Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Have you checked your traffic and ranks? This could just be an issue with index reporting. If traffic and ranks are stable then no need to worry.

If however traffic has declined, there is certainly an issue, check:

• have you received a penalty
• use site: command to see what URLs are actually showing Google index
• fetch and render to see how Google see's your pages
• run a crawl of your site using Screaming Frog or other such tool
• is there issue's with 404 / 500 or No response pages
• has dev deployed anyting like moving to https without applying 301 redirects

I think first is to determine, if this is an actual issue or not. Then if it is, run some serious analysis to determine cause and apply a fix.

Many thanks,

Hi,

If you're paying to have a presence on a website and not doing it to pass PageRank, that's fine. You must, however, request that the website owner places a 'nofollow' attribute on the link to ensure no PageRank is passed. Google have a page here on how to do this and what it means.

If the link doesn't have a 'nofollow' attribute, you will be violating Google's guidelines and that is very much a dangerous tactic.

Here is some further reading so you can put your mind at ease:
Google's page on Link schemes
A reminder about selling links that pass PageRank Why do paid links violate Google's guidelines while other ads don't? (Video)

Hi,

Yes - you absolutely should do this. As you said, 301 redirects would be the way to go as these pass almost all of the link juice to the page you redirect to. If there's not an easy way to add redirects using your CMS, you can use your .htaccess file but this is very powerful and can cause server issues. If you're unsure, ask your developers or better still, send them a list of old pages and where they should be redirected to implement them for you.

Hi Ram,

Yes, you absolutely should redirect all of your HTTP pages and other resources to the HTTPs version to prevent the situation you describe happening. It's likely Google will see duplicates of each of your pages which will cause ranking issues.

There's a great check-list at the bottom of this blog post by Cyrus Shepard which will take you through everything you need to do.

Hi,

Although it seems slightly strange, I can't see any significant SEO issues which it might cause. Have you asked the client why they want to do this? As I'm sure you know, usually one page should focus on one topic and therefore require one link from a main navigation.

Something worth considering would be the internal anchor text which Google will take in to consideration for the linked-to page. If you have 2 or more links on one page linking to the same page, Google will use the first instance of the link as the anchor text. This is something you may want to have a think about.

Hi David,

To be honest, I'm quite surprised that you used to rank strongly for that search term. I've only looked at your on-page SEO and, although your homepage gets an A grade on Moz's On-Page Grader, there's quite a lot you can do to improve things.

Firstly, do you really want your homepage to rank for this term? Unless there's a very good reason, I usually only want the homepage to rank for branded terms (in your case, searches for Unique Magazines). I would recommend creating a new page to target 'Magazine Subscriptions' using something like http://www.uniquemagazines.co.uk/magazine-subscriptions/ as the URL. You can then optimise this page much more freely.

Currently your homepage doesn't include the targeted keyword at the start of the title tag, it only uses the term in an H3 tag (not exact match) rather than an H1 tag and there is very little text on the page for Google to understand the topic of the page. Creating a new page should give you the flexibility to improve all of these things. You can also build internal links to the new page using 'Magazine Subscriptions' as the anchor text.

Hi Felicity,

That's the magic of Google - they just know what's happening

A good way to test which tags are on your pages is to use Google's Tag Assistant. You can easily install it as a Chrome Add-On, reload the page you're interested in and it will show you which tags are present on your page. I checked your website homepage and your blog and both have Google Analytics tags present.

Try for yourself and let us know if you find the same.

Hi there,

I strongly suspect this is an issue with the way your theme is configured. Yoast is a fantastic plugin but it's not very forgiving with poorly configured themes. This is what I think is happening - within SEO > Titles and Metas, you probably have the 'Noindex subpages of archives' option ticked. Try unticking this option, save the changes, refresh your homepage, look at your source code and my guess is that the 'noindex' attribute will be gone.

Could you let us know how you get on?

Hi Carlos,

I couldn't agree with Keri more. Using these kinds of outdated practices will result in two things - a short-term increase in rankings, followed by a penalty from Google (possibly with a complete removal from their search result pages).

Google is really smart (and getting smarter) at finding this kind of activity and it is a clear breach of their guidelines. If you do a Google search for 'Google ScrapeBox Penalty' there are lots and lots of articles about sites which have been hit. Also try searching for 'Google blog network penalty' and read some of the thousands of articles.

Quite simply, you're risking your site (or worse, your clients' sites) with a Google penalty. It's not if but when you get hit. Would you feel comfortable explaining to your client/boss that their site no longer appears even when someone searches for the brand name? I definitely wouldn't!

I'd strongly urge you to reconsider and take a look at more ethical methods of doing SEO. Yes, it will take longer, yes, it will be frustrating at times but it will also be so much more rewarding that you're actually making the internet a better place and no just filling it with junk and spam.

Good luck Carlos!

Hi Ben,

Sponsoring events is a great link building tactic. As the link will come as a side-effect of the sponsorship rather than from direct payment, Google will not penalise you for this. Imagine the reverse - companies would be far less likely to sponsor events, support charities etc if Google were to start penalising them.

