Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there, I'll go through the questions one by one: 1. Does Changing the Anchor Text Bad? Does Google have a new way of detecting anchor text changes. Google will note the changed anchor text when it re-indexes the pages the links sit on. There is no hard evidence that this is viewed as "good" or "bad", although if the links are otherwise "bad" (from spammy sources), changing the anchor text won't help - the link would be better off being removed. However, if the link is neutral or good, there is no evidence that changing the anchor text will hurt you. 2. Can I change the Title/Anchor to something more generic, so that the anchor text profile is more natural. Definitely - if you are going to change the anchor, it is best to change it to something related to your brand, e.g. the name of the company or URL of the website. **3. Since this is a Directory is http://obln.org/ - Does anybody know being on this directory bad? ** Free web directories are not advisable places to build links, so despite this conversation about anchor text, I would remove the link in this case. Yes, they have a PR of 5, but it is the best rule for modern SEO to not use free directories as link building tools because they have been abused so badly for spam in the past.

Hi Stephane, For just one or two pages, targeting different countries, on-page content might prove to be sufficient. That is, a page about companies in X field in the UK, listing UK companies with their addresses and telephone numbers, will give Google a range of signals to indicate that that content is most relevant to people from the UK. That said, the page itself should not contain href lang information to indicate that it is for a Canadian market. If href lang information is included, it should specify the UK. If the content is sitting on a .ca domain, it will be harder to show that the UK review page is for the UK - it would be better to place this sort of information on a generic TLD website. The question of duplicate content between .com, .ca, .co.uk etc. sites is answered by geo-targeting, both using the ccTLDs and href lang tags. Google "ignores" duplicate content when the websites' tags tell it that although the content is the same, this version is for Canadians, this version is or Americans and this one over here is for Brits. Hope this helps. Cheers, Jane

Thanks for the advice, we already create and submit the XML sitemap to Google, that wasn't the question. Would there be any benefit in creating the urllist.txt file?

Just wanted to clarify (for the sake of others who may read this post) that the question was in regards to Penguin and I think in your situation, you're dealing with manual penalties.  With Penguin, there is no reconsideration request.  You've got to clean up the best you can and then hope that things improve when Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm. It's still up for debate whether removing links (as opposed to disavowing) is important for Penguin.  My current advice is that if a link is easy to remove then do it.  But, otherwise I disavow.  While you're right that it is important to show Google your efforts in regards to link removal for a manual penalty, no one is going to look at your work for an algorithmic issue. I asked John Mueller in a hangout once whether disavowing was as good as removing for Penguin and he said, "essentially yes".  However, because there are potential problems that could come up with the disavow tool (such as improper formatting or taking too long to recrawl to disavow), if you can remove the link that's not a bad thing to do.

Their coder will be taking a look at it when he's freed up the time to see if there's a way to do that. Hopefully its something easy like that and doesn't require numerous workarounds to get going.

Thanks for getting back, Dan! Doing these checks definitely satisfies me that it's a non-issue.. Content Keywords gives me "facebook", "strutta", "contest", etc. Interesting bug with Adwords though, they should consider doing subdomain-specific "research", since I think that in the case of SaaS businesses especially, this makes a lot more sense. Cheers, -Danny

As Andy said, you don't need to buy subdomains you need only set them up. but simply pointing a domain or subdomain to your site will not help. Setting a separate website on the domain, can help, but only if that subdomain has links pointing to it, but then you would be better of getting the links to your primary domain. so I would not bother.

Hi Mark, I agree with Gyorgy. It will likely do more harm than good to change the underscores to hyphens because then links to those pages will have to go through a redirect. However, if you are set on making this change here's how you can do it using the .htaccess file. Hope this helps! `RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ [NC]` <code>rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3-$4 [R=301,L] rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3 [R=301,L] rewriteRule ^([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2 [R=301,L]</code>

Hi Bruno, It looks like duplicate content is the issue, not the tabs: Google picked up the text from this particular tab five days ago, but from http://www.imoney.ph/credit-card, not from the .sg domain you mention here: http://i.imgur.com/mdmrPy2.png Google will try to filter out duplications of content so as to keep its index as tidy as possible. You have a canonical tag on the page on the .ph domain, referencing itself. You also have a canonical tag on the .sg domain's page on credit cards, referencing itself, but Google has filtered out the .sg content because it is a duplicate. Look at geo-targeting these domains using the rel=alternative tag (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en), which should help Google understand that one version of the content is meant for Singapore searchers and the other is meant for the Philippines. A Moz guide on this tag is available here: http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool Thanks, Jane

