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Hi Bastian

This process can look quite daunting at first, but can be quite easy and fun to do once you know how.

First, I always look at two criteria for redirecting a page - incoming traffic and incoming links.  If a page has a decent amount of either, I will redirect it.  If it doesn't, I let it 404.

Finding URLs with incoming traffic can be an easy one with Analytics.  If you have Google Analytics, login to the dashboard and click on Traffic Sources -> Sources -> All traffic on the left-hand side.  Once it's loaded, just below the graph you will see "Primary dimension" - at the end of this line click "other", then from the dropdown menu, click traffic sources -> landing page.

You'll now have a list of URLs that people have used to enter your site.  Pick a time frame of about 3-6 months and see how many people have entered the site via that URL.  If you have URLs with 5 or more visits (or whatever threshold you think is best), save the URL as one that will be redirected.

I think it is important to redirect landing page URLs as it is the very start of a user journey that people have used in the past.  It can be off putting to see a 404 straight on entry, so ensuring that the user is taken to an appropriate page via a redirect is highly recommended.

Redirecting URLs that have been linked to the in the past can be an important step to take to ensure that you keep all of your link "strength" or "equity" when you relaunch.  For this, we can use SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer.

Go into OSE and type in your site's URL.  Once loaded, click the "top pages" tab.  Export the results into a CSV and open that with Excel.  Enable filters, which can be done by clicking "data" and then "filter" while having any of the top row cells selected, and then filter out results in the "inbound links" column to exclude results containing less than 2, 3, or 5 links, depending on your threshold.

You'll then be left with only the pages on your site that have links pointing towards them.  Now, rather than just redirecting all those pages, it is worth checking each URL in open site explorer again to look at what links are going to those pages.  This may take a bit of time, but this way you can ensure that you will only pass on links that you're happy with.  You may have a page that has 5 inbound links, but on review you think those links are spammy.  Don't redirect this page and you will not have the new site associated with these links.

Hopefully at the end of this you will have a good list of URLs you should redirect.  Try and redirect them to the appropriate pages on your site for a good user experience  The rest you can leave to 404.  If some pages don't fit in the new structure but you want to keep for user or link reasons, redirecting them to the root domain is no problem.  And to add, I've redirected thousands of URLs to a root domain before and have not had any adverse effects.

Remember to update your XML sitemaps and resubmit them to Google/Bing webmaster tools as well once you're done.

Hope this helps and all the best with your relaunch!

No worries Andrew. Here's my feedback.

You would be able to do this per month quite easily. The problem is that you shouldn't do any of it. At least not in this matter.

Directory submissions - I would can altogether. The value of the link you will get from a directory is already weak, but what we have seen in 2013 so far are a lot of directory links being devalued.  Taking the time, and possibly money, to submit to directories is just a waste to me.  It's a favourite of bad companies because it is quick and scalable.  You should remember that there are no quick wins in SEO, or at least very few of them.

If you absolutely must use directories, have a look at the SEOMoz directory list. Look for the ones that specialise in your niche/industry.

"Themed Link Building" - I don't even know what that would entail. The fact they are judging it by PR, an outdated, inaccurate and easily manipulated metric, worries me quite a lot.

Article syndication - just no. It reeks of laziness, duplicate content and will offer little to no value whatsoever.

If I were you, I'd concentrate with your website first.  Ensure that everything is in order with your own house and that you're targeting the right keywords before you continue.  Here are some really useful audits you can carry out:

SEER Interactive Audit Checklist

SEOMoz Audit Guide

Keyword audit guide from Zazzle Media

I mentioned before that there aren't many quick wins when building links.  If there are any to be found, you can definitely find some at PointBlankSEO.  Read their Link Building Resources guide and also the complete link building strategy guide.  Both are extremely detailed and the second link also includes a tool that gives the estimated time for completion, which could be useful for you.

After that, I'd always look at producing some great content, both for your own site and for guest publications.  Make your website exceptional by producing content for your industry that has never been seen before.  Keep your best content on your own site.  If you're looking for content partners, don't look at PR.  Don't even look at PA/DA.  Look at how engaged their audience is, how active they are on social media and relevant it is to your industry.  MyBlogGuest is a quick stop for some resources, but you'll have more luck jumping into the communities where your audience appears, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.  Identify key influencers in your industry via FollowerWonk and strike up a genuine connection.

This is just a brief summary, but I hope these links help set you on your way.

Well, there are a number of tools that will give you a rough idea of how 'unique' the copy is, such as PlagSpotter, Plagium and of course Copyscape.

Some people may argue that if it passes Copyscape it will be unique enough, but I don't think this is necessarily true.

If you watch this really useful Whiteboard Friday from Rand in January, you'll see the need for each bit of your content to have unique value, in order to help it rank and pull in organic traffic.  To my mind, I feel that the content needs to a new take on things where it can be and to appeal to your specific demographic, which of course differs between Canadians and Americans.

If I were you, I'd try and rewrite as much as possible.  I'm sure things just can't be changed, but try and create the content in a different style and approach to before in order add a unique value.  At the very least, you will be able to A/B test the difference in response between your US and Canadian blogs and you might find that you've come up with copy and content that produces a better response, or one that's more akin to what you're looking for.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Removing the links outright will always be the more preferential option.  It shows that you have taken definitive action and it is likely to be acknowledged faster by Google and the other search engines.

Having said that, the disavow file, once processed, will theoretically ignore the link just as effectively as removing the link itself.  We just have no sure way of knowing.

