Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Is it bad for SEO to have two very similar sites on the same server? What's the best way to set this up?

Does showing the date published for an article in the SERPS help or hurt click-through rate?

Hello, I just recently implemented adjusted bounce rate onto one of the websites that I track via google analytics. (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2322974/How-to-Implement-Adjusted-Bounce-Rate-ABR-via-Google-Tag-Manager-Tutorial) Since doing so, obviously my bounce rate has gone down significantly, nearly half of what it use to be, but I've also noticed an increase in the average time per visitor. In fact, the increase of average time per visitor began the same day I adjusted the bounce rate. Has this happened to anyone else? Can someone please explain why/how this may occur?

Hello, I have a website and my sitemap (generated by the Yoast plugin) is set up into three different sections. One thing I noticed was that my homepage isn't in my sitemap. Is this an issue? The homepage is indexed, but does it need to be added to the sitemap in order for it to be crawled? How would I go about adding the homepage to the sitemap?

Hello, I am curious to know everyones thoughts on speed optimization for wordpress. I currently use the w3 total cache plugin and was considering adding a CDN like cloudflare. Does anyone have any experiences with utilizing both of these two together? What works best for you?

I own a website (domain.com) and used the subdomain "dev.domain.com" while adding a new section to the site (as a development link). I forgot to block the dev.domain.com in my robots file, and google indexed all of the dev pages (around 100 of them). I blocked the site (dev.domain.com) in robots, and then proceeded to just delete the entire subdomain altogether. It's been about a week now and I still see the subdomain pages indexed on Google. How do I get these pages removed from Google? Are they causing duplicate content/title issues, or does Google know that it's a development subdomain and it's just taking time for them to recognize that I deleted it already?

Hello, So I have a website (example.com). I have an ajax pop-up (example.com/#example) that I am receiving a bunch of links to. Since this pop-up (example.com/#example) is on my homepage, are these links giving juice to the homepage, or this pop-up, or both?

There is a competitor in my sites industry, and per various tools like opensitexplorer, quicksprout, and searchmetrics, they have an evenly amount of massive (100k+ per page) facebook social signals (likes, shares, comments) to around 25-50 of their top pages on their site. They have no social media presence in terms of a fan page, and they rank on the first page for almost every single keyword that is niche related. How could it be possible to naturally have the same number of facebook social signals to all of your top pages? What have they done to even accomplish this, and is it only a matter of time before Google recognizes the black hat tactics they've put in place to manipulate the search engines?

For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?

Does anyone know of a company who has direct experience with growing websites AFTER a manual link penalty has been lifted? Any referrals would be great!

Hello, Noticed a lot of sites, usually wordpress (seems to be the default) have the images in their posts clickable that load to their own page, showing just the image, usually a .jpg page. I know these pages seem to be easily indexed into google image search and can drive traffic to those specific pages... My questions are... 1. What is the point of driving traffic to a page that is just the image, there are no links to other pages, no ads, nothing... 2. can you redirect these .jpg pages to the actual post page? I ask because on google image search, there are 3 links to click (website, image link, image page), when you click to view the image, it loads the .jpg page, why not have that .jpg redirect to the real content page that has ads and also has other links. Is this white-hat? 3. Do these pages with just images have any negative effect on optimization since they are just images, no content? 4. Can you monetize these .jpg pages? 5. What is the best practice? I understand there is value in traffic, but what is the point of image traffic if I can't monetize those pages?

Hello, I have a website with tags (which have the noindex tag) on each article post. I've been told that I should noindex/nofollow these tag pages, because they are getting link juice passed to them, and since they aren't getting indexed, it's wasting link juice to those pages, when the link juice could be passed to a page that is actually getting indexed. What are your thoughts on this? Also, what would be the point to noindex/follow a page, if you are noindexing that page? Isn't it just wasting link juice? What is the proper SEO way to optimize tags.

I have a few sites that have tens of thousands of links on them (most of them are sourcing images that happen to be external links). I know that it's a good thing to externally link to reputable sources, but is it smart to place the nofollow tag on ALL external links? I'm sure there is a good chance that external links from posts from years ago are pointing to sites that may now be penalized. I feel as though nofollowing all the external links could come off as unnatural. What are the pros and cons of placing the nofollow tag on ALL external links, and also if I leave it as is and don't put the nofollow tag on them. Thanks.

If you have a site that has 200k+ backlinks, and you are receiving anywhere from 1-4k new links daily (according to majestic), how are you supposed to manage your link profile? We don't do any black hat tactics or any link building, and at the rate of new links coming in, we are afraid that Penguin might hit us one day. We have never used the disavow tool yet either. What are we supposed to do exactly?

Is it wise to focus on multiple niches for one site, rather than zoning in one or two different niches? On one hand, you can target many more topics and go after tons of keywords, but on the other hand doesn't google get confused of what your site is really about? Won't google just focus on one of the niches that you provide more than all others? Any input would be great!

There has been mixed opinions regarding the best practices in using alt tags/image titles. I am looking to avoid over optimization techniques that are potentially hurting my site. Right now I have a website in the crafts/DIY niche and every one of the page titles on the site are long tail keywords. Every page title is the main targeted keyword and for every one of those, that keyword is the image alt tags/image title. I have been told that the alt tag/image title for a post should NOT be the keyword your going after so what I'm looking for here is the best practice in dealing with these alt attributes. Should I change it to something other than the ranking keyword? Or not putting anything at all be a better approach? If I do this, will I lose rankings? Would like to know all the repercussions of these actions. I need to know what is the best approach here in avoiding over optimization penalties. Any insight or recommendations would be greatly appreciated here!

Hello Guys, I have a few questions regarding google manual penalties for unnatural link building. They are "partial site" penalties, not site wide. I have two sites to discuss. 1. this site used black hat tactics and bought 1000's of unnatural backlinks. This site doesn't rank for the main focus keywords and traffic has dropped. 2. this site has the same penalty, but has been all white hat, never bought any links or hired any seo company. It's all organic. This sites organic traffic doesn't seem to have taken any hit or been affected by any google updates. Based on the research we've done, Matt Cutts has stated that sometimes they know the links are organic so they don't penalize a website, but they still show us a penalty in the WMT. "Google doesn't want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. However, because we realize that some links may be outside of your control, we are not taking action on your site's overall ranking. Instead, we have applied a targeted action to the unnatural links pointing to your site." "If you don't control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google's perspective, the links already won't count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you're able to get the artificial links removed, submit areconsideration request. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action." Check that info above at this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604772?ctx=MAC Recap: Does anyone have any experience like with site #2? We are worried that this site has this penalty but we don't know if google is stopping us from ranking or not, so we aren't sure what to do here. Since we know 100% the links are organic, do we need to remove them and submit a reconsideration request? Is it possible that this penalty can expire on its own? Are they just telling us we have an issue but not hurting our site b/c they know it's organic?

I know of a website that inter-links a handful of websites together (ex- coloring.ws interlinks to a handful of other sites, including dltk-kids.com, and others). Is this negative for SEO? I was thinking about creating a few related sites and inter-linking all of them together, since they will all be relevant to each other. Any thoughts would be great!

If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....

My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.

I have old pages on my site that I want to 410 so they are totally removed, but later down the road if I want to utilize that URL again, can I just remove the 410 error code and put new content on that page and have it indexed again?

I know Penguin focuses on links but do you need to personally reach out and try to manually remove the links, or can you simply place the bad links in the disavow tool. I know for manual penalties you must manually reach out and try to remove and use disavow as an absolute last resort. Does the same go for algorithm penalties? Any insight would be helpful.

So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche. I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/ This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic) Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com. Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?

So I noticed on a few of my clients wordpress tags (via moz) that there are canonical tags on URLs, pointing to that same URL. What is the point of that, and is it harming the website? Is this being done automatically via a plugin? Should I remove the canonical tags or leave as is?

Hello all, So I have a website that was hit hard by Panda back in 2012 November, and ever since the traffic continues to die week by week. The site doesnt have any major moz errors (aside from too many on page links). The site has about 2,700 articles and the text to html ratio is about 14.38%, so clearly we need more text in our articles and we need to relax a little on the number of pictures/links we add. We have increased the text to html ratio for all of our new articles that we put out, but I was wondering how beneficial it is to go back and add more text content to the 2,700 old articles that we have just sitting. Would this really be worth the time and investment? Could this help the drastic decline in traffic and maybe even help it grow?

Hello, My website, www.coloringbookfun.com is very old and authoritative, but the URL structure is terrible. If you check out some of our subcategories such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda and individual printables such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda/imagepages/image2.html You can see that they aren't optimized. I am curious to know the pros and cons of fixing the URL structure and 301ing them to the new optimized url. Will 301ing lose authority and backlinks for the sites pages? Does optimizing the url structure outweigh losing the authority/backlinks?

Can someone explain sitemaps, and if you need html and/or xml? I have a site with a few html sitemaps, one for products, one for categories. I have another site with just one xml sitemap for my entire site (which has massive pages, 600k+). Should I be dividing the site with massive pages into html sitemaps like my other site?

I have a website that is built on OS Commerce and I am planning to transition to Magento. I was told that the transition to Magento would change my url structure. How do I preserve my current url structure while migrating to the Magento platform so that I do not lose my backlink profile.

Do you need to optimize a 410 page like you do for 404 pages? What does a visitor see when a page is 410 compared to a 404?

I have a site with paginated search result pages. What I've done is noindex/follow them and I've placed the rel=canonical tag on page2, page3, page4, etc pointing back to the main/first search result page. These paginated search result pages aren't visible to the user (since I'm not technically selling products, just providing different images to the user), and I've added a text link on the bottom of the first/main search result page that says "click here to load more" and once clicked, it automatically lists more images on the page (ajax). Is this a proper strategy? Also, for a site that does sell products, would simply noindexing/following the search results/paginated pages and placing the canonical tag on the paginated pages pointing back to the main search result page suffice? I would love feedback on if this is a proper method/strategy to keep Google happy. Side question - When the robots go through a page that is noindexed/followed, are they taking into consideration the text on those pages, page titles, meta tags, etc, or are they only worrying about the actual links within that page and passing link juice through them all?

If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept? If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag? If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?

Hello, I know that Google says that you are supposed to make anchored text links nofollow on press releases, but what about just putting the site url itself (example.com) and making it dofollow? Is that okay?

Is it bad to utilize a custom codebase for multiple websites? Does that play a factor within Google? Also, what about hosting sites with the same custom codebase on the same dedicated server?

If you have a site with a few thousand high quality and authoritative pages, and tens of thousands with search results and tags pages with thin content, and noindex,follow the thin content pages all at once, will google see this is a good or bad thing? I am only trying to do what Google guidelines suggest, but since I have so many pages index on my site, will throwing the noindex tag on ~80% of thin content pages negatively impact my site?

I have a website that has around 90k pages indexed, but after doing the math I realized that I only have around 20-30k pages that are actually high quality, the rest are paginated pages from search results within my website. Every time someone searches a term on my site, that term would get its own page, which would include all of the relevant posts that are associated with that search term/tag. My site had around 20k different search terms, all being indexed.  I have paused new search terms from being indexed, but what I want to know is if the best route would be to 404 all of the useless paginated pages from the search term pages. And if so, how many should I remove at one time? There must be 40-50k paginated pages and I am curious to know what would be the best bet from an SEO standpoint. All feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks.