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Thanks Thomas, I'll check 'em out.

Hi there, You have kind of answered your own question in my opinion. "The usage is quite different (indoor vs. outdoor)" & "the specific outdoor categories and products don't map logically to specific indoor ones" You only want to be redirecting if the location is useful to the customer. Thinking "i dont want to loose the authority i've built up", whilst a valid chain of thought doesn't mean you should redirect it somewhere for the sake of it I would personally take 1 of 3 approaches Find a suitable replacement line of products from another supplier so you have somewhere valid to sent the customers 404 the pages and accept you no longer offer a service that users searching for this phrase would find useful Write an informative article / piece on the subject, highlighting the possible use of an outdoor version instead of the indoor as a place-holder piece of content or permanent replacement until new content can be sourced. Some may disagree but thats what I would do

Brodie has identified the issue - it is splitting available resources. The work that goes into one domain is huge. If you have two domains - then you are doubling the work. Ie I use the house analogy. Two domains is like owning two houses, two sets of bills, travel between the two, everything different. You likely need different resources, to make it look and feel differently to some extent. If you keep everything on the same domain - it is like adding a new room to an existing house, so overall the bills are kept down. You can tidy up everything as you move around the one house. So I always try and err on the side of caution, and try wherever possible to fit within a existing well maintained domain assuming there is a content and relevant nexus. However if the nexus is not there - then well you have no option.  As stated by Brodie it is a judgment call. The positive is you can always buy a new house later....  even if you start on your current domain. Also if you want to sidestep the decision all together - you can leave the decision to the money men - CFO and let them know they need to double the digital budget - and see what they say... with a brand new domain... Good luck hope you have enough info to make the right decision.

AHA! I had a feeling is was something like that. Glad to help!

Hey Colin! I looked at the pages and, I think, not only is the content thin but it may also show as duplicate content. My company creates and provides SEO services for a lot of eCommerce stores and we see this common issue. We typically make products such as these a single product with a way to choose different specs. That way you have the content all on one page and limits the duplicate and thin content that often comes along with an eCommerce store. If that is not an option, I would recommend reworking the content on these pages. I don't recommend canonical due to the URL structure. Noindex will be a way to avoid the duplicate/thin content, but that also means they are not indexed by search engines and limits their possibility of showing up. Hope that helps!

Yes, they would be. However, with the custom search, it would be set up so that the user could either search or they could click a keyword from a list of all the popular keywords that the search archive uses (California, Colorado, Grand Canyon, Lake Tahoe, blue, red, autumn, summer, etc.). While I would leave the pages for the actual photos in the sitemap, I figured I would leave these keyword search pages out of the sitemap, as they would be the most likely to conflict with my main galleries. Does that sounds like a good idea or am I flawed in my thinking here? Thanks for the help! Mickey

There has even been a Google Webmaster Guidelines Update in February 2016 which states "Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most)."  (Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en) So I really would not bother too much, especially not in a navigation - it often makes lots of sense to have lots of links there. (For example I have several alphabetical selections available on hover from main categories. It would not make sense to remove them just to have fewer links.) More links are of course not always better - consider what the user is likely to expect/need in navigation etc. Of course, more links mean that the relative importance of each link decreases; but google is able to identify navigation and repeating elements that appear on every page. I'd assume that they treat them different to main-content links. Because, well, they feel a lot different. Regards Nico

Hello mate, My advice is that the product descriptions and information in text are original content. If the text copied from the manufacturer's website appears on your website, google will penalize impacting well on your positions. Note that surely many of your competitors websites have descriptions and information copied from the manufacturer's website, it is a common practice. If you want to be different from your competition you have to make own original content. I can tell you from experience that also have an online shop, all my items are original descriptions made by me, so I got in just 6 months to live my website get good positions in top10 positions mainly related to the brand. Youtube upload videos is also important for your SEO. The important thing is that descarges videos and upload it to your YouTube channel, I always get on google + and immediately to the web, so you can write your own aspects that also influence the seo as the title meta and keywords.

Just because it says "first seen" by aHrefs, doesn't meant that Google hasn't been looking at it for years.  Google, could have seen and discredited any of the value those links passed long ago.   First seen in aHrefs, simply means their crawlers (significantly less resources than google, and maybe link was built before they even had crawlers out there) are just now getting to that page on the web. For your specific questions: If you’ve gotten through all that, how important does it seem to disavow links now? Given the "impending" Penguin update, I would strongly urge you to do an audit and cleanup anything that looks nasty. You don't want to get stuck in some filter because of old crappy links, waiting until the next Penguin rollout to "unfilter" you.   That being said, if you survived this long without getting a Penguin slap, then you might be okay assuming they having further "dialed in" the thresholds with the upcoming release. How urgent? See above regarding potential Penguin update.  Only issue is we still don't know when. Google claimed by end of year, then by end of Q1, and now most recently "when it's ready".  So the sense of urgency is always there. I’ve heard that disavowing links should be a rare undertaking. If this is so, what would you think of the idea of us disavowing everything or almost everything “first seen” Nov, 2015 and later? Disavowing links is the step you take under one of the following circumstances: You've tried to get webmasters, unsuccessfully, to remove links identified as potentially harmful, and you do not wish to receive credit for them.   This could be part of any proactive link monitoring approach. You have a penalty, and part of showing you don't care about those past paid links, is "taking the hit" and disavowing them.... note: you should have tried removal for these as well. If you don't have a penalty/filter... typically, you don't need to disavow links, as some level of "crap" builds up for everyone.  The real question is if you are noticing a pattern of low-quality backlinks or links from sources you know to be in violation of Google guidelines, and obviously or algorithmically so... and you want to minimize your risk. Is there a way to disavow at the linking domain level, rather than link-by-link to reduce the number of entries, or does it have to be done for each individual link? You can disavow entire domains/subdomains. If we disavow around 5.5k links since Nov, 2015, what is the potential for doing more harm than good? Fairly large.  You don't want to blanket disavow anything.  This should only be done after careful consideration of the value that link likely passes to your site, as well as a consideration to the risk is poses.  You don't want to disavow links that could be supporting your existing authority/rankings.  Disavow is not a tool to be taken lightly, and it is much easier to do more harm than good. If we’re seeing declining organic traffic in the past year on printglobe.com pretty much for the first time in the site’s history, can we attribute that to the links? If it is a steady and gradual decline, it is likely not link related, but rather site quality related... whether in the quality of the site/content itself (read: panda?) or in the experience of users (e.g. pogosticking, not clicking through on serps, etc.) Anything else you’d advise a guy who’s never disavowed a link before on this situation? Since you are doing this proactively, I would recommend you closely review all of the links in question and only disavow the link if you look at it and think "ugh, spam".

The same thing happens to me, and I check my rankings in an inkognito Chrome window. Does anyone know why I am seeing discrepancies?

Similarly to any link, not just 301: "The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link." So 301s are just fine.

Sure. Thank you so much for confirming the same. For the first time today, my recommended solution for a problem was supported by you. I'm really happy about it. "Moving in the right direction" feeling

Heard through some of their customers that the links they built got sites hit with manual penalties last year. I wouldn't personally use them for this ... just depends on the business & goals, I suppose. Keep all your reports if you do use them. Check the links, verify you aren't getting setup with sites that can harm you.

Given what you've shared you either have a target on your back or you have some lingering issues from a past infection. I've seen this before and its a pain is the $%& to deal with, but not impossible. For preventative measures for anyone with a WP site, I recommend the following: Use Wordfence - paid version if you can (minimal cost). Monitor the notifications, use country blocking that you are comfortable with (I disable China, Ukraine, N Korea, and Russia on most sites since most are local sites in the U.S.), and enable front end scanning Remove admin account and any other "easy" usernames Give all WP users strong passwords Use strong FTP passwords Don't install any plugins you don't need Update everything often! This is the best way to avoid problems. Pay attention to the theme you use and they are NOT all created equal. It's not uncommon for some themes to have known or unknown exploits in them, so be careful of the theme you use. Make sure it has good reviews and excellent support. If not, find a different theme. In your case, I'd do the following: Sign up for Sucuri for a year. They will audit your site within 24 hours and will clean any malicious files on the site. Hands down the best service for cleaning WordPress sites. $199. Remove un-needed WP users, change all WP passwords, remove Admin or other easy usernames and transfer posts/pages to another user Remove un-needed FTP users, change all FTP passwords Audit your plugins and get rid of all you don't need Keep your plugins, themes, and WP updated. Hope this helps. It's easier than it sounds when your get a system going. Joey

I agree, you shouldn't lose much if any on DA and PA, but if you are on a GoDaddy holding page you will start losing those links. I'm sure you realize the need to get some relevant content up there fast

Hi Jordan Thank you this has completely cleared things up. Thanks for your help. Claire

This happens more than you'd think, and it can be frustrating. It can, on occasion, be a sign that Google is on the fence about your category page. In other words, it could signal quality issues, although that's not always the case. Could you tell me what search you were running when this originally happened? There are ways to see how Google is viewing the pages on your site that match that search.

From looking at your site, your niche is "quirky gifts", so that is a decent umbrella topic to drive the content you're producing. I think the "10 Best ______" format is one you should keep doing regardless of the links. Over time they could get links from people referencing gift occasions and things like that. The next content types I'd be focused on would be topic related. "Star Wars", "Wine Lovers", "Science", etc. These don't have to be posts about gifts for those audiences, just anything related to those topics that fans would want to read. These types of posts will be your broader strategy for building awareness with your target audiences. The better your production value and promotion efforts, the more likely you'll see links from this type of content. Your overall blog may or may not attract subscribers. You're more likely to get them if you focus on an angle, eg "nerdy stuff" like www.thinkgeek.com. That's probably the best route to go in order to get a following over time. Otherwise you'll always be trying to build traffic without a developed fanbase. And, your blog can speak to 60% of the categories you sell and still be successful. You don't have to publish about all products in the same blog.