With that in mind, if I can get the link removed at any time, I'll always go for that option.  But the disavow should suffice if you make the effort to remove the link prior, as Google suggests.

Hi there

First of all - your logic is sound.  Trying to add additional, useful content to the product page could help its SEO performance.  There are obviously a number of other factors that will determine its success, but the principle logic is good.

Up until very recently, I would have said go for the solution you have proposed above.  It was a great way of getting useful information on the page - for both the search engine and the user - without having to interrupt or disturb the user journey.

However, things look to have changed within the last six months.  It began in September with this webmaster world thread saying that Google was no longer indexing content in onLoad hidden sections and was later confirmed in November with Google explicitly stating that Content In Tabs & Click To Expand May Not Be Indexed Or Ranked.

Whether that change is being fully enforced yet, I'm not sure - but if it's on Google's radar it may be wise to avoid this kind of onLoad content usage.

So that leaves you with having to present the content on the page straight off the bat. That can be tricky , as you run the risk of overloading the user.  But if you can keep the content concise and useful and can design the page accordingly, hopefully you can achieve it.

Hope the above links help.

With a gun to my head - I'd say thin content is "better" than mass duplicate content.

This is only based on helping to remove penalties from clients' sites - I see more instances of a Panda penalty when duplicate content is present rather than 'thin' content, as it were.

However, it's important to understand how the algorithm works.  It will penalise pages based on content similarity - so if a page has thin content on it - ie not a lot to differentiate it from another page on the domain - technically, Google will see it as a duplicate page, with thin content on it.

Now, my line of thinking is that if there is more content on the page, but the majority of it is duplicate - ie physically more duplicate content on the page - then Google would see this as "worse".  Similarly, taking product descriptions from one domain to another, and having duplicate content from other domains, seems to be penalised more frequently than the Panda algorithm than just thin-content pages (at least in my experience).

Your mileage may vary on this, but if forced into a temporary solution, thin content may be better for SEO - but conversely worse for a user, as there is less about the product on the page.  The best solution of course will be to rewrite the descriptions, but obviously there's a need for a temporary solution.

Hope this helps.

Hi Robert

According to Algaroo, a tool that tracks the level of volatility in Google AU, there doesn't look to be anything out of the ordinary in the last few days.

I jumped into MajesticSEO to have a look at their backlinks, and what struck me was that out of their top 50 links (according to Majestic), around 20 of them have been deleted on the 21st and 22nd of September.

I'm also looking at their links on a whole - there are a lot of blogroll links, which looks quite unnatural, plus a number of directory links (which aren't necessarily bad but may have been devalued).  A number of these blogrolls were site wide, so the deleted ones will have resulted in a very sharp fall in the number of links.

I can only speculate as to why those links were removed - whether prompted by Google or not - but it's clear that either removing them has caused the drop, or they have been prompted to remove them by Google after finding out about their link scheme (if it was one). Similarly the massive amount of directory links could be the cause - not because they're penalised, but because they have been devalued.

Hope that helps.

Site speed is often a quick fix.  A faster site can not only help in SEO, but also for conversion factors of course.

Run your site through GTMetrix and have a look at the recommendations that come up.  If you click the recommendation, then the "What does this mean?" text in the top right, it'll explain what the change will try to achieve.  If you click "read more" on that pop up, more often than not you'll get a tutorial on how you can implement the change.

Hey John

If you decide to take action action, then being aggressive with the links is a good approach. Both in Cyrus Shephard's great Moz blog post on the disavow tool and also advice from Google itself says if you suspect an entire domain to be spammy, go ahead and disavow all of it.

However, from my own perspective, I would only go through and create a disavow file if I knew for sure that I was suffering from a manual or algorithmic penalty.  I have seen very little benefit in being proactive with that tool (eg rankings are good, you spot bad links in your link profile and disavow them to be safe) and, in fact, I have seen a number of cases when a disavow was submitted "prematurely" - ie, a site was ranking fine and then disavowed some links and saw rankings fall.

If we want to look at it from a slightly skeptical point of view - if you're not suffering from a Google penalty, do you really want to inform Google that you have suspicious links in your profile?

However, that is a matter of preference based on my own experience.  I would certainly take note of the links you think are bad (and perhaps put together a file ready to go, just in case). Worth noting that prweb.com has made all of its links nofollow anyway, and so as they're not passing on link equity it doesn't seem logical to then disavow them (as they have no SEO benefit) Also, keep in mind though that if you visit the page and the link is not there - and especially if you do a google search for cache:http://www.example.com and see that the cached version contains no link - there's a very good chance that the link has already been discounted anyway and so would not be flagged in a manual or algorithmic check.  Seeing as you have so many links from the domains, that may be occurring.

Hope this helps

Hi John

The first thing I would ask in this situation is - did you 301 redirect the non SSL (http) versions of your pages to the SSL (https)?

If you didn't - that could be a big problem.  First of all, that could run into a couple of duplicate content issues and canonical issues, as you would have two versions of each page battling each other for prominence.  However, what I think would be more of an issue is the fact that if you didn't redirect the pages and if you didn't change any of your inbound links - the links that you had pointing to the website might now be pointing to inactive pages, and the link 'equity' your site had may now be lost.

This might be a redundant point as you may have implemented the redirects - but it's always the first thing that I look out for.

If you're looking to redirect all of the http pages, this bit of code is something you can add to your htaccess file to redirect all URLs on your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Again, apologies if you have already done this but if not, I hope it helps.

