Welcome to the Q&A Forum

hi thanks for that. i have now dealt with a lot of them through htaccess and directed them to one page. what i may do in the future when i see that they are no longer bringing traffic is allow google to delete them. what i have found is they are bringing in traffic which i am surprised at. they were from a component i had which was a kind of message board

Hi Donnie, Thanks for your reply.  The links are great.  However, I was hoping that Rand would provide his perspective in a blog or weekly whitepaper.

That was a good catch Alan and Ryan, I just looked at the Alt and Title and did not even notice the example used them in an anchor. Doh! I would only ever use them in images. Since I develop on the Microsoft platfrom using it anywhere other than img flags a syntax error.

I'd like to get an SEO point of view on Redirecting Level 1 Pages (ie: main pages) to Level 3. I am thinking (hoping) you may not be using the proper verbiage. If you have a link from your home page to a page within your site, whether that page is 1 level or 10 levels deep, it is referred to as a "link". A redirect happens when the target page automatically bounces you to another page. Links are a good thing for your site as they help users and crawlers locate pages quickly and easily. If a user didn't have the link, they would need to navigate from your home page to the motorcycles page, then to the bandit page, then finally to the cb600-hornet page which would take 3 clicks. The link offers the ability to get to the page in 1 click. Redirects are great when required, but they also do not pass the full amount of link juice on to the target page, so they should be avoided when possible. Is there any point adding in title and description tags for these 2 levels seems as there is no content? If the pages have no content, you should add a "noindex, follow" tag to these pages so they do not get indexed. Then there would be no need to add a title nor description tag. Of course, the best option would be to add quality content to these pages, but the choice is yours.

From what I understand of Panda is that Panda is an algorithm update therefore the same exact site built on a different domain will most likely suffer the same fate. Google rarely delivers reviewed penalties. Human hands are rarely involved. You are playing a video game against a machine. The machine will react about the same way every single time. 301s only help push forward some link juice. They don't seem to pass all of the link juice forward. They will pass all of the traffic forward.

Shane, it tends to be the sites that manipulate the rankings (black hat) know all those tricks and if all it took was a seal from an SSL company, they would have a different one on each page. It would be surprising that the seal actually gives you page rank, it most likely does the opposite since an outbound link only passes juice to the destination and all those seals link directly to the ssl provider. As Ryan points out contacting Verisign directly will give you some insight, they are a company built on reputation and would not say it adds Google rank when it does not. You have to consider what their product is 'trust' and if they give you false information that hurts their marketting when you discover that is not the case. They would tell you what I said in my first reply, that their seal brings customer conversions, which is ultimately what you are after. Generally ecommerce sites exclude their ssl pages via robots.txt or nofollows so the question does not get raised. If the content on those pages is secure but not authenticated then the value is limited as it is public and open to exploit. As a developer, I have attended many seminars on this topic alone. The rank gain you get is secondary (from more tweets, blog links etc because people trust your site and like it) rather than a direct corelation. Read the paper (relevant section below) from the link: If I use SSL on my pages, will we be PageRank'd higher then non-ssl pages? So far, there is NO conclusive proof that a SSL site will get higher Google/MSN/Yahoo search rank listing compared to the same site which is unencrypted. In fact there seems to be no positive or negative result if you have your pages encrypted or not. This is because the quality of the data on the site is not validated by SSL, only that the certificate is independently verified. The most important factor in Google's PageRank for example is the amount of high quality sites linking back to your site. The idea being that if a site like Digg or CNN link to your site then your page rank will increase because their page rank is high. This is completely independent of whether your page is encrypted or not.

Thanks for your response Aaron. Thats why I asked the question because we have done some 301ing in the past and I am pretty sure PR was transferred pretty sharply however, it does not seem to have done so on this occasion. Cheers

Thx for the advice. Will do!

Cloaking is defined as providing different content to users then to search engine crawlers. That is not what is happening here. Users and search engines see the same picture. The source of the image is irrelevant. Many sites use content delivery networks to deliver images. If you are viewing the page from California, then perhaps a server in San Jose, CA will deliver your image. Meanwhile if you view that same page in Texas, then perhaps a Dallas, TX server will deliver the same content. The delivered files COULD have different names or paths, but the actual content delivered should be the same. No, this is not cloaking and does not impact SEO directly. As oznappies points out, there may be other issues with the page which cause it to load very slowly and not perform well, and those issues can impact SEO.

If the external site links to what Google considers a 'bad neighbourhood', then yes, the external site linking to the doorway page might get penalised but it isn't normally an instant penalty, but after Google figures it out through their various algorithms.