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Google recommends blocking all Internal Search Results in the Robots.txt file. I suggest creating a product collection or category for Edward Scissorhands Themed Costumes and linking to that instead. This way you can customize the content on the page just as if it was any other category page.

Google still internally values / devalues the links they discovered based on their algos. I think in 2011, when penalties and WMT notifications started to pop up, many SEOs forgot that Google still does a good amount of this internally.  They'll react when it's egregious. If you see pure spam in your backlink profile, Google suggests you go ahead and disavow. If you see otherwise good domains that are irrelevant (which it sounds like you do), then there's no reason to panic until Google misreads the intent and thinks you're trying to game the algorithm.  If you're not doing that, you're probably in fine shape continuing to build good relevant links and creating the most relevant and valuable website possible. egregious

Hi Silkstream, Thanks for the fast and good answer. Will take the advice and start with the links.

Hmm, a main menu link is usually great. Have you double checked to make sure those links are in HTML, so Google can read them?

Hi, I often see the same myself and the recent Moz ranking factors survey (and all previous ones) show that general opinion is that links are still the strongest signal when it comes to organic rankings. As others in the thread have mentioned, your content can be great but if no one ever sees it, then it's a bit wasted. One of the ways people can see / discover your content is via links and Google see links as vote of confidence in your website or content. The one thing that hasn't been mentioned is that it's often the high quality links that can differentiate websites in the long-term. Lower quality links can boost a site for a short period but will often not work long-term anymore. So you're right in that things often come down to backlinks, but it's usually high quality backlinks that make the difference. Having said all of that, I wouldn't bet against Google bringing in more signals that could become as strong as links. Social signals may become stronger for example, as may user signals or brand / offline signals. Machine learning also plays a huge part in rankings which are largely driven by user behaviour. I hope that helps! Paddy

It's definitely worth asking about that canonical link. If they are nice, they'll add it - and I've personally been lucky with that before. If they were "nice" enough to credit you for the blog post and link to the original source, then they should be fine with adding it.

Hi Li, Moz will show you the linking page with their Open Site Explorer. If you are looking at your whole domain, just enter the homepage url and set the filter "target" to "this root domain". It will then show you the site.page linking to you plus the page its linking too. You can also download a CSV file to help you quickly sort. If your goal is to get rid of bad links, you can use the Open Site Explorer to see a sites "Spam Score". Any domain with a rating of 7+ is probably a good candidate. I do agree with Josh, in that removing bad links is not a high priority unless you know you have used bad SEO tactics to spam your site. Hope this helps, Don

Thanks or the help. I've read that google can sometimes not be as accurate at reporting links as well. I'll look into the disavow option.

Hi Sridhar, as Ria mentioned, there are many factors to consider. This is the official MOZ guide; https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building which has plenty of great tips. Often, we get carried away with focusing on external links when it comes to link building. There should be more focus on authority building, and this comes from many more places than just external sites. High quality external links are certainly a large factor in ranking highly. However, link building strategies also need variety. There are link opportunities EVERYWHERE, which are often overlooked. We wrote a blog post on this, which you can see here; http://www.inmarketingwetrust.com.au/link-building-smart-strategy-online-success/ Hope you find that useful!

Love Patrick's response. Refer to it often. Thank you!