Negative SEO may not be technically illegal - but extortion is.

What you have described there looks like extortion to me.  240 sites built to link to you, verifiable whois information, contacted the culprit, he has requested money from you to remove the links he built.  That's extortion - and you have it in writing.

It might not be the most solid legal case, but it can be enough to scare off any disgruntled webmaster who is doing this.  If you have anyone who can draft a legal letter to serve, I'd get on this.  It should put a stop to it.

However, as Jonathan says, it is unlikely that this kind of negative SEO will have any sort of impact, particularly if you have disavowed the links.  When uploading a disavow file, I'd also put a "# comment" in there saying that this is because of a negative SEO attack.  240 identical sites and links from the same whois (and probably IP) - Google is going to know this is a negative SEO attack on you and will discount those links.

But I'd scare that bastard into submission if I were you.

I highly recommend reading AJ Kohn's latest blog post on the rich snippets algorithm.

Yes, getting the schema markup in place will technically enable you to have the stars appear in the SERPs, but reading that blog post will tell you where and when they will appear, which is very important.

As an SEO professional? Yes, absolutely.

As a general searcher or consumer? Well, it's been a long time, but I think you could make a case in saying the opposite is true. "These guys have the top 5 results, they must be legit".

Might be a CS case on this, will see what I can find.

Hi Matthew

Unless those domains had particular bad link profiles or indeed had a penalty put on them, then I think you're right and we can rule out that reason.

I'd first check webmaster tools and see if there are any large crawl errors - you basically want to make sure that all of the pages on the site are accessible by Google, all of the links pointing to the site are working (or redirected to a working URL) and that your 404 page is working (and not returning soft 404s).  Should you find something irregular here, that's where I'd start ASAP.

I'm guessing one of these domains was the old website URL? In this case (and apologies if this sounds obvious and you've already done this) I'd double check the 301 redirect has worked properly, so that all the old links pointing to the website are now.

Now, as for the rankings that have dropped - are they across the board and for all keywords, or are they limited to specific keyword groups or specific landing pages? Depending what the result is here this could mean a number of things.  When you did the 301 redirect, did you redirect the URLs to the equivalent pages on the new domain, or all to the homepage? If its the latter, is there a chance that the links you were pointing to the old site are now not "powering" the equivalent pages on the new site, as they're going to the homepage?

Similarly, if the rankings that have dropped all go to the same landing page, then there could be a problem on-site or off-site with that page.  On-site, Google might not think the new page is very useful to the reader if there is not a lot of content it can crawl and read.  Off-site, the algorithm may have devalued some old links to that page if it thinks they are not useful/editorial, such as old directory listings or article site links.

If the drop is across the board, for a number of keywords and landing pages, it could indicate a penalty of sorts, so I would check your webmaster tool messages for any link warnings.

If there's no warnings there, nothing out of the ordinary in terms of errors and your confident that your links are editorial and authoritativ and so would not have had a bunch of links devalued, then I would call for a bit of patience to see if things recover. After all, the Googlebot is going through a bunch of new pages and might have freaked out a little bit - but hopefully I've provided a few things to check in the meantime, in case the drop becomes sustained.

Hope this helps Matthew, wish I could be more of a help.

Hi Edmond

You'd be able to use the copy without any problems, but you won't be able to rank for it specifically.  If that's not an issue, then read on.

What I would do is add a canonical tag on your page back to the original press release.  You can read up on canonical tags here in this Moz guide.

So say the press release is at this URL: http://www.pressreleasecompany.com/yourpressrelease

You can take the press release and publish it on your own page, such as: http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpressrelease

On your webpage, you would need to have the following code in the section of your HTML:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.pressreleasecompany.com/yourpressrelease" />

With that bit of code, you are letting Google know that you have taken the press release from elsewhere and that the original copy can be found there.  You are using the copy just to feature and add user experience to your website, and not to try and rank for any terms.

Google will acknowledge the tag and will not penalise you (or reward you) for using the duplicate copy.  I think it's also a good idea to include a brief introduction to where the press release came from and what it is about before using the copy, just to show that you are citing your source.

With those steps, you will be fine in mentioning external press releases about your company on your own site without risking being penalised.  Always a good idea not to overdo it, but with the canonical tag you won't be seen as duplicating content for nefarious or ranking means.

Hope this helps.

I'd invite you to search for "car insurance" on Google UK - you can see an example of this abuse already being used. Aviva pretty recently tried to legitimise its star rating that shows up in search, but its reviews are still internal, so not really legitimate.  Here's another good blog post that covers how easy it is to snippet abuse.

Now snippets don't effect your ranking, but they do obviously effect CTR.  Google does have a method in place to take action on snippet spam - they have and will take action.  I think you can be safe in assuming that they'd be looking to catch this on a greater scale should it ever occur.

In short, it aint big and it aint clever.

Hey there

Option 2 would be the best way to maintain your rankings.  If you can ensure that the content, on-page elements and links pointing towards the page stay the same, as in the URLs remain the same, then there should be no reason why changing the design would result in a rankings drop.  A design change would only trigger a drop if it came along with loads of ads above the fold, or if it included hidden links on the page through the use of CSS, in order pass PageRank elsewhere.

If you wanted to keep the elements the same but did want to change the URLs, I would ensure that you take any old URLs that have been changed and add a 301 redirect to the new URL.  This will ensure all of the inbound links are passed on.

Hope this helps.

