Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We have a similar issue. We contracted with an agency to redesign and migrate our website to WordPress, using the YoastSEO plugin. The pages do not have a meta description, however there is an og:description. Will Google/Bing use the og:description tags as the snippet when a meta description is missing? My instincts say no, but the agency says they use this solution all the time and haven't run into issues.

I feel very silly for posting this question.

Looking at the Pubmed source:

Doh!

Content from our medical journals gets indexed by the National Library of Medicine / PubMed on a monthly basis. The link to the full article appears in the upper-right corner on PubMed, yet I'm unable to find PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) backlinks in the reporting tools.

Example:
Article Title: Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Children (allintitle query)
Article URL: http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html
PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21243988

The PubMed link is to http://www.aafp.org/link_out?pmid=21243988 ,
a 301 redirect to the article, http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html

Any idea why this link isn't appearing in backlinks? This isn't just for one article, we have roughly 2,000 articles from 1998 to the present. Articles from the past 12-months are access-restricted, and after 12-months the articles become public.

First, forgive me if I miss something obvious. I'm a user experience designer who handles all SEO efforts for our organization in my spare time. This question is about our patient / health education website, http://familydoctor.org

NIH's Medline Plus ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ ) has linked to http://familydoctor.org for a very, very long time, before we had advertisements on the site. To get an idea of where Medline Plus links to familydoctor.org, visit http://goo.gl/1yaofC or use the following query in Google.com: site:www.nlm.nih.gov inurl:medlineplus American Academy of Family Physicians

After we redesigned and started putting ads on FD.org, I think these two things happened simultaneously, we received a contact from someone at NIH stating they could no longer link to our site because of the ads. NIH is a highly-trusted and ranked domain, so we agreed to let them link to the printer-friendly versions of our content to avoid the ads.

A few years later, we restructured the content. For an article about depression, instead of having one page with all of the content ( http://web.archive.org/web/20090215071258/http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/common/mentalhealth/depression/046.html ), we broke it up into many shorter pages ( http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/depression.html ), such as Overview, Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment, etc. I don't know if NIH crossed anyone's mind until go-live day, when we noticed a high number of referrals to the error page coming from NIH.gov. We wanted to fix this quickly, so Medline didn't stop linking to us and Google didn't de-value the relationship because of the broken links.

We redirected all of the printer-friendly links from the previous site to the printer-friendly whole article (lets you see all the information on one page) on the new site. We did this because there is no way to move between now split up content pages in the split up printer-friendly versions of the site. Even if there was, we didn't think NIH would take too kindly to this.

There is a return to the web link on the printer-friendly whole article page. This is a followed link and I realize the anchor text could be improved. We added the following on printer-friendly pages in an effort to not get penalized by search engines for duplicate content.

Are we doing all we can to take advantage of these high-value links? Is the meta robots tag necessary, helpful, or not?

Thank you for the prompt and comprehensive reply! The /online/en/home is structure created by our web content management system. We have a consultant for our CMS coming in next month, so I'll definitely see if this is something we can address.

We're hoping to restructure the Past Issues pages for the online version of our twice-monthly medical journal.  Right now the Current Issue page (sort of a truncated table of contents) gets replaced twice each month, when a new issue is available.

The current location of for our past issues page is shown below:

Home Page > News & Journals > Journals > American Family Physician > Past Issues

Under Past Issues, there is a page for each year. 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - etc (back to 1998).

Is there an advantage to putting all of the Past Issues on a single page? This would be 24 issues per year, which is just over 250 links on a single page and it would grow by 24 each year.

I'll attach a couple of screen shots of ideas I'm considering. One is an expandable navigation using jQuery for each year, listing all Past Issues on a single page. The other is making the links to the 3 most recent issues available in the left nav across all Past Issues pages.

Do you have other suggestions for how we might structure this?

cydxG.png PDXT9.png

I feel very silly for posting this question.

Looking at the Pubmed source:

Doh!