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I expect some won't agree Donna. Trouble is, we're all guessing.. and we're guessing based on today's ideas. We've seen over the last 2-3 years just how quickly and radically the rules can change. Google has made it clear (I think) what they value. Links from real people writing content about you.
My 2c; I'm deleting all mine on BOTW now, even though I originally paid for a lifetime listing. It seemed such a good idea at the time.
Why am I deleting? Because Link Detox (for one) is now classifying BOTW as 'highly toxic'. I've come to agree with them. They are, at the end of the day, paid links.
Remember we were all told (and believed) that EzineArticles was the jewel in the crown of Article Directories. It hurt having to remove thousands of $$$ of articles from there last year. My tolerance for SEO BS has lowered in recent years - and I no longer do anything that isn't 'real' (and by that I mean a real person on the other end of the link)
My 2c; I'm deleting all mine now, even though I originally paid for a lifetime listing.
Why? because Link Detox (for one) is now classifying BOTW as 'highly toxic'. I've come to agree with them. They are, at the end of the day, paid links.
Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains.
As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too.
We're getting there 
Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you.
Thanks. It's going to be a long weekend
Thanks Chris. The redirect from .com to .org just started in December 2012. Every page on .com was 301'd to the relevant page on .org - so after 6 months of telling google about this I'm still amazed that the .com still stays in the index.
But then, some of my top backlink domains according to GWT don't link to me any more. Google is super slow in updating it seems. One was a forum that had a link in my signature that I removed 6 months ago- still shows at #4 backlink domain.
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why?
More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request.
Two weeks later, Google refused, saying..
"We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes."
We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites.
Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site?
What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them?
Any other tips/tricks?
I have an e-commerce site that sells around 1,500 SKU's.. but there are some huge categories that we really never sell anything in.
I'm thinking of deleting a lot of underselling products. When I put it like that of course, you'll probably agree - but I'm hesitant because I have to wonder what Google will think of my site going from (say) 1,000 products and unique URL's to 500.. or lower. Removing that many URL's, products and product categories worries me that we may be viewed as a smaller store and have a negative impact.
What effect would you expect from removing a lot of products? Who has done this?
Perhaps they mean the keywords coming from those geographic regions? They are different after all.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
My instinct says that (if you are .com) they would be far less useful because they are not from your country - unless you really are targeting international search which I have no experience in. Of course if your TLD matches, you're golden..
Yes, you should have a real 404 page.
If you want to keep (some of) the linkjuice, and you know where they want to go, you would 301 redirect to the correct destination.
+1
blog.domain.com is effectively a different site, so you lose out by spreading the love amongst two sites..
Do they or you have in-house developers? If so, going the open-source route will give them huge advantages over time when you want to modify the CMS. I wrote my own CMS years ago and I'm still finding things to improve - and many of my competitors with their OOTB CMS cannot keep up with changes.
Ah, the classic unanswerable question.
Many people have asked - and many people have guessed at the answer. There are numerous ways people have approached this "problem" - some nofollow outbound links, some use javascript to hide the links entirely from bots.
I keep coming back to the advice - what would you do if there were no search engines? Building your site to make sense for people is still the advice that google offers.
Personally, I like linking out to relelvant topical sites from my ecommerce sites. I'm not being stingy with links to helpful places. I do however nofollow all my comments - for obvious reasons.
There are numerous ways for google to find your URL even if it doesnt have a regular link to it - security by obscurity isnt very effective, if you truly dont want anything to be crawled hide it behind a login.
I'm not sure how these pages are being created obviously but I wouldnt redirect - instead remove them from index using meta tag or robots.txt. Or just delete them
Don't miss the obvious - title is a conversion tool not just for SEO. This is what makes your customers click on your page in SERPs and on your category pages. You should consider making the titles (and meta descriptions) better at "selling the click" not just from a keyword SEO point-of-view..
A because it's easier to read - use the rel=canonical tag to "redirect" index.html to /
or do a real 301 redirect. the key here is to only have one of these indexed, or you will get duplicate content.
with that super-flat structure you are missing out on the category and subcategory keywords being present in your product URL. It's minor, but I wouldn't do it that way. The traditional category/subcategory/product is preferred.
Have you done this yourself and are talking from direct experience or is this just a "feeling"? Not bashing you, just curious because some answers like this are too easy to write what everyone assumes rather than real experiences. I'm very interested in this question too - I have a similar situation.
"a lot more sites per visit" - I assume you mean pages per visit?
Don't rely on tricks like splitting the articles up over many short pages to increase your page views. You're only annoying your readers.
Instead focus on creating more and better content! There is no substitute for great topical content to keep visitors on your site!
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