Here are a few posts you can look to for reassurance:
http://moz.com/blog/5-link-building-tactics-to-improve-your-local-rankings
http://www.wordtracker.com/blog/33-seo-experts-share-their-most-effective-link-building-strategies
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2064922/131-legitimate-link-building-strategies

Hi,

Just to let you know it's quite easy to find the domain of the site in question from the screenshot you provided

I think as you've created a new sitemap and submitted it to Google and removed all the pages so they return 404s, you should be fine. The page will just drop out of the index in time. You might also want to add the address of your XML sitemap to your robots.txt file as it's not there at present.

I crawled the site using Screaming Frog and couldn't see any dodgy looking pages remaining. You could create removal requests of the pages in Webmaster Tools if you'd like to take an extra step. Do this under Google Index > Remove URLs. To prevent this happening again, make sure you keep your WordPress installation and all plugins up to date.

I think that would be a great solution with a really clear incentive for the shopper to convert. On the Moz post I linked to, Stephanie wrote about using cookies to implement a message after a redirect under the 'Dynamically-Generated Messages' sub header. Unfortunately it's well beyond my coding skills but I'm sure a developer could help you out.

Howdy,

As you suggested, there are a few approaches you can take here. There's a really thorough article/discussion on Econsultancy on exactly this topic as well as a Moz blog on the same topic. I'd have a read of those and decide which approach is really best for you.

If you decide to go down the redirect route, there's no need for a developer to be involved. There are loads of plugins for WordPress you can use to create your own redirects but this one would probably suit your needs.

You have some good answers from Ryan and Hutch there. Press releases should be used as part of a larger overall strategy and not be the only thing you're doing to build links and/or drive traffic.

As Hutch said, by all means, if you have something useful to say, why not do a press release? If you're just doing it for the sake of it, you'd need to consider what the benefit is.

Ryan said it better than I could but definitely steer clear of spun press releases as this all this will do will give a short cut to getting yourself a penalty.

I'd look to invest in a more complete content strategy if you haven't already. If you're still looking for more traffic and have the budget, have you considered using a content distribution network such as Outbrain or Taboola? This can be a great way to get more eyeballs on your content and also build links. Here's a great post on using content distribution networks written after a test carried out by Seer Interactive. Rand also did a Whiteboard Friday a few weeks back on how paid media can have SEO benefits. This is something I've done in the past with really good results.

Hi Riccardo,

There are couple of errors with your code there. Firstly, the noindex attribute is used at a page level, not link level. If you want to noindex a page you should use the meta robots tag on the page itself. There is more information on the meta robots tag here. The nofollow attribute however, can be used at link level. You're essentially telling the search engines not to crawl this link.

Secondly, the attribute isn't wrapped around any text so it's wasted code having it there. If you want your anchor text, 'Kumar' to be in italics, you should close the tag after the word. Also, replacing the tag with an tag (short for emphasis) is considered good practice.

____Finally, try not to use spaces in your anchor text. Modifying your code in this way will give you this:

If you want the anchor text to be in italics:
Kumar

If you do not want the anchor text to be in italics:
Kumar

If you're interested in learning more about HTML (it's really easy!) W3C Schools is a good place to start.

Happy coding!____

You'll definitely need to add a link to the source anyway but even so, I'd carefully check the terms and conditions of the sites you mentioned to see whether they allow this.

If you're adding a timeline, I presume it won't be updated very often so I'd really urge you to create your own content rather than take it from another source. It sounds like a very risky strategy to me.

Hi John,

Can I ask why you would want to 'copy articles' from another source? What value will you be providing to your readers if the articles are available elsewhere, especially on really high authority sites like the ones you mention?

Surely a better way would be to provide content of genuine interest and value to your readers. Also, I presume that the sites you mention will also have copyrighted content on their site so it may not be a great long-term strategy for you.

I completely agree with Massimiliano. There's absolutely no reason why you should receive any kind of penalty for this.

Hi Branislav,

The way that canonicalisation works is with duplicate content. As your signup page is completely different to your homepage (not duplicated), it's likely that Google will simply ignore any canonical element you place on the page so it would be a waste of time. As you have links on the signup page back to your homepage, you're likely to get at least some of the benefit anyway.

If you're really keen on having your homepage getting more authority, have you tried contacting the person who gave you the link and asking them to change it for you? Explaining the benefit to them of doing so (allowing visitors from their site to get more information about you before signing up) would really help too.

Hi,

Can you tell us why you think you were hit by that specific update? Did you see a drop in organic traffic from Google around the date the update went live? If you use GA you can overlay your traffic using Barracuda's Panguin Tool which will show you when your traffic dropped and how it coincides with Google's algorithm changes.

Are there any particular search terms you've lost ranking for?

I've taken a very quick look at your back link profile and it looks okay, just a few spammyish looking links like the highly optimised one here.