What about looking for the questions that people are asking about your industry, products or niche?

Try http://answerthepublic.com/ - just enter the keyword you want and which Google to crawl and it will find a list of questions that people are actively searching for (appearing in similar searches/autocomplete).

Could open up a couple of content ideas.

Well, there is said to be correlation between having the keyword in the URL and higher rankings, if we are to believe the Searchmetrics ranking reports.

I don't the effect is going to be all that significant, but if you think about page titles and compare it to URLs: If you have a page title like Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Brand - it is said that the keyword at the front would receive the most weight. By the same logic, the earlier your keyword appears in the URL, the more weighting I imagine it would get.  Similarly, if your keyword can appear in the URL as it does in the search term, as in for "organic soap" it would be /organic-soap, I guess it would be "stronger".

In all seriousness though, I can't see either of your options having any significant or influence or tangible effect; either would be fine. I understand that every little helps, but I wouldn't worry about this too much.

Hi Virginia

Your last point really clinches it for me. Hosting with a template/CMS provider is something I'm really not happy with (especially given the price). I find the CMS and the resulting website very friendly to use and I think it's quite well SEO-optimised, but the limitation of hosting with Squarespace is just counter-productive to me.

If your client really likes Squarespace, there are a number of parallax scrolling Wordpress themes you might be interested in. Here's a selection at Themeforest.

Hope this helps

Hi Milan

I can't speak for Moz - but I would imagine that because those links have only just been discovered prior to the update, they weren't actually incorporated in the update itself. The index may have updated on the 15th, but the cut off point for URL entries may have been a few days before, possibly before it had discovered your links.

I'd be pretty confident that now Mozscape has seen your new links they'll be fully incorporated in the next update.

Hope this helps.

You shouldn't receive any kind of penalty for doing so.

The premise of the nofollow tag is tell Google that "Hey, these links might be paid advertising, or could look a bit unnatural, so I'm going to whack a nofollow tag on them so you don't pass any link juice".  It then ceases to become a tool to manipulate the SERPs, so you're not doing anything wrong in Google's TOS.

I think that's pretty clear cut.  It's this scenario that nofollow was pretty much designed for. I'd never bet the mortgage with Google, but this comes close!

If we're talking site-wide links like footers to show that you worked on the site, from a personal POV I think that's a bit much and that a homepage link would achieve the same effect, but that's just me.

Hope this clears things up.

Hi Luke

Really sorry you're feeling dismayed with all of this.  I've met a number of people who feel the same as you - and I have had my fair share of scepticism recently as well.

On the other end of the spectrum, you see websites using complete spam tactics to rank well and get away with it, which causes no end of frustration for people trying to do the "right" thing, if there is such a thing in SEO.

Acquiring those reputable links in a sustainable way usually does involve sharing information and content that people may want to link to, or offering expertise for people to use you as a source.  However, it doesn't have to be just written content you offer.

You might be able to develop online tools that would help loads of people in your industry - for example, think of those that have created free invoice generators and tax calculators.  Tools like that are infinatly usable and will get a lot of links.  Similarly, a lot of people in the SEO sphere have developed WordPress plugins that many webmasters will find useful, all with a branded link back to the provider's site.  So that could be an option.

Online PR could also be an option for you.  Every day I see pretty regular requests for people with a knowledge in the housing industry to provide comment or analysis.  It may be a bit of a stretch from just building supplies, but if you have the expertise there are a lot of valuable links that can be earned.

Exhaust all the methods you possibly can in this guide and have a look into the Link Club program - these are two great resources for earning links in creative ways.

And if you want, feel free to drop me a private message or an email (email in profile) and we can have a chat about some ways you can go about promoting your business, I'd be more than happy to help

All the best

A dofollow link will pass the SEO strength, or "PageRank" of the page to the site that it links to. A nofollow link, in theory, will not do this.  That's the main difference between the two.

By that logic, you may assume that a nofollow link will not help you rank for a keyword, but I don't think this is completely the case.  Having a link to your site in any capacity may improve the "authoritativeness" of your site.  SEOMoz uses Page Authority and Domain Authority to measure this and, while not an official Google metric, it stands to say that if you have 2 identical sites, one has 5 nofollow links from newspapers and the other has none, Google may well think that the site with the links has more authority or trust and may treat it more favourably.  We all know how much Google loves to promote real brands.

As for seeing if a link is dofollow or nofollow, you can either inspect the element in the source code, or a convenient and hassle-free way to test is with the SEOMoz toolbar. That toolbar contains an option to highlight the links on the page - green links are dofollow and pink links are nofollow.  If you check previous posts on any website, you should be able to see a pattern of whether they allow for dofollow or nofollow links - but in the end, this is at the discretion of the webmaster.

Hope this helps!

Hi there

Wordpress can be very SEO friendly when set up correctly, but setup incorrectly it can be a bit of a nightmare.

Let's be clear - Google hates duplicate content, not certain CMS's - particularly one of the most popular ones in the world.

Sounds like you're well on your way to fixing any problems that may have occurred, but if you're still looking for help, I'm always reminded of Dan Shure's excellent blog post on how to optimise WordPress for success. Have a read through there to see if it helps.

Panda is being integrated into the general algorithm as we speak/type, but it may still require a refresh to lift any Panda penalty on your sites. These have been monthly, but expect them sooner in the near future now it is being integrated.

To double check to see if your penalty coincides with the panda penalty, check out: MyTrafficDropped and Ryan Kent's great blog post. If you can't see why your site is being penalised, you may find that your penalty is down to something else.

