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Hey Paul Did you get any response after tweeting Google? Thx.

being a standard drupal setting doesn't mean it makes SE friendly anyway I have no backup for that theory, I'm just assuming that new sites should be as simple as possible in order to google to get a better grasp of them and start trusting before complicating thing in an unnecessary way, unless the node url is adding any value to you, I would get rid of it and 301 it to its canonical.

Hey Steven, it's hard for giving you a 100% valid answer as we do not know your site as well as you do, but here I will try clarify your doubts with my PoV: 1. beware of the definition of original content. Google is starting to move away from the solely written by me = original = deemed to rank. They are trying to figure out which content is unique and also adds value to user experience. You need to try to provide content which is providing a meaningful addition to user experience. 2. care with internal duplication. the walt disney piece on the right looks like a boilerplate content which is present on more the 51 pages on your website (google search). Take into account that if you create an original piece and then you splash it across multiple pages of your website google may dilute its value 3. Panda is a page-level algorithm. Panda doesn't act on the site as a whole. Even before being integrated with Core algorithm it was clear that panda acted on a page-level basis, only after reaching a certain threshold the system may decide to rule out a site from google rankings. It's definitely likely that google may be discounting only the pages it feels that are not useful while keeping the ones that are adding a value. The cancer quotes list is a good list of quotes that may be not found elsewhere. You know better than we do which unique functionalities you ahve added to your website to assess which are pages that deserves to rank vs pages which are just a rework on already existing (onsite) pages. I hope this helps you! e

Hi Does your client have a trademark / copyright on the business name - that would be my first place to start. See if legally you can get them to take down the website for trademark / copyright infringement. If not then have to agree with Vijay - its going to be hard work but you have to be better than them - build up the brand. Thanks Andy

I have a new client and just discovered on Open Site Explorer hundreds of links to ghost pages. The anchor text is stuff like Criminal Background Checks Las Vegas or Find Missing Persons. I am not the webmaster.  What advice should I give him? Julie

Everett, you've been incredibly helpful - thank you!

Hi While I haven't done it yet, I do have a client which I am looking at this issue for. I came across this plugin which looks decent and will do the job. https://store.plumrocket.com/magento-extensions/accelerated-mobile-pages-magento-extension.html My client has some other issues which needs fixing first before we start looking into making their site AMP. Thanks Andy

Yeh, I have just seen a few ranking drops so I'm now a little concerned. Thanks for your advice!

Hi there! That's awesome that you are already ranking for positions 1-3 but some solid research from Stat shows that it doesn’t guarantee you would trigger a rich snippet. But you have a high chance of getting one! I cover in detail how you can find and trigger rich snippets in this blog post: https://www.distilled.net/resources/3-ways-to-find-answer-box-opportunities/ In short here are the elements that will help you trigger an answer box: Presence of search query which is a question (or an implied question)  in <title>tag</li> <li>Presence of search query in <h1></li> <li>Presence of <ol> or <ul> lists or <table></li> <li>Look at what your competitors have done to get an answer box.  How did they format their content (pay careful attention to what Google highlights in bold in the answer box)? </li> </ul> <p>Hope this helps and let me know if you would like ant clarification!</p> <p>- Maryna </p></title>

Hi, You can simply leave them alone. Google will 'learn' that those URLs are all dead and remove them from the index. There's no need to robots.txt them out, or do 301s. Adding 2,500 301 redirects would have a significant impact on your page load time that isn't worth the risk. If the removed posts are showing up in Search Console, it means the crawlers are still finding them somehow. So you should do the following: The one exception to my 301 comment above is this: if you have good external links pointing to any of the posts you removed, you should redirects those to the next most relevant post Update your XML to exclude any of the removed posts Updated internal linking: if you have internal links that point to the removed posts, update those destination URLs Hope that helps!

No problem! Please let us know if you need any help once you have your results.

Hi While I have never used the service - it seems pretty expensive to me. For one link on a site with DA30+ its going to cost £80. Especially as from the looks of it you can't decide which sector the link is on - seems very grey / black hat to me, where its all about having a link. So you could sell car parts and get a link on a site that's about kitchens, might be DA30+ but not very relevant. Google knows where users click and will be putting more weight behind those metrics rather than website scoring metrics. We usually look to get links for our clients where potential customers are that can drive traffic and sales as well as a ranking benefits. While its probably more hard work than buying a link, its more natural, will give you greater benefits and you don't risk the chance of a Google penalty. Thanks Andy

If the links are low quality disavow them, better to be proactive rather than wait for a penalty then having to go through the process anyway.

Personally I don't agree with setting internal filter URLs to nofollow.  I set noindex as you have done and add the filter attributes to the Search Console > Crawl > URL Parameters. For the option "Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl?" you can set "No URLs" (if the filters are uniform throughout the site). "No URLs: Googlebot won't crawl any URLs containing this parameter. This is useful if your site uses many parameters to filter content. For example, telling Googlebot not to crawl URLs with less significant parameters such as pricefromand priceto (likehttp://www.examples.com/search?category=shoe&brand=nike&color=red&size=5&pricefrom=10&priceto=1000) can prevent the unnecessary crawling of content already available from a page without those parameters (likehttp://www.examples.com/search?category=shoe&brand=nike&color=red&size=5)"

Hi, I found the exact problem you are facing with a solution on this link http://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/17553/magento-core-url-rewrite-table-excessively-large There are patch codes available on this link, however do read this reply on this page Bugs in earlier (and possibly current) versions of Magento is one. Another is there's logic in this table that tries to track changes to the URL key value so that 301/302 rewrites are setup for old products. Because of this, and complicating things, truncating the table and regenerating may make existing URL rewrites go away, and this will have an unknown effect on your search engine listing (not necessity bad, just hard to predict). My general advice to clients who ask is Leave the giant growing table as is if you don't have a good handle on your URL/SEO situation Until the table size starts being a problem (generating site maps, for example). When that happens, get a handle on your URL/SEO situation. Once you have a handle on your URL/SEO situation, backup the table, then truncate the table and regenerate. Address any URL/SEO problems caused by the truncating. Automate step 3 Trying to fix this on the Magento code level is admirable, but you'll be swimming upstream. Sometimes it's better to accept that "That's just Magento being Magento", and to solve the problem with and external process. I hope this helps, if you have further questions, then post a response, I will be happy to answer. Regards, Vijay

From my experience*, using a subfolder structure will yield the best results. I think the more important factor is how these pages are linked to from within other pages on your website. You need to build links from high authority internal pages to your degree pages using keyword rich anchor text. If you do this from both websites, I don't think it will make much of a difference which domain the pages are hosted on. i.e. if you link to the degree pages sitewide from both domains, you will see similar results hosting them on either domain. So if you are going to move the degrees to the other domain, you might as well switch to a subfolder structure. If not, focus on building a stronger internal link profile. *As you said, this topic is highly debated. Google's official stance is that there is no difference for ranking between subfolder/subdirectory. They also say that if the content on the subdomain is highly relevant to the content on the root domain, they will be treated as the same domain (authority overflows).

Thank you for your posting, but I made further research on all this, and I tend to disagree with what you state. It is now my understanding that if you remove a page from the index, that content is no longer considered by Google, because it is actually "out of the index"... therefore, if, let's say, a specific page or a specific section of the site which could have caused a site-wide "content" penalty is removed from the index, those pages are no longer affecting any algorithmic calculation on the quality of the site from a "contents" stand point, and such alleged "content-related penalty" should be lifted. Anyone else can confirm that?

Thanks so much! I will get back to the drawing board and try my luck at some more attainable keywords. Thanks!

Hi ThreeShips! I agree with Vetty. If migrating to a new domain AND to HTTPs, I would recommend doing this in phases. It's the safest way to do this without causing a major problem with the site. If something with the migration were to go wrong, it will be much easier to spot and correct the problem than if you did both migrations at the same time.

I would perform an 80/20 analysis and see if these pages are driving any traffic to your website. If they aren't performing well, I would delete them and redirect them to similar pages or back to the homepage. I agree with Bernadette about checking Open Site Explorer. You want to makes sure you are not going to be giving up any valuable backlinks that these pages might have generated.