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Hello,

I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+).

if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/

Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do?

Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Thank you in advance!

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?

HI!

I haven't seen any change today on my sites, but we suspect Google is playing with some sort of content-quality algorithm since the last June, so it could still going on. Have a look at this article:

http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/

Yes, everything looks good, Webmaster Tools gave me the expected results with the following directives:

allow: /directory/$

disallow: /directory/*

Which allows this URL:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/

But doesn't allow the following one:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory2/...

This page also gives an update similar to mine:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en

I think I am good! Thanks

Thank you Julie, appreciated!! I really don't understand why most of the times our website content is buried in the search results, whereas "crappy" websites are shown prominently before us... do you call that "quality" big G??!!

Thank you again for your kind words

Yes, I think that may be definitively a possibile cause for your lower rankings.  Can't you rewrite those links in a  way to make them visible?

Hello here,

I am putting down a link building strategy according to the latest "good practices" and Google recommendations, but I find myself often confused.

For example, I'd like to implement the technique suggested by Rand on his article below:

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/headsmacking-tip-1-link-requests-in-order-confirmation-emails

But if you look at the comments, a user suggests to "ask for links in exchange of discounts", and everyone there applaud him for the idea (Rand included). But, wait a second... am I the only one realizing that now days Google discourage to ask for links for "money, services, or any other kind of 'offered' benefit"?

So.. where to draw the line here?

Here are other examples that I am not sure are "safe" in link building:

1. Ask for links in exchange of a free Membership on a site (where usually a Membership is sold for a price)

2. Ask for links in exchange of exposure (isn't this a sort of "link exchange"?)

3. Ask for link in exchange of "anything else you can think of", even if necessarily doesn't involve money (i.e. for a "certified site badge", for a free e-book, or anything else)

I'd really like to know your thoughts on this very sensitive issue.

Thank you in advance to anyone for helping me to understand.

Marie, look at the following page, it is the main (first) page of our guitar index:

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

Now, if you want to browse the guitar repertoire to the second page of the index, you click the page "2" or "next" link right? And then the second page appears:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2&lpg=20

And so on... well, those subsequent pages are the ones I was talking about: they have the rel=prev and rel-next tags together with the canonical tag that refers to the main (first) index page, but many of those subsequent pages are still in the index, Shouldn't they disappear and only the first page kept in the index?

As for what you wrote about how I can expect a recover from Panda, it makes sense and I really hope this new integration of Panda into the main algorithm will gradually speed things up. Thank you for your opinion on that.

I think my approach will be to keep noindexing those pages that really don't bring any business first and in the meantime improve all the others one by one. To nonidex all pages and start releasing just the optimized ones one by one scares me too much!

Yes, I agree with ameliavargo, you could make just a single page including both keywords and potentially rank for both phrases. Boat and ferry are really similar, and I am not sure if you can really make two different pages differently relevant enough to rank both well. That could actually fireback.

I would definitively opt for a single optimized page which includes both words.

Sorry just found: it is actually setup with the domain "www.virtualsheetmusic.com" so that should be good! What do you think?

Thank you, I think you clarified the problem very well.

Appreciated your help!

The way I would do it would be to make a simple PHP (or Perl) program that every day, week or month (as you may need it), archives your sitemap.xml on a specific directory on your server, and possibly zip it. As a PHP programmer myself, I can tell you that that's really simply to do. Just ask to a PHP programmer, I am sure it will make it in a couple hours!

Thank you Wesley for your comment on the other thread about the Panda. We have decided to put back all the pages in the index and in the meantime try to differentiate and thick them more. Our traffic was down too much as well as our business was suffering too much that we couldn't keep up.

As for the bounce rate, that is pretty much from all our sources. Direct traffic has actually an higher bounce rate right now (58%), and used to be better in the past (38% in 2009), but on the Google side it is now 46.33% whereas used to be 57% in 2009. Referral traffic is about 50% bounce rate and used to be worse in 2009 at 53%. Please, note that in 2009 our business was going great. 2009 was the best year ever and we always take it as the reference the reference year.

I am aware that we need to get that down furthermore, but it is hard to understand how to do it. If I look at our website, I don't see anything misleading or anything for which users can be scared away, but maybe I need someone that can think more "out of the box".

I really appreciate your help and brainstorming!

All the best,

Thank you Peter, I got your ticket reply.

That makes perfect sense, and as Dr. Peter pointed out on a different thread:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-seomoz-bot-consider-these-as-duplicate-pages

I was discussing this issue further, I was confused by your report.

Thank you again for your help and I hope you will improve your report interface to avoid such confusion related issues in the future.

Best,

Fabrizio

According to mozcast:

http://mozcast.com/

and to my own stats, Google had a pretty strong algorithm update on September 17. Personally I have experienced a drop of about 10% of traffic coming from Google on most of my main e-commerce site virtualsheetmusic.com.

Anyone know more about that update? Any ideas about what changed?

Thank you in advance for any thoughts!

Best,

Fab.

If you use a MySQL database to store your website data, I think that to do this kind of automatic "archival" work by creating an automatic PHP script would take between 2 to 5 hours work. I don't see why it should take more than that.

If someone tells you that it is going to take more than that, I would be suspicious. Either the programmer is not good enough, or wants to cheat on you. That unfortunately happens more than you think!!

Be sure to ask for a step-by-step description of how they plan to complete the job. If you have doubts, please feel free to ask me, I am a pretty expert PHP programmer. I don't work for others, but just for myself (I built and keep tweaking my own websites virtualsheetmusic.com, musicianspage.com and others with very little help from external programmers).

Good luck!