Hey Martijn

Let's address this in 2 parts:

First, if you 301 redirected the page with the higher authority, in theory the new page will receive that authority and your score could go up. The 301 tells Google to pass the link equity of the old URL to the new URL and in the SEOMoz crawler this is replicated. If you look at websites that have had old domains 301'd to the new root domain, you can see the old links that point to the old URL come up as links for the new URL. With that in mind, you can expect that the SEOMoz crawler will pass the authority on as well.

Now, as for whether or not you should do this - I think you should straight away. If it subdomain is just showing images this may not apply, but by having the 2 versions of the website live you may be running the risk of having duplicate content.  If this is the case, this could severely harm your site's ranking, so I'd address it straight away with a 301 redirect or by rewriting the content.

Another potential issue, and one that might explain why your rankings have dropped to page 2, is that you are "cannibalising" your keywords. By having similar content, title tags etc - even if it is not technically duplicate - you could be confusing the search engine crawlers. It may not know which page to prioritise.

Now, if the images that are showing up on Google images are attracting a healthy amount of traffic, I would think twice about redirecting straight away. You may want to leave it where it is, but adjust the copy and on-page elements to ensure that you're not cannibalising your keywords.  Having said that, the links to that page, which may be ranking it highly in Google images, could theoretically work again if 301 redirected, as all link equity is passed when you do so.

Overall, I'd keep things neat and simple for the user and have 1 version of the site, implementing a 301 redirect to the appropriate new URLs. Include the images on these equivalent new URLs.

They possibly may have been penalised, or they could just be new-ish sites where the majority of their good links have come in the recent weeks/months.

Google's toolbar PageRank only updates every 3-4 months, so it's possible that during this time the page in question could have acquired all of those links to give it a healthy Moz score.

You can check this by popping the URL into the wayback machine and see when it was last archived, checking the whois data of the site and see when it was registered and also by checking the recency of its backlinks with Ahrefs - the free version will give you a link graph of when the links have been acquired.

Anything after February 11th or something around that mark is when the PR toolbar updated, so if you can see a lot of links to that page after that date, the page and domain should be fine, it just hasn't had the chance to have its PR updated.

Hope this helps.

Hi John

I'll try to lay this out with some very broad examples.

Page A has 1000 PageRank (PR). Page B has 0 PR. Page C has 0 PR.

Page A then links to Page B with a dofollow link.

Page B now has 950 PR. It then links to Page C with a dofollow link.

Page C now has 900 PR.

With every link, a portion of the original PR is lost.  Not all of the original PR, link "equity" or "authority" is ever passed 100% with a link.  This has always been the case.

Now, what most SEOs previously thought was that, in addition to the PR that is always lost when linking to another site, a 301 redirect would also make some of the PR disappear.

So, with the first example, it would be:

Page A (with a PR score of 1000) is 301 redirected to Page B (with 0 PR)

Page B now has 900 PR - 50 was lost with the link, PLUS another 50 because it was a 301.

What the Matt Cutts video tries to clarify is that the extra 50 points that we thought we lost with a 301 redirect is actually a myth - there's no extra value lost just because it is a 301.

I hope that helps to clarify the point? Remember, my example is a very broad one used to illustrate the point and there are always other factors at play that could effect the amount of PageRank that is passed.  But, all things equal, the same amount of PageRank will pass to another site, regardless if the original page links to it or is redirected to the new page. Some PageRank is always lost in the linking process.

Any questions let me know and I'll be happy to clarify!

Hey Brent

To me, this doesn't look like a wise investment.  Regardless of its link profile, I'd be much more inclined to try and rank your current website rather than buying this domain and 301 redirecting it.

In any case, we can try and look at it from a financial standpoint and see if it is worthwhile.

To estimate the worth of ranking for those keywords, let's do some very rough estimations:

Take the local exact match search volume - example, 6,100.

Take the average click through rate for rank 1 - example 40%

Take the average conversion rate - example 3% (your mileage may vary greatly)

Take the average value of a conversion for that keyword - example £20.

So, 6,100 x 40% = 2440.  2440 x 3% = 73.2.  73.2 x £20 = £1464 - this is your average value for that keyword.

How much more than that amount is the asking price?  What would be a comfortable investment for you?  3 months worth, 6 months?  You may be able to find a comfortable price you'd want to buy at.

If you did buy the domain, 301ing the old domain to your site will pass on all of the value of their link profile, which in turn might help you rank in its place.  The important thing to remember, however, is that this is all theory.  The 301 redirect may not work that way and the site in question might not rank for that keyword for much longer, in which case the purchase would be pointless.

It's for those reasons why I would concentrate on trying to rank your current website.  If you're thinking about investing, turn it around and think what you could do with that budget instead, or even half of it.  You could create rich content, infographics, tools or plugins to try and rank higher in organic search, you could invest it in PPC adwords, you could look at display advertising and retargeting networks and so on.

You may find you'd make your money go further investing the money elsewhere.

Hi Tim

First of all, you're right that having a page with dynamic content, or having a page that is constantly updating, may help your site to rank, as the page could be seen as "fresh" quite regularly.

However, not having a frequently updated page does not mean that your site will be crawled infrequently, nor does it mean that your page cannot rank.

If you have a sitemap submitted to Google/Bing, chances are that the search engine is going to revisit your site very often.  You can see here that the last Google cache for that page is the 23rd of April, which isn't that long ago.  This is a useful guide on how you can increase crawl rate.

