Assuming you've only got one instance like this, search engines are typically smart enough these days to see this is an anomaly rather than a pattern of intentional spam.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to disavow them I suppose but if it were my site, I wouldn't worry about it. On the other hand, if you have a number of instances where this is happening, I'd look to address that quite quickly.

Google understands that weird things like this can happen to all of us and they can't be judging everyone by the individual links or perceived actions. As a perfect example of this, my latest client has never done any form of digital marketing. Looking at their backlink profile they have 7 quality, natural backlinks and 2 Polish spam/scraper sites in their backlink profile. They can't help having their site scraped, just like you can't control the structure of that site you have 45k links from

Interesting question but unfortunately I think the answer is quite boring (while the inner workings behind it are fascinating)!

With the advancements Google has made in recent years around semantic search and truly understanding both what your website is about and the intent behind a user's search, I really don't think that space is going to make any difference.

They have no issue at all in understanding that Car Hire terms are very relevant to me when I'm searching Car Rental. Far more impressive is that I can search for the phrase "I need a car in Perth tomorrow" and I still get car hire options for that location. I didn't mention Hire or Rental at all yet they still nailed it based on my intent!

I've seen countless other examples of this over the years so based on that alone, I'd say the difference between C300 and C 300 is immeasurable.

While it's true that two websites with exactly the same strength may rank differently with and without that space, SEO is just too complex for that to ever be possible in the real world.

To answer your question directly around how to target both, I'd suggest using the correct C 300 format and let Google work it out

I think the best way to answer this is to determine exactly how Moz calculates the score in the first place. They have a handy video explaining it on this page along with more detailed info.

Long story short, to improve your Trust score, improve the overall quality of your backlink profile.

Technical Definition of MozTrust

MozTrust quantifies the trustworthiness of a web page relative to all other pages on the web. It is based off of an algorithm developed by Yahoo! search engineers that is likely similar to the trust algorithms used by Google and Bing search engineers. Just as links express global link popularity, they also express information about the trustworthiness of URLs.

As mentioned above, receiving links from sources with inherent trust, like university and government homepages, is a strong trust endorsement for your own page or site. By measuring the occurrence and frequency of these endorsements, MozTrust can quantify trust on the web.

The short answer is "nobody knows"

Whether or not it will ever show up is completely at Google's discretion. Generally speaking, the only time that carousel will display in the SERPs is if the website is highly authoritative.

If you think about it from Google's point of view, their aim is to provide the highest possible value to their searchers. If you were a local plumber who Tweets a quote or funny joke a couple of times per year, schema markup or not, displaying this in the carousel won't provide any value at all and takes up precious screen real estate.

There's no magic number (that Google is going to give us anyway) that will get it to display either. It could be a combination of Tweet volume and regularity, interaction, followers etc and is likely combined with the strength and relevance of your website in the context of your search query too.

Applying that schema is still a good idea in my opinion, it's just not as simple as "if I apply it to my site, it will definitely display in SERPs". This is true for all forms of schema markup. You're giving your site the best possible chance to display better in the SERPs but it doesn't necessarily mean it will happen.

I hope that helps!

Hi Nicola,

Sounds like a very strange one indeed. I can't say I've ever heard of Google giving a redirect when other 3rd party crawlers give you a 200.

My only suggestion to begin the troubleshooting would be to have a look at your htaccess and maybe Robots to see if there are any directives in there addressing Google specifically.

Anthony's suggestion is also a great idea. At least you'll see what Google is picking up on those pages right now rather what they saw last time it was cached.

Hi Fabrizo,

That's a tricky one given the sheer volume of pages/music on the site. Typically the cleanest way to handle all of this is to offer up a View All page and Canonical back to that but in your case, a View All pages would scroll on forever!

Canonical is not the answer here. It's made for handling duplicate pages like this:

www.website.com/product1.html
     www.website.com/product1.html&sid=12432

In this instance, both pages are 100% identical so the canonical tag tells Google that any variation of product1.html is actually just that page and should be counted as such. What you've got here is pagination so while the pages are mostly the same, they're not identical.

Instead, this is exactly what rel=prev/next is for which you've already looked into. It's very hard to find recent information on this topic but the traditional advice from Google has been to implement prev/next and they will infer the most important page (typically page one) from the fact that it's the only page that has a rel=next but no rel=prev (because there is no previous page). Apologies if you already knew all of this; just making sure I didn't skim over anything here. Google also says these pages will essentially be seen as a single unit from that point and so all link equity will be consolidated toward that block of pages.

Canonical and rel=next/prev do act separately so by all means if you have search filters or anything else that may alter the URL, a canonical tag can be used as well but each page here would just point back to itself, not back to page 1.

