Normally the only thing which will prevent a page from ranking is noindex tag. If you don't want to have it indexed just noindex it, if that page has been laready indexed, put the noindex tag and delete from index using GWT option.

Concerning the canonical tag thing, it will consolidate the seo value in one page but it won't prevent those page to appear in rankings, however you may have two cases:

1. the two or more pages are identical. In that case google may accept the canonicalization and show always the original page.
2. the two or more pages are slightly different, it's the case of paginated pages which are canonicalized using rel next/prev. In that sense the whole value will be consolidated in page 1 but then the page which will be shown in the rankings will be the one which responds to that query, for example if someone is looking for blue glass, google will return the page which shows blue glass listing if that's different from the first one.

Hope this may help you!

Yes that happened to me a couple of years ago too.

If you're redirecting a lot of different content to the exact same generic page (like a section/category homepage) google will consider that the page is like a container, not the location where that exact content was moved. A clear signal for them would be that they can't find any portion of the old content.

Here you can read some guidance from google regarding returning 404s. It seems that mask 404 witha 301 is not the way to go anymore, just limit that to pages with backlinks pointing there, because if not you can just return 404 and delete those pages from google index (you don't want google to waste your crawl budget on those pages).

Hope this helps!

Hi Moby, first of all the difference between all the tags you mention:

• canonical: is a meta tag which indicates which page containing the same content is the original one, It may be used from one page to another to indicate which one is the main one or a as a self canonical indicating the same page where it is located, because you can avoid duplciates due to sessions id or other kind of tags (trackings and the like)
• noindex: is a meta tag which indicates to bots to not include that page to their index. It's used to avoid low quality pages to being shown in serps
• nofollow: is both a meta, used to avoid search engines to crawl all the links in one page, or is used attached to a link to indicate bots to not pass value to that link.

So if you got pages which are identical you want to use the canonical in both the original page (as a self canonical) and in the other oines pointing to the original one. If they're are almost identical. If they're not you may want to:

• noindex those duplicates
• add quality content to the other regions pages so google finds that they're not identical at all.

Maybe your regions pages are seen as identical due to:

• low content, an image and slight changes to the title tag is not enough to mark a page as different, try to add good content, or mash content from other pages.
• is the content accessible when not logged in? If not google is seeing identical pages because its bots cannot crawl the content (bots cannot login)

About the login page you may noindex it, but I don't see any hurry to  make changes to that page.

Hope that helps!

Hi Eric, in my experience I've always found 4** better than 301 to solve this kind of issues.

Many people uses this response too much just because they want to show google that their site don't have any 404.

Just think about it a little, a 301 is a permanent redirect, a content which has just moved from one place to another. If you got a content you want to get rid of, do you want to give google the message "hey that low quality content is not where you found it but  now it's here", no. You wan't to give google the message that the low quality content has been improved or removed. And a 404 is the right message to give him if you deleted that content.

It's prefectly normal to have 404s in a website, many 404 won't hurt your rankings, only if those pages were ranking already so users will receive a 404 instead and if some external sites were linking there in that case you may consider a 301.

While I think that google has a sort of a black list (and a white list too) I don't think that it has a memory of bad sites he encounters, if you fix your issues you'll start to rank again.

The issue you may have is not that you're site may be tainted but that maybe you still have some issues here and there which you didn't fix. As it seems Googlers said that Panda is now part of the algo so if you fix your issues you won't need any upgrade to start re ranking.

Hope this may have helped!! G luck!

Hi Ve. A 404 is generated when someone reach a page which doesn't exist, so to have someone reaching such a page you need to give them a path to it. There may be two different paths:

• internal. You can remove this internal path changing all the links pointing to the old url to the new one.
• external. This may be trickier. There may be:

1. external sites pointing with links to the old page. In this case you need to think if it's really worth to change the url. If it is, get in touch with those websites and ask them to change the link.
2. Google having indexed that page and make it rank. That cannot be changed by YOU.

So make all the internal and external possible fixes

change your sitemap and submit that to google webmaster tools

and then you'll need to modify your htaccess (if your server is driven by apache, which 90% normally do) and create a rule which redirects from the old page to the new one. In that way even if the external site doesn't change the old link the user won't receive a 404 but will be redirected to the new page, and google will drop the old url (in a week or so it depends on the crawling rate) and then index instead the new one.