I would need to have a look at your website to understand how it is structured, but I have a very similar case on my site virtualsheetmusic.com, and I think it is a common case for e-commerce websites in general as well, and I think the best way to avoid any issues is to use a rel=canonical tag.

For example, if your page URL for a search can vary in the following way:

http://www.yoursite.com/search.php [assuming this is the "default" page display]

http://www.yoursite.com/search.php?sort=title

http://www.yoursite.com/search.php?sort=title&filter=NY

I would put a rel-canonical like:

pointing to the "default" version of the page. That would avoid any duplicate issues very easily!

Also, if you have paginated content (2 or more pages results) you may want to add the rel=prev and rel=next definitions as suggested by Google:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

I hope this helps.

Thank you jStrong, I have just posted something on that thread too. I am glad to know I am not alone! I hope we can figure out what happened and possibly tackle the problem.

Thanks!

Hello here,

In the past I was able to find out pretty easily how many images from my website are indexed by Google and inside the Google image search index. But as today looks like Google is not giving you any numbers, it just lists the indexed images.

I use the advanced image search, by defining my domain name for the "site or domain" field:

http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search

and then Google returns all the images coming from my website.

Is there any way to know the actual number of images indexed? Any ideas are very welcome!

Thank you in advance.

Hello here,

I am trying to figure out the correct way to tell SEs to crawls this:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/

But not this:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory/

or this:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory2/sub-directory/...

But with the fact I have thousands of sub-directories with almost infinite combinations, I can't put the following definitions in a manageable way:

disallow: /directory/sub-directory/

disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/

disallow: /directory/sub-directory/sub-directory/

disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/subdirectory/

etc...

I would end up having thousands of definitions to disallow all the possible sub-directory combinations.

So, is the following way a correct, better and shorter way to define what I want above:

allow: /directory/$

disallow: /directory/*

Would the above work?

Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.

Best,

Fab.

Thank you Michael, it is my understanding then that my idea of doing this:

allow: /directory/$

disallow: /directory/*

Should work just fine. I will test it within Google Webmaster Tools, and let you know if any problems arise.

In the meantime if anyone else has more ideas about all this and can confirm me that would be great!

Thank you again.

Thank you Everett! That makes sense. I appreciated your help!

I'll let you know if I'll have any more questions about all this, but I think for now I'll have to work to cleanup my back link profile first... thank you again.

Thank you Donna for your reply, but that's exactly why I posted my concerns here: How do I know if a page or a set of pages are "causing" me to not rank? That's the purpose of this discussion... how do I actually know that any action of that kind, by "nuking" pages, will be causing me more benefit than damage?

A couple of years ago, I thought to be under a Panda penalty, and I started to remove from the index many of our product pages that I thought were not bringing us traffic or had low user engagement... well,  the only result we had was a steady decline of traffic because of the removed pages, that's all. I put all pages back after 6 months because we would have died miserably. After 6 months I concluded that we were NOT under a Panda penalty. IN fact, I put back all pages, traffic got back and we started to rank better than before (fortunate event??)

Also, if I we are under a Panda or similar penalty, why do we still rank well for some keywords? And, back again to square one: Why should we think to be under a Panda penalization if our content is actually less thin, less duplicate, and better handled with canonicals, noindex tages, etc, in order to cope with any possible Panda penalty than our well-ranked competitors??!

Thank you Kristen for your kind reply.

Yes, of course, I have considered that a thousand times. Do you really think that could cause so much trouble to make most of our rankings slip over the 10th or 20th page of the SERPS? Those pages you have mentioned on our website, are actually blocked by robots.txt, with the exception of the first page of course. My concern is about those first pages that should be able to rank anyway... unless you tell me that the contextual weight of the "subsequent" pages could play a role to "boost" the first page in some way if Google can spider and index them... but then, I'd be concerned with "too much similar or thin content" because by doing what our competitors are doing, I'd create thousands of additional pages with inside pretty much the same content (lists) organized in different ways... you see what I mean? Of course it seems to work for our competitor, but hence the contradiction and absurdity I was talking about above with the Panda algorithm: shouldn't all those thousands of extra and similar pages be bamboo for Panda?

I hope to have not confused you... I am just trying to find the elephant here that is causing the problem...

Thank you for your help!

This is a very good answer, thank you Kristen. The more I look at the "site structure" of my competitor compared to ours, the more I realize we need to work on that.

I have also started to think about the so called "siloing technique" Bruce Clay introduced a few years ago, and it looks like 8notes.com has done a very good job to follow that kind of concept, whereas we are probably "spreading" too much of our juice around thousands of different pages and categories... what are your thoughts on that?

Just a thought about the fact I have put those pages to be no indexed in the robots.txt file: If you look at those pages, you see they are generated dynamically from our internal search engine. And as you can see, you can filter results by clicking the filters on the left side of the page... which is a great thing for users, but can be problematic for search engines. Right? So.. that's why I decided to simply no-robot those pages, to avoid any possible indexing and crawling issues. So... how would you suggest tackling that problem? My first idea would be to create "static pages" for those dynamic pages linked from the category pages, and then block via no-robot the links of the filters on the left side... do you have any different ideas?

Thank you again for your help! Super-appreciated!

Thank you very much Julie, I really appreciated your words. I have wondered so many times what Google think of "quality", and why before us there are always very low quality websites distributing the exact same music for free (often copyrighted music, which is illegal) and most of those sites are full of ads. Is that quality?

We could open a new discussion thread on the "What is quality to Google?" topic, I think it'd be very popular!

Thank you again.

Any more thoughts on this?

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://mza.bundledseo.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

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!

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!