With that being said, a far more influential factor towards rankings and why your site may be falling will be the links pointing to your page.  Looking at the open site explorer report for that page, I can see a number of links that may have passed value before but would be in line for a link devaluation.

First of all, I can see a few forum links that contain your URL in them, such as this and this.  Nothing wrong with having those links there, particularly if you were troubleshooting, but I've seen quite frequently that forum links will lose any 'worth' that they once had over time.  That may be one reason for the drop.

There's a couple of links here and here that also look quite unnatural.  I can see why Google would devalue these links - if you look at them from a human perspective, they look very artificial and have some very optimised anchor text.  I'd keep an eye on links like these - I can't imagine Google would be thrilled seeing them in a link profile.

Finally, you also seem to have a number of regional microsites, such as this and this pointing to the page you provided.  Now, the content on these sites is informational, if a bit sales-y, but the wording is only slightly different from site to site.  There's not a lot of value in this content and as such it could be constituted as thin.  Without the content offering much worth to a reader, it could also be a site that has had its link devalued - not penalised, just devalued, I hasten to add.

With all those links devalued, therefore not passing the strength that they once were, this might explain why you've fallen to #11.

There's no major concern here and it doesn't mean that you should remove these links - but if you want to regain your ranking I believe you would need to replace them with higher quality links.  These can include links from articles or features on other articles that tap into the site's expertise.  It could include creating content or a resource centre on the site itself that would encourage people to link to it or share it on social media with friends.  There really are a number of ways to accrue higher value links - but what differentiates a higher value link from lower ones, at least in my eyes, is if the link is contextual to what you are offering on your site, it offers value to the reader and it can be seen and shared by an active audience.

This is based on my expertise and certainly does not constitute as fact, but that's just how I see it.  Hope it helps you out a bit and if you have any more Q's just let me know.

Hi Henri

If you think a footer link could bring you traffic, but don't want to risk any SEO side-effects, you can simply make the link "nofollow".

By making a link nofollow, you're showing Google that you're not using the link to pass PageRank and therefore you're not placing it to improve your SEO.  This would get rid of any risk, while allowing to keep a link there that could lead to more traffic.

For the record, I think it would be fine to have a few footer links, provided that they are relevant, not too many of them, don't use commercial anchor text and don't make up the majority of your link profile.

But if you're worried, simply make the links nofollow.

Hope that helps.

Hi Dan!

It's not bad practice at all, in fact it's something I often recommend.

If you have a long domain name like the one you mentioned, a short one can be useful for a number of reasons, namely print as you have mentioned.

What might transpire is that people may start identifying the company with that name more and more, which leaves a dilemma of whether or not to simply use the new domain.

For that reason, in addition to what you said about the 301s which is spot on, it's important that any links you acquire for that new domain are done in the same way as the main domain.  In short: ensure its quality.

Hey there

If you had 10 individual websites with completely unique content that did not link together and each one offered a unique value, it could happen.

The unique value factor is key here - does each website not only have unique content on the matter, but also a new theme, style and way of portraying the message?  If they do, I could see it happening.

But even then, I can't imagine Google would be happy if they found out all the sites belonged to one webmaster.  It would take a manual review, but even if the WMT information was different, site themes were different, who.is registrar was different, backlink profile was different - basically everything was different, if they suspected it was the same person behind it all they would simply deindex the sites.

Hey, it's their search engine.  We have quality guidelines and ideas of what we can or cannot do, but at the end of it there is a manual team who can penalise who they choose.  This is a situation where I can imagine they would.

It's worth mentioning that I have seen a top 10 where 10 different websites which fell under one subsidiary trading name ranked for a pretty commercial keyword.  So yes, it's possible.

Also worth pointing out is that 9/10 of those sites are now nowhere to be found.

I've tested this a couple of times and each result has been: no.

If you 410 a page, Google does a bloody good job at never bringing that URL back.  I've changed the response code back from a number of 410s, socially shared the page, built natural links to it, even blasted links to it (for testing's sake of course!) and Google has never reindexed it.

It's both good and bad - good in the sense that it really uses the 410 response code properly, but bad in the sense that, if you make a mistake and want to reuse the URL, you're pretty screwed.

If you're going to use it, be absolutely 100% you wouldn't see any use in using that URL again (such as offering the product again in the future etc.).  If there is any doubt, leave it as a 404 or redirect it.

Hi Mark

There really is no optimal layout purely for SEO.  You can definitely hinder your SEO if your content is poor, if it's stuffed with keywords, if there are too many ads above the fold, or if the content is hidden using uncrawlable elements like Flash.  But in terms of SEO performance, one layout will not perform better than the other.

However, in terms of traffic and conversions, layout can make a big difference.  I highly recommend reading some conversion rate optimisation blogs, such as Optimizely, Conversion Gardens and many more.  This will show how a good layout may not necessarily out perform another in SEO or bringing traffic to your site, but how it definitely can convert that traffic that you do bring a whole lot better.

Hope this helps.

In theory, this shouldn't be a problem.

When you use an image on a page, you are embedding that image from somewhere else - it's own URL.

Therefore, if the page itself is "noindex,follow" - that does not apply to the images (or anything else like a video, pdf etc) that is embedded into the page.  Provided that the URL holding the image is allowed to be indexed on your root domain, which it will by default, you can index the image.