This clip from Google's Maile Ohye is quite old but the advice in here clears a few things up and is still very relevant today.

With that said, the other point you raised is very valid - what to do about crawl budget. Google also suggests just leaving them as-is since you're only linking to the first 5 pages and any links beyond that are buried so deep in the hierarchy they're seen as a low priority and will barely be looked at.

From my understanding (though I'm a little hesitant on this one) is that noindexed pages do retain their link equity. Noindex doesn't say 'don't crawl me' (also meaning it won't help your crawl budget, this would have to be done through Robots.txt), it says 'don't include me in your index'. So on this logic it would make sense that links pointing to a noindexed page would still be counted.

Apologies for the indirect answer but I would have to ask "why"?

If these pages are almost identical and you only want one of them to be indexed, in most situations the users would probably benefit from there only being that one main page. Cutting down on redundant pages is great for UX, crawl budget and general site quality.

Maybe there is a genuine reason for it but without knowing the context it's hard to give accurate info on the best way to handle it

It's hard to say exactly without seeing your site since there are so many potential variables (e.g. are most of your blog posts low quality or just a minority? etc) that would define the best way to go about it.

What I can say though is that you're on the right track as far as using analytics data to determine which ones are providing value right now. There is a danger in losing some rankings if you go removing a huge volume of these posts. Unless they're utter rubbish posts, they'll likely be providing relevance signals to Google on what your site is about. That said, I do think it's a necessary evil and I'd expect you'll be rewarded for it in the long run provided you start replacing the trash with high quality posts in the future.

As for the benefits, if they really are low quality then user engagement is going to be terrible which is obviously not what you should be aiming for. It's also going to be chewing up your crawl budget for no good reason so the leaner your site is, the better base you have to start rebuilding with quality instead of quantity. For the same reason, I generally suggest removing tags and categories that aren't providing any actual benefit too - in most cases I see they're just there either "for good SEO" or because the site owners things that's how users are browsing their site but in almost all cases, that's not true. As always, check your own data on this to be sure.

As for removing vs noindex, this one is always contentious but I lean toward removing simply because it's going to clean things up for the user too and ultimately they should be your primary focus. Having 40,000+ pages of trash on your website is a fantastic indicator to them that your site may not be somewhere they want to be and noindexing them won't do anything to change the user's experience.

Hope that helps!

Assuming pricing in your country (US?) is about the same as here in Aus, I'd probably do the following if I didn't have SEO knowledge myself.

• Use a few months worth of that budget upfront to get a quality company to do a thorough audit and devise a plan for me to work through
• Work through this plan as quickly as I humanly could without cutting corners
• Return to the original company periodically (quarterly?) for advice along the way so I know I'm always on track and not wasting my effort sprinting in the wrong direction
• Buy a few helpful tools to make analysis easier and monitor results. I'd say at least Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 items) and some kind of ranking tool - we use AWR Cloud.
• Engage a contractor of some form (Fiverr?) to start producing as much quality content as the remaining budget allows

Of course, if services are much like tangible products where Australia is 50-100% more expensive (the joys) then I'd probably just take the time to find and engage a quality agency and keep a close eye on their work to make sure you're getting value. Here in Aus the value you'll get from $1,000 /month is questionable unless you're in a vertical with minimal competition.

Before the hate starts - _some _agencies and certainly freelancers can do a fantastic job for you on that budget, it's simply that the smaller your budget, the higher the likelihood of landing a dud provider. Again, $1k /month in the US may be the standard minimum for quality agencies so this wouldn't apply.

It's something you shouldn't _really _doing so it comes with the usual warning of "use with caution"...

That said, the chances of anything negative happening here are so slim it's probably not worth worrying about. If you were cloaking shady anchor text relating to gambling or viagra it would be a different story.

There are two other points to be aware of here though. Firstly, it's very unlikely you'll see any ranking difference between those two link anchors in your link profile. The other is that it sounds like you're dropping footer links on your clients' sites to build your link profile. That one is cause for genuine concern if it's on a large volume. If it's only a couple of sites, disregard everything below!

How these are treated post Penguin 4.0 I don't know just yet but at best, they're given very little weight. We've just finished pulling one of our web design clients back up from ~ page 8 after he built a large volume of those same footer links over about 6 months. It may be because they were all irrelevant links (his clients have nothing to do with web design, obviously) or perhaps because his anchor profile was 98% "Web Design". Which of these caused the problem is quite irrelevant.

We removed those links from all but a handful of sites and he's back to the middle of page 1 so the real work just started. This was earlier in the year so again, I have no clue how that same thing would play you now after the latest update.

Hope that helps!

The pros and cons can both be quite compelling here so it usually comes down to a question of budget and available manhours.