Also, have you checked GWT to see if you have a manual penalty?

There looks to be a few on-site issues (multiple H1 tags etc) but nothing that would point towards a penalty. If you could get back to us on the points above, we can take a closer look for you.

Hey Tamir,

You have a couple of solid answers below from Ryan and Marie - I'd definitely follow their advice. I quickly ran your site through Open Site Explorer to look at all external links to your site (you can see the results here) and it looks like this is where your problem lies. You have lots of links from a small number of domains with very keyword rich anchor text. For example, every page on the http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/ site has a link to your site with 'Holiday Rentals' as the anchor text. Google is likely to see this as pretty spammy activity, especially as you have virtually no links with URL or branded anchor text.

I'd recommend cleaning up your back link profile (either adding nofollow attributes to your links or changing the anchor text if possible).

Hi Parodi,

Including your targeted keywords in your URL is definitely recommended. As a general rule, people should be able to read the URL and understand what the page is about before clicking. Pete Meyers wrote a great post on this a few years back but all of the information in it is still very much valid today.

One really important thing to note - if you do change your URLs to include your targeted keywords (and there's no real reason you shouldn't), remember to redirect the old versions properly using 301 redirects.

One final thing you might want to try if you haven't already is Moz's On-Page Grader Tool which will look at important on-page ranking factors for your targeted search term and give you a list of things you can do to improve the relevancy of the page.

Hi,

There's an update to Mozscape scheduled for tomorrow (11th March). You can keep track of the update on the API page at http://moz.com/products/api.

A better (faster and more accurate) way to measure progress of your SEO campaign is through your Analytics account. There's a ton of blogs on Moz about this at http://moz.com/blog/category/analytics.

Hi,

Let's get the sub domain/sub directory question out of the way first. Rand did a Whiteboard Friday on this recently which answers everything you could ever wish to know so take a look. (The answer is sub directory by the way.)

Now, let's look at the trickier part of your question. I understand your concerns but I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Using headline, aggregate data from your analytics really won't give you any insights which you can use to improve the performance of your website and business. All this data will tell you is how all of your visitors (those from organic search, paid search, social, email, display etc) are behaving on your site. This type of person doesn't actually exist in the real world so there's nothing you can do to improve their experience on your site.

A much better way to look at this is through data segmentation. People who are aware of your brand, have visited your site multiple times before and are arriving on a branded organic search will behave completely differently to someone who has just seen your brand for the first time on Facebook. This is totally normal behaviour. By far the best person to learn from when it comes to data segmentation is Avinash Kaushik who has a blog called Occam's Razor. There's a ton of great stuff on his site which I won't attempt to replicate here but suffice to say that by breaking your traffic down into segments, you'll be able to really easily and quickly see how improvements can be made to your site to suit each individual channel.

If you're reporting into someone, it's really important you set realistic expectations from the outset (I know this from personal experience!). Create a report which breaks down your traffic by segment so you can quickly and easily show how each channel behaves and so you can show what work you can do to improve metrics for each. Honestly, they'll love you for this!

Try and think about digital marketing and SEO in the same way you would as traditional marketing. If more people come to your off-line shop but don't necessarily buy something on their first visit, is that a bad thing? Definitely not! It's the same for people visiting your website from Facebook. You're building brand awareness, putting your content/services/products in front of more eyeballs which can only be a good thing. Google will never penalise you for that kind of marketing activity. Making more people aware of your brand is also a great way to attract organic links - another thing Google wants you to do.

I hope that helps but let us know how you get on.

Hi,

You can definitely do as ivordg suggests and use the product name to create unique title and H1 tags and meta descriptions to get you started. Another strategy would be to combine all of the products in to one page but this depends on the product and what's unique about them. If only the colour and size change for example, this could the way to go. You can then use drop downs to let users select the product they want and add a canonical tag to the page. This is something Zappos.com does very well - http://www.zappos.com/cole-haan-ridley-blucher-sneaker

If that's not possible, a better long-term strategy would be to make each page truly unique which would be a great help to you. The best way to do this? Product reviews. This will not only help your SEO but also increase customer engagement and allow customers to get a better overview of your products and likely increase conversion rates. Econsultancy wrote a really good piece on the benefits of product reviews which would be worth your time reading.

There's also an Econsultancy piece here on how to attract product reviews from your customers.

Hope that helps but let us know how you get on or if you need more help.

Howdy,

This all really depends on what the anchor text being used is and how natural it sounds. For example, if it's a service such as car insurance that your site offers, using 'car insurance' as the anchor text would make complete sense as this is how the service is referred to. However, if it's something more long tail than this - car insurance California, for example, it would look unnatural and would not be recommended.

Are you able to share the URL for the page you're working on so we can take a closer look? Feel free to send me a PM if you'd prefer.

Another thing you could do is to look at your competitors in the SERPs for your targeted term(s) and see what they're doing. Open Site Explorer's Anchor Text tool is a great way to look at internal links pointing to a particular page so you can get a really good idea of what others are doing.