Hi Chris, First thing is I'd look at the Wayback machine and make sure you followed the same URL structure of the old site and look for any oddities. Does the site have an old Google Webmaster Tools account? You might want to poke around in there and make sure there aren't any old URL removal requests or anything else that could potentially cause problems with the relaunch. if you don't have a GWT account, be sure to set one up. Quite honestly, if these articles existed before, I don't see any advantage to releasing them slowly vs all at once. In fact I'd prefer all at once especially if articles linked to one another. Finally, I'd make sure there were no penalty issues on the old site, and address them if there were. You don't want to bring any of those back to life in the process

Thanks everyone for the confirmation!

Helen, I know people who have had success in reducing the number of links within mega menus by turning some of them (after the first two levels, for instance, but you could get much more sophisticated if you wanted) into javascript links. If the javascript is not too complex Google will still have no trouble getting to those pages, but the links won't be "hrefs" and therefore won't waste pagerank on pages that are not as important relative to the others. The upside to this is that the links are still there for users, assuming that is a good thing. As someone else mentioned, consider whether having those links there really is good for the users, or if they'd rather see a simpler menu. The search engines are beside the point in that case. Any time an eCommerce site experiences slow, steady traffic drops I always look into the uniqueness of their product copy. That is often a sign that they are sharing product copy with other sites, either due to manufacturer description use, or by publishing feeds to 3rd party sites like Amazon, eBay or price comparison shopping engines. Good luck!

Thanks Michael for the response. The primary reasoning we were thinking of using the subdomain is technical in that the applicant processing software only allows us to use a subdomain to display our job. They effectively host the job board on their servers and we setup a cname (jobs.ourcompany.com points to ourcompany.jobapplicantsoftware.com). With the content hosted there is sounds like they get the credit or does our subdomain? My other idea is setting up a canonical tag for the pages hosted on jobs.ourcompany.com to point to ourcompany.com/jobs. I could create two copies of the same content so the users wouldn't know the difference. Wonder if that would work?

Thanks Paul! Why do you think there was more than just a shared IP? Brant

Great questions. I'll give my 2 cents based on what we've witnessed at Penalty Pros: 1 - Yes, this will do the trick. Just make sure that you are referencing the non-www version in the disavow. For example "domain:site.com" and NOT "domain:www.site.com". If you want to be super safe, just include the exact subdomains as separate line items. 2 - Google's official word is that you don't need to worry about nofollows, but we've encountered a few situations where nofollow links were pointed out as problematic in failed recon requests. This may be human error on the part of the manual team, but it's probably worth it just disavowing regardless. Hope this helps and good luck!

Sorted(I think) used screaming frog and identified a few caps issues, all looks ok now Thanks for all the help

thank you, I grabbed this and put into a text file for my developer to see and it and have made sense of your corrections.

It would be generally recommended you also include a <noscript><img src=""></noscript> section for crawlers and other visitors without JavaScript turned on. I would have at least hoped your solution would use the element rather than a completely non-standard approach to display images. Not sure what library, provider or script you are using but maybe check out a responsive image service like Pixtulate who would actually allow you to use a standard img tag and still accomplish what you are looking to do.

Thanks so much Bill and Brian. This is exactly what I was thinking. I did the same thing Bill suggested initially and took a snippet from one of the reviews and did a verbatim search and got nothing. What I thought this told me was that yes, the page was indexed, but not the content. The fact that the cached version renders the content from the javascript only shows that the script was executed, not necessarily that any of the content it contains was actually indexed. From an SEO standpoint I think this is valuable content that the dealer would very much want indexed. While the service providing the javascript might be very convenient, and the majority of end users might be able to consume the content, the fact that it's not searchable, to me, means it's an opportunity lost. Thanks again everyone.

Hi Denise, I would say you should treat a mobile user with the same content as a desktop one as they are there for the same reason- to access your site.  Having said this you might find having just essential content for a user and a link to desktop for some of the other pages. Obviously that's not helpful its down to preference. The way I would ask you to look at it is not from Google's point of view, but your users. What will give them the best experience? If you want to rank the mobile site i would alter more content to be mobile optimized.