Pros

Targeted niche sites allow the client to be far more specific about exactly what it is that they do. This can make them far more competitive in that particular niche. As an example, one of our clients installs fake grass in commercial applications and outranks the largest national hardware chain here in Aus simply because he does one thing very well while the hardware chain sells thousands of products.

It also makes the site much easier to manage and browse from the user perspective while also being easier on the crawl budget as well.

Cons

Multiple websites means multiple SEO campaigns. You have to duplicate all of your effort for everything from page titles and meta descriptions to content and link profiles. If you have 10 micro-sites then your time investment will increase 10x!

Thinking of the user experience, you  may miss out on same conversions and/or upselling if users only visit one of these niche sites and don't realise that you provide several other services that they're after as well. Sometimes, being able to get everything they need done by a single company can be a very strong selling point. Much like paying 1 renovation company to do your entire reno rather than orchestrating 20 different suppliers and service providers.

There are ways to manage this second point to some extent like including badges or a list of other services you provide, though I would warn against inter-linking between each of these sites.

So, if you have the time and resources to put into it, you're likely to see greater success from multiple small sites but for more businesses, this just isn't viable. In that case, a well structured site and navigation is going to be your best bet, as well as strong and relevant internal linking from blog posts and building backlinks directly to those category pages from their respective industries.

Hi Manas,

It's quite tough to give general advice on something like this because it often needs quite a specific answer, depending on your company name and that keyword you want to target.

If your company name is very close to that larger keyword, like Car Hirez and you're trying to rank for that branded term and Car Hire, it can be a little tricky. Without further info, my best suggestion would be to put that company name everywhere that it makes sense, and always in the same order.

I don't mean cram your company name whenever you can, just make sure it's in all the usual places like the page title, logo alt text, in your content, in all of your NAP listings, your link anchor profile etc. Keeping it to the same phrasing each time is also important for you to establish that those 2 or 3 words as your actual brand name, rather than words.

For example, don't allow alternation between ABC Car Hire, ABC Rental Cars, Car Hire from ABC etc. if the name is ABC Car Hire, make sure it's written that way wherever practical.

Of course, to rank for that broader term, the usual rules apply. Include that keyword in your page title, H1, content, internal link anchors etc etc. Treat the branded term and the keyword as separate items; that's how you want them to be viewed.

Interesting question but unfortunately I think the answer is quite boring (while the inner workings behind it are fascinating)!

With the advancements Google has made in recent years around semantic search and truly understanding both what your website is about and the intent behind a user's search, I really don't think that space is going to make any difference.

They have no issue at all in understanding that Car Hire terms are very relevant to me when I'm searching Car Rental. Far more impressive is that I can search for the phrase "I need a car in Perth tomorrow" and I still get car hire options for that location. I didn't mention Hire or Rental at all yet they still nailed it based on my intent!

I've seen countless other examples of this over the years so based on that alone, I'd say the difference between C300 and C 300 is immeasurable.

While it's true that two websites with exactly the same strength may rank differently with and without that space, SEO is just too complex for that to ever be possible in the real world.

To answer your question directly around how to target both, I'd suggest using the correct C 300 format and let Google work it out

Matt Cutts answered a very similar question some time back in this video response.

In short, it's not a problem having these date/category pages, provided you've got them formatted correctly. Basically, just make sure that on each of these pages, you're only showing the heading and a small snippet; usually a paragraph or two and maybe an accompanying image.

If you're doing this, search engines have no issue understanding that it's essentially an aggregation page rather than duplicate content. If you're unlucky enough to be working with a CMS that just dumps then entire posts onto each category/tag page then you're definitely playing with fire!

If you're using Wordpress, often the simplest way to go about doing this is using the "more" tag which you'll find at the top of the text area when writing a post. Clicking that button will add into the HTML which cuts the snippet off at that point and provides a "read more" link to the full article. Here is a link to more info about it, note that current versions of wordpress do look different to these screenshots; you're looking for a button that just says "more", rather than the icon they use here.

The best way to deal with it is to update your template to automatically cut it off at a certain length for you, it just depends on whether you have access to a dev to make this change.

This is a tough but common problem. In the perfect world, you'd hire a team of high quality content writers on a contract to populate each of these pages with genuine, unique content.

Since this isn't the perfect world, you're probably on a budget that doesn't allow this to happen. Assuming your site is already live, that means you no longer have to deal with the "push it live with sparse pages or spend a few more months preparing properly" conundrum.

That being the case, my suggestion here is always to just do it properly and it takes however long it takes. Assuming you've had the site up like this for some time, your rankings are unlikely to drop in the next month or so. Start populating content from the top down, namely from your primary landing pages to your category pages, subcategory pages then finally the individual products.