You can test this out by uploading images to your root domain and then, in the next few days, performing this site search:

site:yoursite.com filetype:jpg (or png/gif/whatever you used)

That will show any of the images that you have on the site that are in the Google index.  If that does not work, try this search:

site:yoursite.com inurl:imagefilename

Replace those details with your real site and what you named the image when uploading and it should show you whether or not it's indexed or not.  If not, you could try sharing the image on Google+. G+ is ridiculously effective at getting web pages and content indexed.

But just because the page where the image is present on is instructed to be noindexed does not mean that the image itself will inherit that quality.  By default, it should be indexed properly.  You can also create image sitemaps to help with indexing (I believe you're running Wordpress, Yoast's SEO wordpress plugin can help with this).

Hope this helps.

Hi there

The short answer is yes.  Here's a relevant video: http://searchengineland.com/google-pagerank-dilution-through-a-301-redirect-is-a-myth-149656

301 redirects to pass on full PageRank value/juice on to the new domain.

Long answer: yes, however, with each additional link, some PageRank value is lost along the way.  This is no different for 301s.  For example, Page A has a PR of 1000 and Page B has a PR of zero.  Page A either links or redirects to Page B.  Page B now has 900 PR.

Value of PR in the algorithm is always partially lost.  What many believed before was that, in the above example, a link on Page A would give 900 PR to Page B, but a 301 redirect might only give 700 PR to Page B.  However, we now believe that this is not the case.

Similarly, it should be remembered that PageRank is one part of the Google algorithm - one of many.  If you look at how a 301 redirect works, you're passing on the strength of the domain/page to to the new web page, but what you lose is anchor text, content and so on.  Contextuality, quality of surrounding content and anchor text all have a certain "SEO value" to them as well, but you don't get these with 301 redirects.

However, it passes all of the PageRank strength of the page and so you should expect to see a significant boost from a relevant 301.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Well yes, a CMS can have an effect on SEO performance.  If the CMS makes elements on the page uncrawlable, or the website load very slowly, this could have an adverse effect on your performance.  Similarly, if the CMS produces a lot of duplicate webpages, URL or content, which can often be a problem with e-commerce sites, that could lead to algorithmic Panda penalties.

However, looking at your homepage, the Googlebot sees this on the page - so it looks as though everything is fine with its crawl there.  In addition, your site load speed appears to be good.  I also can't find any obvious duplicate content or URL issues - the search function works well and each product listing looks to have good unique content, with no duplications of the pages (at least at very first glance).

So your CMS, at first glance, looks to be working really well.  The issue that I see is that, as a result of your bad backlink cleanup, you have a very small amount of links pointing to your domain.  Majestic SEO is reporting that you have gone from a peak of 9000 backlinks and 1000 root domains to just 69 backlinks and 25 root domains.  That is a huge reduction in links.  While being completely necessary, it essentially means that your off-site SEO is back to zero and so you need to earn more links. Now, it's about quality rather than quantity, but to give you a quick example: the top 5 results for "specialist paints" each have over 10,000 links to their domain.

You've done a great job with your onsite optimisation and an extremely thorough link removal process.  What you're left with, however, is a site with very few links and so not a lot of power to help it increase its visibility in organic search.  I would say that you need to replace the bad links you have had removed with strong, contextual and high-quality links in order to start performing well again.

I hope this helps.

Hi Cornel

By default the new Keyword Planner tool uses exact match by default, as explained here.

However, quite a few folks are a bit concerned about its accuracy right now.

I don't think it's the last we've heard of it and would expect to hear some clarification on it in the near future.

I very much doubt it.  So long as the SSL certificate is genuine and from a reputable source, that should do the trick.

Really, we're still waiting to see whether SSL is in fact having a positive impact on rankings.  Despite what Google's claimed, it's too early to tell without a few more weeks/months data.  However, if you're going to make the change or start a new site with SSL from the outset, using a reputable SSL certificate provider will provide all of the trust and SEO benefit you need (if and when that comes).

Hope this helps.

You got it in one.

There's no doubt that this is paid link placement and/or an advertorial for Sprint.  Furthermore, they have an Amazon affiliate link in there too (which is now a 404 error - I'd love to meet their editor).

You may be surprised how often big websites sell these links.  In the UK, The Telegraph and Guardian newspapers are pretty notorious for it.

With links like this you're really playing with fire.  Even big companies have been ruffled for links like these in the past, have a look at JC Penny and Interflora (although Interflora had a load of crap links that probably pulled the trigger).

Then again, Google think they can do it without any problems.

It's all part of the many hypocrisies in SEO.  I can't say I'd recommend these links (above all else, there are cheaper ways to get equally as valuable links) - but however you decide to proceed, do so with caution.

The above redirect structure you've proposed would work great.  You're ensuring only one homepage version exists, making it the canonical, and all variations (which may also have previous links going to them and SEO value) are being redirected to pass on to the canonical version.

You can use your .htaccess file to force http to https by adding the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

The first line turns on redirection capabilities.  The second line checks to make sure the connection is not already https. The third rule will redirect users from their original location, to the same location but using HTTPS.

And also, in case you want to know how to make sure that the www. version of your site redirects to the non-www version, the code would be:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps

Hi Casey

I have a "self-referring" (pointing to itself) canonical on all of my pages, if another isn't needed.  There's certainly no harm in doing so and I believe that there is a benefit to.

If your content is put up, is indexed first by Google and has the canonical tag on it - that is a really clear directive to Google/Bing that you are the originator for your content.  That means if someone comes along and steals/scrapes the content from your site, they are far less likely (in my opinion) to be successful in passing it off as their own (and therefore leaving you with a duplicate content issue).