For the htaccess rule if you're not experienced with that kind of file leave that to your it guys, because a wrong comma there, may brake the whole site.

Hope this is clear

Well Google can index the iframe but not as Rogerio would like to.

Google can see the src link pointing to the infographic page sowhen following that google will index the content contained in the iframe but don't count with such kind of links as being valuable for you.

What I don't understand is that you want to use the iframe instead of the image because you got links in it. Why not brake the image and build it as a table and link each portion of it to the url you want? Use flash and embed the links? Or map the image to indicate zones where the links should be? I think there are more frendlier ways to put links without recurring to the iframe to have links in your infographic.

Or simply you can put a tinier version of that infographic and if someone wants to see full image they need to reach your site where they'll find all the links. Hope this may help!

Hi Eric, I'll try to answer your further question even if I'm not an oracle like Pete

First of all thanks Pete to underline that you need to give google just one response since you can't give them both 301 and 404, I was assuming that and I didn't focus on that part of Eric's answer.

Second. Eric, If your purpose is to give google the ability of recrawl the old content to let them see it has disappeared you want to give them a 404 or a 410 which are respectively not found and permanently not found. Before it was a difference but now they've almost the same value under google's eyes (further reading). In that way google can access your page and see that those contents are now gone.

In the case of 403 the access is denied to anyone both google and humans, so in that case google won't be able to access and recrawl it. If your theory is based (and I think you're in the good way) upon the thing that google needs to recrawl your content and see it ahs really gone, 403 is not the response you should give it.

Technical onsite is pretty important for a successful SEO but you still have several opportunities out there:

• onsite content creation: you can create new content to implement on the site and target your core keywords with LSI data

• title and meta optimization: I don't consider this technical but it's pretty key to get better rank and most importantly better CTR

• sitemaps: create sitemaps to better diagnose the site. I imagine the dev team may have other priorities but bugs should be handled anyway, especially important ones

• find 404 with traffic/links and redirect them

• lnikbuilding. This one is always tricky depending on resources.

• If you can create new pages do some broken linkbuilding and some ego baits (mention other in order to get them to link back to that content)

• influencers marketing in social media. Build up your community and get ready to share stuff, they will return the favor when you need it

• guest posting. There are a lot of sites that accept free guest posts, depending on the niche.

• cocitation. Get links where your competitors did (exception made for PR stuff)

• skyscraper technique. Find the best content in your niche and make it better, then get the links that content had.

as Paul correctly said, if your purpose is to improve the page speed just be sure that you're not resizing the images with css/html but that you're uploading the images in that dimensions.

An image of 10241024 resized to 100100 still weights as an 1024 image so my recommendation is to resize all those images to the desired dimensions, moreover if you can use an external cdn you'll save bandwith and have those images loading outside your website. That will help reducing the loadtime of the page.

• Hey Gianluca, thanks for responding to my answer.

  I agree that LSI is not a pure metric, and in the past when I used TF-IDF content, it didn't prove to work all the times in all markets. Despite that I think that both LSI and TF-IDF are recognized method to gather information about related keywords and provide to content writers additional insights.

  It's not the same when you request an article to a content writer about "Blue ribbons" than providing them information about related keywords, keywords suggested by Google and Questions related using askthepublic. The connection of the three is what I call LSI data, not 100% what google intends with pure LSI (based on the huge amount of data they have) but pretty accurate IMO.

Sitemap and robots are not required but recommended. However you may find sites which doesn't need them jsut because they're really tiny or which doesn't want to show they blocked pages to competitors.

Sitemap may be the same, you don't want to show to your competitors your site structure or your site is so small that is useless. Also a sitemap may be useful for you to be sure that google is aware of all you urls and that those urls are crawled constantly.

For a classified ads site I'll recommend to use map for categories. You want google to rank those pages because there are the ones rankings for broader keywords and attracting users which may convert. Create one or more sitemap (with an index), based on how many urls you have, (limits for each sitemap are 50k urls per sitemap).

I'll also recommend  you to canonicalize you paginated series to the main page and submit only the first page. In that way google will focus on the first page and consolidating all the value there.