In my experience, ~300-500 words seems to be sufficient for a product page so you may be able to stretch that budget with a good writer to maybe 4 or 5 pages, maybe. It's more about offering value that an arbitrary word count anyhow.

You could always get them to do the first few and you follow their lead from there, perhaps getting them to proof-read the first 10 descriptions that you write? Not ideal and I'd only attempt this if your writing abilities are ok (they seem to be?). If you're going to go this route, I'd suggest using Grammarly to keep an eye on your spelling and grammar for you as well - it can integrate with Word if that's your tool of choice or you can type straight into their web app.

Anyhow, back on topic, doing it this way means your most valuable/sold/profitable products will be getting content first and you're not compromising on quality. We've done exactly this with a number of medium sized ecommerce sites and the results are always great (albeit in conjunction with other work we're doing). Naturally, the faster the better but you have to start somewhere.

There was a Whiteboard Friday on this exact topic and I think I just found it but the video is broken and it was old so they don't have the transcript The closest I could find was this one which is also quite old but worth watching. Don't forget that Google's intention is to ignore duplicated content so if you're just copying from other sites, there's a good chance you just won't rank with those pages.

Hope that helps!

Assuming you've only got one instance like this, search engines are typically smart enough these days to see this is an anomaly rather than a pattern of intentional spam.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to disavow them I suppose but if it were my site, I wouldn't worry about it. On the other hand, if you have a number of instances where this is happening, I'd look to address that quite quickly.

Google understands that weird things like this can happen to all of us and they can't be judging everyone by the individual links or perceived actions. As a perfect example of this, my latest client has never done any form of digital marketing. Looking at their backlink profile they have 7 quality, natural backlinks and 2 Polish spam/scraper sites in their backlink profile. They can't help having their site scraped, just like you can't control the structure of that site you have 45k links from

No problem Lauren,  happy to help.

I did just remember a working example of a strong company here in Aus that has split their services across multiple niche sites, no doubt for all the reasons I listed. They do rank very well for each of their niches; usually #1.

The site is http://www.carsales.com.au/. You can find their other sites under the "Our Sites" menu item in the top right corner of the nav and also under "Sites" in the footer.

This is about the best compromise I can think of, though I'd be hesitant about those followed links between each site. If you went this route, I'd suggest making them nofollow at least.

Best of luck with the campaign!

I agree with Eric here so I won't repeat what he has said, simply offer additional suggestions.

Firstly, you can click on each entry from that Crawl Errors window in your screenshot and from the window that pops up, check out the "Linked From" tab. It will show you all the pages this broken one has links from.

If you're having no joy finding them on the pages manually, you can try the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site and if the 404s show up here (if they don't they probably don't exist anymore and you can mark them as "fixed" in Search Console) then click them and check out the "Linked From" tab at the bottom. This tool shows you not only the pages it's linked from but also the anchor text so you can go to the linking pages and use ctrl+f to find the offening link(s).

Hope that helps!

Hi Ricky,

More often than not, when we see this from a new-to-us client, it's because their previous SEO provider put some content on their homepage and drove 100% of the links there but did nothing for the other landing pages.

If you're comfortable dropping your URL in here I'd be happy to take a closer look, but if this is the case for your site, I'd suggest starting by boosting the content on each of your landing pages (to give you an idea, our internal expectation is 1500+ words of quality content per landing page, styled so it isn't a wall of text) and revise your upage titles, meta descriptions and headings as well.

Working on building some links to these pages will also help out quite a bit. Basically, the common  mistake is to almost over-optimise the home page, ignore the rest and wonder why it's only the home page that ranks

Similarly, make sure your nav is as flat as possible and links directly to these landing pages rather than just from a broader "services" page or something.

1) Analytics data is based on the UA code on the page. Assuming your pages are built on a template, by default the UA code for yyy.com is going to receive the visit, not yours. You could ask them to put your UA code on there but... that kind fo defeats the purpose of having analytics in the first place when you're blurring the data!

2) From a user perspective, it would be a little confusing to click a top nav link and end up on another website, so yeah I would suggest putting that link somewhere else on the site and making it clear that they're about to leave yours. Bonus points for using target="_blank" to open that other page in a new tab, also for user experience.

**3) **Right again. If yyy.com has nothing to do with xxx.com (as in the owners of X and Y don't even know each other) then it's a very strange request and one I'd be hesitant to even entertain.

The quality of their site can hurt you to a minor extent, I'd just be more worried about the confusing user experience and the fact that you'd be electively sending your users to their site, while they offer you... what?

The reason they want that link up there is simply the implied strength of that location. Link value is typically seen in order of priority from top left to bottom right; a link in your top nav gives them a sitewide link from almost the very top of every page. Good for them I suppose, though sitewide links aren't great, but not something you should do.