Any more thoughts on this?

Thank you Samuel for your reply as well.

Yes, what you describe is exactly what I also learned: no need to be too much "redundant" about keywords, but SEs will understand from the surrounding context... well, fact is some of our competitors are doing what I am suggesting here and they are dominating the 1st spot on Google for most of the keywords we are competing with. They also have a more clear "siloed" category-sub-category structure than us, which suggests this technique combined with the siloing technique help a great deal (also, note that for most category pages we compete with, we have much more external links than them! Hence my though that a more clear, siloed structure could help)

And of course, anything we do is with the user in mind: ALT text is always meant for users first, but I don't see harm in being a little bit redundant on that if it could help with SEO as well, don't you?

Thank you again very much, and please, any additional idea you may have is very welcome!

Thank you Rob for your extensive reply.

I see what you mean, and I am aware of that. This "link technique" suggestion is part of a bigger plan I am working on where the goal is to create a more "siloed" structure to increase topical relevancy as I have discussed on this other thread of mine:

https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues

And even though that's a minor thing, everything adds up. For example, we have recently moved from http to https and that's also is a minor thing, but adds up with all other improvements we are working on.

As for your suggestion:

"I would consider is replacing the example music videos from your specific instruments pages to your home page so visitors know what kind of quality they are getting if they subscribe."

I don't exactly understand what you mean, are you talking about our own produced Music Expert videos or the YouTube videos inside our product pages submitted by the users?

Thank you again

Hello everyone,

I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy.

Here is an example (I'll keep it simple):

Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories:

• Christmas

• Classical

• Traditional

So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like:

"christmas violin sheet music"

"classical violin sheet music"

"traditional violin sheet music"

I would be tempted to make the above links as follows:

Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music

But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs.

My questions are:

1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint?

2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do?

I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!

Thank you Chris for your in-depth answer, you just confirmed what I suspected.

To clarify though, what I am trying to save here by noindexing those subsequent pages is "indexing budget" not "crawl budget". You know the famous "indexing cap"? And also, tackling possible "duplicate" or "thin" content issues with such "similar but different" pages... fact is, our website has been hit by Panda several times, we recovered several times as well, but we have been hit again with the latest quality update of last June, and we are trying to find a way to get out of it once for all. Hence my attempt to reduce the number of similar indexed pages as much as we can.

I have just opened a discussion on this "Panda-non-sense" issue, and I'd like to know your opinion about it:

https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues

Thank you again.

You are right, hard to give advice without the specific context.

Well, here is the problem that I am facing: we have an e-commerce website and each category has several hundreds if not thousands of pages... now, I want just the first page of each category page to appear in the index in order to not waste the index cap and avoid possible duplicate issues, therefore I want to noindex all subsequent pages, and index just the first page (which is also the most rich).

Here is an example from our website, our piano sheet music category page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html

I want that first page to be in the index, but not the subsequent ones:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html?cp=2

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html?cp=3

etc...

After playing with canonicals and rel,next, I have realized that Google still keeps those unuseful pages in the index, whereas by removing them could help with both index cap issues and possible Panda penalties (too many similar and not useful pages). But is there any way to keep any possible link-equity of those subsequent pages by noindexing them? Or maybe the link equity is anyway preserved on those pages and on the overall domain as well? And, better, is there a way to move all that possible link equity to the first page in some way?

I hope this makes sense. Thank you for your help!

Hello everyone,

Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages?

For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page?

The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?

Sure, I understand, that makes sense. Thank you for your help!

Sorry guys, I wasn't enough clear with my first question above, it was actually too generic.

To cut to the chase, I am talking about our main website:

www.virtualsheetmusic.com (IP 66.29.153.48)

and our affiliate website which is:

affiliates.virtualsheetmusic.com (IP 66.29.153.50)

They have 2 different IPs, but they are on the same server and same network, of course their are on the same IP block.

And I'd like to know to what extent the activity/status of one site can affect the other, but from what you are asking, I guess they could affect each other to some extent. I mean, Google could understand that they are part of the same "network" and then associate them anyway... right?

Thank you Vijay for your extensive answer, but as I wrote above, each sub-domain has its own separate IP address. So... if each sub-domain has its own IP address, are they treated as two completely different websites?

Hello everyone,

I have a basic question for which I couldn't find a definitive answer for.

Let's say I have my main website with URL:

www.mywebsite.com

And I have a related affiliates website with URL:

affiliates.mywebsite.com

Which includes completely different content from the main website. Also, both domains have two different IP addresses.

Are those considered two completely separate domains by Google? Can bad links pointing to affiliates.mywebsite.com affect www.mywebsite.com in any way?

Thanks in advance for any answer to my inquiry!

Thank you Oleg for confirming. I think a lot of people should be aware of this as well!

Thank you again.

Hello everyone.

I was reading this article on semrush.com, published the last year, and I'd like to know your thoughts about it:

https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-google-crawl-relnofollow-at-all/

Is that really the case? I thought that Google crawls and "follows" nofollowed tagged links even though doesn't pass any PR to the destination link. If instead Google really doesn't crawl internal links tagged as "nofollow", can that really help with crawl budget?