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!

This is the correct answer.

To expand on this slightly, just make sure none of the 404s are internal (ie there are no links on your site pointing to one of these dodgy pages as a result of the hack) and you're all good.

Remove the entries from your htaccess file to avoid having to parse them constantly and let any external links to dodgy pages 404. This sort of circumstance is exactly what 404s are made for!

The only site at risk of a ranking drop from these 404s is the one pointing to those dodgy pages - who cares about your hackers' rankings?

I've only ever seen the demos for Hubspot but from what I've seen, they're very different tools - both excellent at what they do, but very different.

MozPro gives you access to a bunch of metrics and research tools predominantly for SEO decision making while Hubspot is essentially an advanced CRM; a way to track sales metrics and guide leads through the conversion funnel.

Granted, they do track some on-site metrics and provide some very helpful info there as well but it's still quite different to the Moz suite.

If we decide to go with HubSpot next year, it'll be as well as Moz Pro.

Hi Rachel,

Not a problem, glad to hear you're on the right track! It's great to see the pages looking unique and much better for UX.

Looking at the elements flagged in your spam score breakdown, there are some relatively easy fixes in here still which may be contributing at least somewhat. To answer your question directly I would expect it will still be related to your link profile meaning less poor links and more quality ones will be the fix.

Don't forget that this score isn't a direct Google metric either. The entire Spam Score system is meant to be little more than a system of red flags for you to investigate - having a bad spam score isn't inherently a bad thing but it also shouldn't go ignored.

As for whether or not the Spam Score takes disavowed links into account, I can't find confirmation for this either way but I'd doubt it. This would require them having access to your Search Console to see the disavowed file.

Low MozTrust or MozRank Score / Large Site with Few Links These will obviously be resolved with ongoing link building but are likely the most significant factor in current score.

Small Proportion of Branded Links As you go about your link building, it tends to happen naturally but be sure to continue building links that use your brand name as the anchor.

Large Number of External Links You do have a fair volume of external links but they all appear to be legitimate so I'd ignore this one.

Low Number of Internal Links This one is quite valid. Beyond the nav I couldn't really see any internal linking practices going on. They shouldn't be promotional links within your blogs but just making sure that any piece of content that may be relevant to another page also includes a link. For example, if we mention Adwords on our SEO page, we'd include a link to our Adwords page for users who may want more information.

No Contact Info
May be caused by the fact that the phone number tends to show up with slightly unusual formatting in each instance; either:

• 855.4.CYNTOX (429.6869)
• 855.429.6869

I'd be interested to see if changing this to just 855 429 6869 would clear that flag in the spam score. Applying schema markup here may also help.

External Links in Navigation This seems to be referring to the nav links to your login areas so it's another area I wouldn't really worry about. Changing this would frustrate users for the sake of satisfying an arbitrary checkpoint in this list which is exactly what we're not supposed to do with a tool like this!

On an interesting side note, ahrefs is still showing 42 obviously spammy referring domains. This won't change anything to do with your spam score since Moz isn't pulling Ahrefs metrics but it may not be great for your Google rankings if they're seeing the same links.

Wow, so sorry about the slow reply here, things have been crazy the last couple of weeks!

Looking at a few of your blogs I see what you mean. They're not too bad but are probably a bit too keyword-stuff to keep as they are.

Having the keyword amongst the content isn't a problem (obviously!) but when it starts to feel unnatural, that's when you start turning users away. As an example, I had a look at this post and found the word Wyoming used 17 times in a fairly short post.

Paragraphs like this one really highlight the awkwardness:

From the moment you validate a business idea, to processing your business licensing requirements, incorporating in Wyoming, to finding the right financing, it takes up time, money, and effort.

I also noticed in that post that the first link points to the page you're already on!

Internal linking is important and for the most part appears to have been implemented quite well. If it were my website I'd be leaving the posts up but systematically working my way back through them to remove some of the keyword stuffing and fixing up any weird linking to make them read better.

As much as cutting them all and starting again would be technically correct, in the real world we need to make compromises like this to maintain existing rankings and income.

This is a tough one and a bit of a gamble either way I suppose. If the content was absolute rubbish (maybe horrible spelling and grammar or keyword-spammed) then the suggestion would be obvious - delete them and move on.

Being that it sounds like they're "ok" but just not up to your modern standards, the decision isn't quite so simple. Having them on your site isn't going to make it any slower unless they're adding redirects or something else to your site, the issue is whether or not their low quality is hurting you and it's tough to say without seeing them.

Very generally speaking, if they're free of errors, don't spam keywords or talk about dodgy subjects like online casinos or pharmaceuticals then you're probably better off leaving them there since they will be passing some relevance signals and they are bringing you traffic.

The one other thing I'd suggest checking is user engagement on those pages. Since Google is looking at this too, having an average session duration of 4 seconds for a 2,000 word post is a pretty clear red flag that whatever that page is about isn't worthy of being in their search results.

I've never personally tested this so I can't say what would happen if you just left everything to fall away over time but I prefer to be proactive with this sort of thing.

If these branches are essentially just a retail shop front then I'd lean toward closing that branch (in GMB) and having the other instances of that particular NAP removed too.

It's basically just a bit of housekeeping - you don't really want people to be coming across one of our branches that no longer exists and since you created these listings, it shouldn't be hard or time-consuming to remove them.

The only other step I'd suggest here is to Google the terms you think are likely to show that branch. Search for the company name and location and skim through the results to make sure you haven't missed anything out. You may even come across something like a genuine comment on some obscure forum referencing that branch.

Since you can't exactly have that comment deleted, you could always create an account and drop a comment in there saying that branch is unfortunately closed but there is a branch at [nearest location]. At least then anyone reading that thread in the future has an alternative.