In addition, having self-referring canonicals on pages future proofs you against any plugins/searches/features of your site that might generate multiple URLs from an original (think www.domain.com?searchquery.html if you have a search function on your site). Having a canonical will mean that Google will not index multiple versions of your URL, which might also result in duplicate content.  This also prevents attacks from people who try to brute force multiple versions of your URL to get indexed (ie sending spam links to www.domain.com?randomquery - it's very rare but I've seen it happen)

In short, I think self-referring canonicals are great idea - use them wherever you can.

Hi Peter

Both are viable options.

I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

Here is her international SEO checklist

Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

Hi there

You don't have anything to worry about with this.  Having a hashtag query after a URL is widely recognised as the denomination for an internal page anchor.  Simply put, Google won't attempt to index a URL like http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/#tabThree as it knows that it is linking to a point on an existing page, rather than a completely new page or URL.

To put your mind completely at ease, you could set up a canonical tag on the http://www.discountstickerprinting.co.uk/ page that points to itself - instructing Google that any variations of that URL with #'s or ?querystrings etc. should not be indexed or considered duplicate content.  I consider this good practice in any case and so would recommend that you do that anyway.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

Looks like when you've been adding the code, you've pasted in special characters or something like that.  This is why you're getting the “en-sg" error.

If you look at the source code in Chrome, you can see the code is italicised:

http://i.imgur.com/IfTwvpj.png

What I'd do is retype the code manually, or remove any special formatting from the text before adding it into your HTML.  You want to just get the raw quotation mark in there ("), rather than the special character.

Hope that makes sense

Hi there

If you're going to persist with separate landing pages for all size/colour varations, then you should make use of both the rel=canonical, rel=rev and rel=next meta tags in the of your HTML.

Choose one URL to serve as the "master page" - the one that you would like to rank if you intended to.

Starting with that page, add a canonical tag that points to that URL and then a rel=next tag for your first product variation.  For example:

For the first variation page (product-variation-1), you want to add these tags:

For the second (product-variation-2):

And so on in a sequence until they are all covered.

The reason why I recommend using a canonical tag and the prev/next tags is to be absolutely sure the commands are adhered to.  It is better practice, in this example, to use prev/next tags - however that is just for Google.  Bing has a hard time adhering to that command and will sometimes flat out ignore it, which could lead to duplication issues on that search engine.

For further reading there's a very helpful Google Webmasters post on the topic right here.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

You can certainly make use of some design elements to help your website appear attractive, but so it still contains useful information for both your user and the search bots.

You might have seen this already with landing pages that contain a video.  You might want to make the video the main focus of the page with little other content visible to direct attention to the video and subsequent call to action (CTA). However, what people have done in the past, with good success, is include the transcript in expandable content.  There will be a bit of text saying "Click here for the transcript" and, upon clicking that text, an element will fire, a box will expand down and the content of the video is then displayed.  The search bot can read the content at all times, which will help the page to rank (provided it is on-topic), while the text is hidden by default for user experience reasons.  There are lots of variations of this that you might have already seen.

There are two things that I would always consider: 1) Make sure you are hiding the content purely for design/UX reasons and not nefarious reasons (such as hiding text on an irrelevant page/website) and 2) Make sure that the content is justifiably there on the page.  I've seen some people "mask" their landing pages in they will show the search bots a long, informative article, but a user who visits the webpage will be redirected via javascript redirect (which bots can't follow) or will overlay the page with an iframe (which bots can't see) to show the user one thing but the bots something completely different.  In my opinion, this goes too far and is manipulative, which might see your page and/or site penalised.  With this, you are deliberately misleading the bots and/or users with what you want them to see.  I would think that a plugin that injects content would possibly be seen the same way.

I suppose there is a bit of a grey area but in my earlier example it allows the users and the bots to see, if they so choose, the exact same page and layout.  The difference is that you are styling some content so that the design and user experience is one that is tailored, but you are not restricting either the bot or the user from seeing the full landing page should they so wish.  That (again, in my opinion) is acceptable.

So with that in mind I would look at incorporating design elements that allow the content to be displayed if wanted, but can be folded away by default.  Expandable content, tabbed content, accordion menus - there are a number of ways you can do this. Try not to be deliberately misleading, but definitely design your web page around what you want your user to see.

Hope this helps.

Hi Lee

Would I be right in saying that the client would like to rank in both UK and US?

If so, this is possible.  What I would recommend is to create a new geo-location subfolder for the US site.  Something as simple as website.com/us/ would do.

From there, you would set up the US subfolder as basically its own website.  That starts with adding the right kind of hreflang schema code for the subfolder.

There is a fantastic guide here on Moz by Aleyda Solis on how to set up an international SEO structure.  You can find it here.

This hreflang generator tool, also from Aleyda, can help you generate the right code to add to the subfolder.

From there, as mentioned you're basically treating the subfolder as it's own individual site.  That means you can build new links to it, you should have unique content within it, and you can even set up its own individual GWT account - meaning you can set the geolocation settings in there too.

The benefit of this approach is that it would allow your client to keep the current site as-is, and not jeopardise it, while also setting up a site for the US audience.  Of course, you could do exactly the same thing on a new TLD - but that might be difficult as you're using the .com already (and besides, I like global sites using a .com /country/ subfolder setup)

Hope this helps, let me know if you'd like anything clarified.