I agree with you, Alan.   That's how most people do it. I've found through a few small retail sites and a couple of information sites, that publishing useful or interesting content can be enough that other people will share it for you.  There are still niches out there where one or two people, working as a team, can produce, in two or three years, more content and better content than all of the competitors in the niche combined.  Once you have that, then some of the people who find your site and see the depth of content, will share it for you.  And, there are some topics where people will search deeply for the right information. If you have a hardware store or a toy store or a jewelry store, you don't have to attack the entire industry.  Instead, focus on a very small niche of products that are typically not represented well in local stores, and that do not have an online champion. The niche must be chosen carefully. I don't have any interest in social media, or making personal connections, or in soliciting others.    But, I do have an interest in learning the deep technical details of things and enjoy writing about them.  Through that, I provide the community service similar to what you provide.  Then a steady stream of visitor questions coming in and being answered, first by email and then published to the content library that provides a service to a consumer community - these are coming from people who may have first purchased at amazon or or some other vendor who places 100% of their effort in making the sale but places zero effort in helping the customer after the sale. These people are out searching deeply.  They feel like they have been abandoned. This is today's internet -  Walmart, Amazon, Jet, and others are all focused on the aggressive price competition.  Service after the sale and deep information for the consumer has been abandoned at the very time when you think it should be abundant.  Nobody wants to write it.  How many times have you purchased something and could not understand directions that were written on another continent and then translated into English by someone who knows the language poorly. That leads to a problem in that you become the default service department for amazon!  They don't do it.  But if you step into that role you quickly obtain a knowledge of what information people need and when you answer an email, you also place another brick in your relevant content library.  So, although I am not making any direct outreach at all to advocate a brand, engaging a community, or soliciting on my own behalf in any way, the questions keep coming in, the content mass continues to grow,  and it attracts more and more traffic year over year. Most business owners are not going to do this because they don't like to write content and they don't have a situation that allows them to invest a lot of time now and not be paid back until years down the road.  No SEO will do this because the upfront labor is very high and the return isn't fast enough to satisfy a client.  These opportunities are perfect for the person who enjoys working from the cloister. 

That's helpful. And Dmitril deserves props -- asked the question while on a call and really didn't think it through. Thanks.

Thank you for your time Egol. According to Moz our website is outranking my competitor's website in all other metrics other than total external links. Hope we will outrank them on google as well And thank you Josh and Highland for sharing your thoughts, it was really helpful.

I think this way the Ranking fluctuation will be none to minimum.

You will see no benefit from mass-301 redirects to the home page, and it might even hurt. The only way to get value is if you redirect it to identical or similar content. I wouldn't even count on that adding value or traffic now that the site has changed hands and content has been gone for a while. Still, if you can recover (and have the right to use) the old content, it might be worth 301 redirecting - or better yet, putting on the same URL so no redirects are necessary. Only do this if the content was good and the links were quality links. Otherwise let them 404. If you can't put up the same or similar content, don't bother. Focus on building the site naturally.

Unnatural linking -- including paying for links -- is against Google's guidelines and can get you penalized. Additionally, the vast majority of YouTube traffic never leaves YouTube. YouTube is a great channel for branding, but not a great channel for getting people back to your website.

It's nothing you should worry about, honestly. Create great content, and if it makes sense to link out to someone, then do it. With or without a rel="nofollow" is up to you. Backing myself up here, in which John Mueller basically says there's no SEO advantage or disadvantage to outbound linking:  https://www.seroundtable.com/google-external-links-20951.html

Hi there, To add to what others have said, I don't think this is a good idea. If you have lots of low quality backlinks already, then you need to clean these up by removing as many as possible and adding the rest to a disavow file in Google Webmaster Tools. Building more blog comment links is very, very unlikely to help with anything and may actually hurt you more. Once you've removed or disavowed the low quality links, you should then concentrate on building good quality links instead. Here are a few links that may be helpful: https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building I hope that helps! Paddy

The backlinks are a problem. You have some obvious link networks on there, specifically: top.ind.in  options.pw  submit.pw  aahana.co.in  toplist.space  toplist.ws  toplist.co.in  url.firm.in  alexa.in.net  toplist.in.net All of these are on the same IP. That's a whole lot of domains on one IP address that all link back to you - and that's not the only network set. I'm not sure how much the sitewides from zeldaeurope.de and vgchartz.com are helping you either. The zeldaeurope is listed as an "affiliate" with almost 80,000 dofollow links. Google may be seeing that as a paid footer link. Homepage is a bit slow - 2.9 MB and over 8 sec load time on Pingdom. Content - mentions the 3 main keywords - "zelda" "triforce" and "game" or "gaming" at least 300 combined times in the code. It's pretty high, I think. Especially given that your title has Zelda three times as well. We've found that 1 is best, 2 if you're separating with pipe - but 3 is usually too much. So between the two, a bit of a Panda bite. I also see two major ads above the fold. One is for Forex, the other for a bank. A refresh shows me Careers Australia & a cloud security company. I mean the ads aren't even closely related. A gaming site with a big forex ad tells me there's an issue somewhere, as well. Sorry I can't go further but as Matt said, you could always get someone to help you out outside the forum.

Check this article out really helpful http://seoaltitude.com/the-web-design-footer-link-debate/