Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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..

It would depend on whether the sites are related to your subject. If you were linking to whoever would return the link, no matter the subject - penalty. If you were linking to other sites related to your niche, benefit.  Think of it from SE's point of view - they want to see sites that are experts on a topic, and that real people link to.  So, given these two scenarios the focus is important.

Of course, focusing on getting real people to link to you is FAR more important, so I wouldn't do either. Guest blogging for example is a far better use of your time.

Yes, you should have a real 404 page.

• You'll help the people that follow their links - you should have a list of links that they might be looking for - and a search box.  Remember, you want these visitors to stay on your site, not bounce.
• Google wants you to have one. In fact many bots will test your site has a 404 page that returns the correct status (404 of course). Make sure you test yours. Many incorrectly return 200 (ok) status.

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.

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.

more linking root domains is almost always the answer, especially since you cannot "age" your domain (they may be older than you and benefiting from that). Just focus on quality links, not quantity (e.g. guest blogging)

Sounds like you need to send this question into customer service (open a ticket). Unless you suspect it's a problem with your site, in which case we'll need more information from you (domain for example)

I have raised this to the seomoz team a few times - it's a work in progress still. they are getting better, but my site still shows the same issues - duplicate content errors that even the semoz support team agree aren't really an issue because of canonical tags.

I suggest just ignoring that for now and waiting for an update.

Agreed. That's what I would do too

Yes rel canonical is an option too - BUT please be sure to do it correctly if you have pagination. Don't point page 2, page 3 etc back at page 1...

So you should end up with canonical's like this:

or

or

etc

Personally I'd keep all the old pages, and on them show a list of similar cars.. so if it was a Mustang, show other mustangs, etc.

Yes, you should fix it. Make sure that only one version of that page is indexed - presumably the one that a user first sees before sorting/filtering/etc. When I say one version though, I really mean one version for each category, and don't forget paging - let the SE's index each page.

Just hide all the sorting/filtering versions, the best method is to add a noindex, follow meta tag

yes that's all correct.

Just to add to this: here is how you 301 in vbscript:

<%@ Language=VBScript %> <%' Permanent redirection Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.domain.com/" Response.End %>

1. yes

2. yes, robots.txt works too - there are numerous ways to have the same effect. personal preference comes into it, plus one may be easier than another in your site/CMS. The reason I use noindex is that any page on my site could be accessed by https - so I prefer to dynamically throw noindex into any page that is accessed that way.

No difference - but it is true that some prefer | nowadays - more from a conversion point of view than for SEO. Google views them all the same.

yes, this is a problem! response.redirect is a 302 - you at a minimum should be using 301.

however, i recommend you get to the bottom of this and find out what the real intent is here. if one of the domains is old and needs to be shut down then redirects can make sense - but it might all be a mistake. Using 302's shows that whoever set it up didn't know too much about what they were doing

yes, generally you would noindex your about us, contact us, privacy, terms pages since these are rarely searched and in fact are so heavily linked to internally that they would rank well if indexed.

all search results should be noindexed - google wants to do the search

definitely NOT blog/category pages - these are your gold content!

I also noindex any URL accessed by https

Nice! So ask what the traffic is on that page, and go from there. Ignore SEO value for now and focus on how much traffic you'd get, and how you'd monetize that traffic..

Ouch, they are nasty. Hiding the links like that is dangerous - super easy to detect and can be viewed as deceptive. I would leave the articles, but at the very least remove the CSS that hides the links. I would probably remove all the links in the article.

Of course, if the articles are pure junk (I'm not sure) then get some nice ones written and replace them.

How long is your piece of string?

That's a hard question to answer - but I would not turn away a link from PR7 site, even nofollowed!  Is the page your link is on a PR7 though? Or just some lowly page elsewhere on the site..

As for value - what's the referral value of the link? How many visitors do you expect and what is your conversion rate? How much profit do you make from a conversion? You have to factor all this in.

Many people have paid $300 for a link on a sub-sub-category or Yahoo directory or BOTW and those pages aren't close to a PR7 (often PR0!)..

This is a perfect opportunity to use the canonical tag: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 so that only one of these pages is indexed.

Yep, only first link counts. So it is important that it's a text link!  A common problem is that people have a product image that links as the first link on the page to that URL.. with a text link below.. not good...

In short: Ideally you'll have one H1 per page, and it will be unique across the site.

I've toyed with this a number of times - and always stayed with growing and improving a single site. By splitting your focus amongst numerous sites I think you will get worse results - you'll have to build links to multiple domains instead of just one - with one site each link you get benefits the whole site! You're also running the risk of google filtering out some sites from the SERPs - especially if running from very similar or identical IP addresses.

Overall, it's something I'd discourage - even though I know you are thinking "better focus, smaller niche, more targeted" etc.. I know, I've been there

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

What's the problem that you need a solution to? If you dont want it indexed, add a noindex meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

Well, for a start, its very hard to see traffic figures for long-tail queries - by definition there are thousands of variations that may get only a search or two each month!  I'd focus on finding the keywords that make you money - the long tail will follow if you write good content and have a great natural link profile (varied anchor text)

Find the money keywords using adwords, then optimize your site for those.

I think this was more due to the bad link profile you created, not the PR numbers per se.

Also try the "trick" query of adding a /* to the URL.

site:domain.com/*

I always compare these results with the plain site:domain.com - it's conjecture but I believe the /* is showing the really indexed pages (primary index) and the other shows supplemental index. No-one really knows of course, but I track the percentage of one over the other as a way of measuring google's trust of your site. The numbers are relative, not absolute, but I use a yardstick of 20-30% as being good.

YMMV

Isn't it a bit of an contradiction to link to sites you don't trust enough with a followed link? If you are doing it for the users benefit a followed link is best almost all the time.

I would focus on adding truly valuable links, and follow them

I agree with Dejan SEO - I'd 302 the new to old right now, then 301 the old to new when launched

the safest route is to "noindex, follow" any page that is requested by https - this also squashes duplicate content when the user accesses non-cart pages using https...

Yes Mike, the trick is that whenever someone reposts your article they link back to the original version. That can be embedded in your content, or they will also get that from the in your RSS feed.

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.

In all likelihood you'll be ok if they link direct to the original content (not just a link on your site - the URL of the exact content). Also add a few links to other categories/products if you can.

If you are really concerned you could also just syndicate a brief summary of the article in the RSS..

I don't think this answer is very clear - noodp and noydir prevent google from using the open directory and yahoo directory data for your site in SERps - they have nothing to do with the page title on your website.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264

Sorry, don't have time right now to look at the real question - running out the door...

I haven't done this personally, so this is pure conjecture - but I would be a little concerned if the sites were mainly identical (layout, content, products) and running on the same (or very close) IP address. Who knows when/if it could be found, but this would be quite easy for Google to track and potentially treat as duplicate content. You may not see any effect now, but for the long-term I'd try to think of alternative strategies..

If they were treated as duplicates, then typically Google will pick one and hide the others from SERPs