appears to also have mangled your /robots.txt (which you should fix), and the user experience of seeing this error is poor and so it's worth fixing.

George

A developer who tells you "W3C validation isn't important" is like a house builder telling you "Those small cracks in the walls are nothing to worry about"

George

Google has a policy for this - what you're doing is not advisable - you should be annotating the URLs. You can read the correct approach to take here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls

Hi,

You're far from being alone with the issues you described, but personally I wouldn't recommend what you're suggesting:

1. Using a 302 from the old to new URL structure will impact every link pointing at the old URLs be they a quality or spam backlink.
2. Using a 302 rather than a 301 means there's a good chance that Google will index both the old and new URLs and cause duplicate content and PageRank splitting issues. This is likely to make things worse for you.

If I was you I'd disavow the spam links per Google's policy (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en), set up 301s to your new URLs and following a bit of patience, start your SEO afresh with a clean slate.

George

@methodicalweb

Hi,

I see a couple of assumptions in your question - I would say that having a "keyword rich domain" is becoming a less significant ranking factor in SERPs so I wouldn't base the migration of an existing website that performs pretty well on the potential of a new domain targetting certain KWs.

Secondl assumption is that your existing domain is ranking purely because it's older. There are likely to be other factors at play here - particularly backlinks.

However, I realise that you need to restructure the website and moving to a single domain with the complexes on subdirectories makes sense architecturally. You might well see a drop in rankings certainly in the meantime while you do this migration so if this is a key acquisiton channel, then investigate PPC options to bolster your traffic.

As for the 301 - I agree it makes sense to 301 to the complex subdirectory for a user, however in Webmaster Tools Google doesn't support the migration of one domain to the subdirectory of another domain. This means it won't be as seamless as if you migrate to the root of the new domain.

One way around this would be to redirect the old domain to the root domain, but provide very clear navigation on how to get to the relevant apartment complex to a user. As far as a user is concerned, I would see this as an acceptable solution.

George

Your site appears to be indexed OK, but your visibility is low. I checked that "money site" is a low competition keyword you should be ranking better for.

Taking a look at your backlink profile (opensiteexplorer.org), it appears that there are a ton of toxic links pointing to the domain. This is almost certainly going to affect your rankings through Google Penguin, unless someone's already gone through a stringent disavow process.

Before you launched a new site on this domain, was it vetted to see if your predecessors had done any link building badness?

George

Hi,

I've been badly burnt by agencies in the past offering "quality" link building services and have done quite a lot of work on dealing with a conundrum similar to yours. Here is my advice:

1. Links need to be earnt, not bought. You need to overcome your main problem ("I cannot believe that any content generated will be of any value to anyone other than as a pseudo contextual basis for the link"). If you're not producing something of value, the links aren't going to be relevant and you're increasing your chances of a future penalty.
2. Assuming you're selling products or services, or even generating revenue by ad impressions you still have a customer base. The sooner you can understand their needs, the sooner you can produce some content of value to your business.
3. Work on a project basis with an agency to test them out and stay well away from retainers and minimum term contracts. I started working with an agency to produce individual pieces of content and get them legitimately placed on relevant websites. Smaller/startup agencies are typically more flexible on this sort of model as they are looking to win longer term business and build their client base.
4. Avoid any link-building that targets exact match keywords or any other cynical techniques. You are bound to get penalised for this.
5. To find agencies - go to marketing / SEO conferences. e.g. BrightonSEO which has sponsors and attendees you can network with and get advice and potentially recommendations.

Good luck,

George

Personally I wouldn't rely just on robots.txt, as one accidental, public link to any of the pages (easier than you may think!) will result in Google indexing that subdomain page (it just won't be followed). This means that the page can get "stuck" in Google's index and to resolve it you would need to remove it using WMT (instructions here). If there were a lot of pages accidentally indexed, you would need to remove the robots.txt restriction so Google can crawl it, and put a noindex/nofollow tags on the page so Google drops it from its index.

To cut a long story short, I would do both Steps 1 and 2 outlined by Federico if you want to sleep easy at night :).

George

Hi Tanveer,

It's hard to answer your questions without seeing the raw data. I presume these are external rather than internal links, and that they are genuinely new as opposed to only just having been discovered. I would start with going to Webmaster Tools, downloading your latest links and having a look at where they are coming from.

There could be a number of reasons for this, and so there's no point me speculating and you're right to investigate further. Using a link profile checker such as cognitiveseo.com will give you a clearer idea on the quality of any new links you acquire.

Feel free to post more information if you need,

Regards

George

You're in luck because Matt Cutts covered at least part of this question quite recently, which you can read about/watch here: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308339/Matt-Cutts-Create-Unique-Meta-Descriptions-for-Your-Most-Important-Pages.

In short - you should hand craft the meta descriptions for your most valuable pages (i.e. the pages you want to rank high in SERPs) but it wouldn't be expected for every meta description on your site due to the amount of work involved.

Personally I think the variance between these auto generated descriptions is still too low and would look for other words to vary them by - for example the type of cruise, the savings, or activities offered on the cruise in each region.

You'll also want to bear in mind a similar problem you're likely to experience with the page Title, Headings and content.

George

Hi Lee,

The foundation site idea sounds like a real roundabout way of achieving organic traffic and hence sales - which from a high level I'm assuming is what you're trying to achieve. It would perhaps make more sense if you were going to use the Foundation site to drive referrals, or to use for PR, rather than solely for link equity purposes.

It wouldn't take much for Google to work out that the foundation site is a bit of a cynical attempt to gain rankings.

If I was you I'd focus on improving the content and linkability of your client's existing site and address some of the branding issues head on rather than side-stepping them with a sister website. You can incorporate the "foundation" idea into the existing website (perhaps on a subdomain or directory), which if done properly - with valuable content - will earn natural links and therefore gain far more organic value than having a sister website.

George