Many high value links to printer-friendly versions of our pages
-
First, forgive me if I miss something obvious. I'm a user experience designer who handles all SEO efforts for our organization in my spare time. This question is about our patient / health education website, http://familydoctor.org
NIH's Medline Plus ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ ) has linked to http://familydoctor.org for a very, very long time, before we had advertisements on the site. To get an idea of where Medline Plus links to familydoctor.org, visit http://goo.gl/1yaofC or use the following query in Google.com: site:www.nlm.nih.gov inurl:medlineplus American Academy of Family Physicians
After we redesigned and started putting ads on FD.org, I think these two things happened simultaneously, we received a contact from someone at NIH stating they could no longer link to our site because of the ads. NIH is a highly-trusted and ranked domain, so we agreed to let them link to the printer-friendly versions of our content to avoid the ads.
A few years later, we restructured the content. For an article about depression, instead of having one page with all of the content ( http://web.archive.org/web/20090215071258/http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/common/mentalhealth/depression/046.html ), we broke it up into many shorter pages ( http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/depression.html ), such as Overview, Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment, etc. I don't know if NIH crossed anyone's mind until go-live day, when we noticed a high number of referrals to the error page coming from NIH.gov. We wanted to fix this quickly, so Medline didn't stop linking to us and Google didn't de-value the relationship because of the broken links.
We redirected all of the printer-friendly links from the previous site to the printer-friendly whole article (lets you see all the information on one page) on the new site. We did this because there is no way to move between now split up content pages in the split up printer-friendly versions of the site. Even if there was, we didn't think NIH would take too kindly to this.
There is a return to the web link on the printer-friendly whole article page. This is a followed link and I realize the anchor text could be improved. We added the following on printer-friendly pages in an effort to not get penalized by search engines for duplicate content.
Are we doing all we can to take advantage of these high-value links? Is the meta robots tag necessary, helpful, or not?
-
Use of the canonical link should solve all of your problems as far as how the search engines. Bots that view the PF page will take the canonical directive and treat it like a 301 redirect and pass link equity etc.
The other thing you need to consider is the use of rel next and prev for the article that you broke into parts if you consider this one big article broken up into parts. That would be used to "connect" all the sections of your depression article to each other.
Frankly, I do not know why you broke up this page into parts as the article is not that long as a whole There is some data out there that longer articles get more links http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/20/the-science-behind-long-copy-how-more-content-increases-rankings-and-conversions/
One issue on the print pages is that you have a meta noindex tag. That tells Google to deindex the page and not to crawl it. You do not need to use that tag as you are using the canonical to tell Google what the "parent" page. If you are using the rel next prev on both the regular and paginated pages, I would advise canonicaling P1 to P1, P2 to P2 and the All to the All page vs canonical everything to the main page.
You are basically telling Google two things.
-
with rel next prev - here are the parts that make up the whole.
-
with the canonical - if they look at the PF version, here is the "real" page they want to pay attention to. This is what passes the link equity along to the proper pages. If you are getting links into the "print all page" this is the key page to have canonical linked to the "real" page.
What I would do is put this all into one page and then it is simple. Just canonical the PF page to the actual page and remove the noindex meta tag off the PF page.
If the above does not make sense, read each of the articles below about 3x and watch the video 3x it should help
Here are the Google Pages on canonicals
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
and rel next prev
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
Good luck!
-
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
-
Does a nofollow link from a high DA site count towards trust?
I've been checking out competitors through the 'link intersect function in my Moz account. Many have got nofollow links from high DA websites. I understand that nofollow links do not count count as a backlink, but will they add towards the trust factor?
Link Building | | ThorUK0 -
Link Value
My question is how valuable is getting a link from a PA 71 with roughly 20 links on it. I guess I am saying how many links from a PA of 30 would be a comparable indicator. I understand there is an almost exponential value of authority as they go higher, but I am looking for a good explanation from a technical aspect. Hypothetical Scenario Would a person be better off pursing 20 links from PA25 pages, or would you be better only getting 1 from the PA71 all things equal.
Link Building | | mbarden260 -
I am getting links on people's wordpress blogs but are not showing up on the just discovered tool. Is it true that wordpress links are no-follow links that do give off any link-juice?
A blogger told me that "wordpress.com does not allow blogs to show advertisements or use links to sites that sell merchandise of any kind" is this true? Am i wasting my outreach time trying to get links from wordpress operated blogs?
Link Building | | odegi0 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Internal Links and Page Authority - Best Practices
Hello, Is it bad (in terms of ranking in the SERPS) if i have a link from a page with PA of 18 going to a page with PA of 21? In other words, does it matter if the page containing the link has a lower page authority than the page receiving the link? Page A links to Page B Page A page authority is 18 Page B page authority 21 could this negatively affect my rankings? Thanks
Link Building | | Prime850 -
Targeting high Page Authority sites vs high Pagerank sites for backlinks?
For many years I've been working on seo/backlinks for my website. When doing analysis in opensiteexplorer I notice that the highest listed backlinks for my site are sites with high page authority and domain authority, rather than pagerank. For example one of the highest backlinks for my website has page authority/domain authority of 72/96 but the site itself is only a PR2, while my other backlinks have PR4, 5, or 6 with lower page authority. For a while I've been trying to partner with websites for backlinks from high pagerank sites, as I've always believed this is the #1 metric in relaying link juice. But OSE's metrics seem to not follow that train of thought -- it believes page authority/domain authority is a more important measure. Is it? Should I change my strategy to try to partner with websites that have high page authority rather than focusing so much on pagerank?
Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0 -
How to out rank well with category page for high competitive keyword?
This is really silly question to ask over here! But, I have to drop my mind bubble after long R & D and efforts! Right now, I am working on Patio Umbrellas keyword and want to out rank with following landing page. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas I have implemented too many ways on this page since January 2012. Right now, my website is in top 20 position with this keyword. I want to achieve top 10 ranking with Patio Umbrellas keyword. Now, I have certain limitation to make changes on web page. This is client requirement. So, I have to drill down more with link building. I have started work on link building on since February 2012 and rank well with keyword. Now, I'm searching for link building way which help me to improve ranking in short time frame. I don't want to do any single activity on this page which is UN-productive for me. If you have any on page inputs so it may help me more. SEOmoz is really big source to search and justify answer but, I want to add expert advice in it. Thanks,
Link Building | | CommercePundit0 -
High quality links but where do you find them?
Hi, A lot of the answers on here point to building high quality links, which makes sense but where do you find these links? Lets say the website sells Football Boots, the current keyword you are trying to rank for is say 'Indoor Football Boots'. How do you now go about looking for those links? Cheers
Link Building | | activitysuper0