Google webmaster reports non-existent links between syndicated sites
-
We have run into an issue with linking that we are completely puzzled by. We syndicate our content to various clients, taking care to ensure that we have followed all the best practices that Google recommends for syndicating content. But recently, we noticed Google Webmaster report links from ClientA to ClientB, and we cannot figure out why it thinks that way. We have never created, and we have never found the links that Google Webmaster claims are there.
It is important for us to keep our clients isolated. Has anyone seen such behavior? Any ideas/pointers/hunches would be very much appreciated. Happy to provide more information.
We even asked on the Google Webmaster Forum (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/QkGF7-HZHTY;context-place=forum/webmasters), but thought this might be a better place to get expert advice.
Thanks!
-
It looks like the pages that you're referencing in the Webmaster Forums post do have some indexed duplicate content on them. It may be that Google is trying to figure out which version of the page is the canonical version, and then reporting all the duplicates as links back to the page that they deem the "original" page. I don't know why they would report this as a "link" when it clearly isn't a link in the traditional sense, but link reports in Search Console often contain some weird stuff that isn't really links.
What's clear is that Google understands that these pages are related, which makes sense since it's the same content, on pages with very similar design - the two subdomains are even using the same Google Analytics account. My assumption would be that the "links" are a byproduct of Google trying to figure out which of these pages are the duplicates and which should be treated as the original.
It may be that this is nothing to worry about - if you're happy with the pages' performance, I doubt you will see these "links" coming through anywhere besides Google Search Console. If you do want to keep the client sites more separate, I would recommend separating them out into their own Google Analytics accounts at the very least.
-
Only with Google WMT
-
Are you seeing this with any other link discovery tools, like AHREFs, Majestic, or Open Site Explorer? Or only in Google WMT?
-
It happens with a few of the client sites. Google Webmasters thinks most of the other clients are pointing to these few.
-
Is this something that is happening between just two specific client sites? Or is it more widespread for all of your clients?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Strange site link on Google for a Facebook result
A Facebook page targetted to US Hispanics (with content in Spanish and English) is showing me a hindi sitelink underneath the main Facebook link when I google (in the US, English) for the page [ page name facebook]. We don't have any content in hindi, or targetted to that audience. If I click on the sitelink while logged out of facebook, I can see it takes me to a facebook subdomain of hi-in. When I'm logged in it just redirects me to the same page. Any idea why this could be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_80 -
Hreflang tag on links to alternate language site
Hey everyone! In the interest of trying to be brief, here's the situation in my favorite form of communication, bullet points! Client has two sites; one is in English and one is in Japanese Each site is a separate URL, no sub-domains or sub-pages Each main page on the English version of the site has a link to the homepage of the Japanese site Site has decent rankings overall, with room for improvement from page 2 to page 1 No Hreflang tags currently used in links to the Japanese version from the English version Given that the site isn't really suffering for most rankings, would this be helpful to implement on the English version? Ideally, I'd like each link to be updated to the corresponding subject matter of the Japanese, but in the interim it seems like identifying to Google that the link on the other side is a different language might be helpful to both the user and to maybe help those rankings on page two creep a little higher to page one. Thanks for reading, I appreciate your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Does including your site in Google News (and Google) Alerts helps with SEO?
Based on the following article http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm in order to check if you are included you need to run site:domain.com and click the news search tab. If you are not there then... I ran the test on MOZ and got no results which surprised me. Next step according to :https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en#ts=3179198 is to submit your site for inclusion. Should I? Will it help? P.S.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This is a followup question to the following: http://moz.com/community/q/what-makes-a-site-appear-in-google-alerts-and-does-it-mean-anything0 -
Link Removal Request Sent to Google, Bad Pages Gone from Index But Still Appear in Webmaster Tools
| On June 14th the number of indexed pages for our website on Google Webmaster tools increased from 676 to 851 pages. Our ranking and traffic have taken a big hit since then. The increase in indexed pages is linked to a design upgrade of our website. The upgrade was made June 6th. No new URLS were added. A few forms were changed, the sidebar and header were redesigned. Also, Google Tag Manager was added to the site. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer submitted a page removal request to Google via Webmaster tools around June 20th. Now when a Google search is done for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com 851 results display. Would these extra pages cause a drop in ranking? My developer issued a link removal request for these pages around June 20th and the number in the Google search results appeared to drop to 451 for a few days, now it is back up to 851. In Google Webmaster Tools it is still listed as 851 pages. My ranking drop more and more everyday. At the end of displayed Google Search Results for site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.comvery strange URSL are displaying like:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/... If we can get rid of these issues should ranking return to what it was before?I suspect this is an issue with sitemaps and Robot text. Are there any firms or coders who specialize in this? My developer has really dropped the ball. Thanks everyone!! Alan |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
50,000 backlinks in webmaster tools from one site???
Hi All, I'm new to evaluating backlinks, but I just saw I got over 50,000 links from a backlink that was added on ONE page at this site here: http://www.netnewspublisherDOTcom. I presume this is not a good thing, and if I contact them to remove the one link on the one page, it won't solve the other 49,999 links that Google is seeing pointing to us, so what do I do??. Should I contact them and ask to remove it and see if they don't and then disavow? Or would you just tell Google to disavow the whole site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mlm120 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Site Wide Link Situation
Hi- We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RezStream80 -
Why google does not show my site on my branding keyword?
Hi, I am the site owner of http://www.lankahq.net. It is a youtube video hosted website. 95% of the video contents are daily telecasting TV shows and categorized to make easy to find the specific video of the day of preferred program of the viewer. About 1 year ago suddenly disappeared my site from the google. Before happened that it was performing very well in search. Google showed my site contents within few minutes after I update in their search results when someone search for that. At the moment it does not show even some one search for "lankahq". It showing only if search for "lankahq.net", "lankahq.com" or "www.lankahq.net" something like a search keyword related to my domain name. Some other websites have added my branding keyword LankaHQ as a user of their site and they showing on top of Google. But not mine. It is much appreciated if someone can have a look on this matter. I can not find where is the problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprasad0