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do logged in-user and anonymous user should have the same behavior ? For the most part, yes, however it depends on the forum you are running. The important piece to understand is that whatever is hidden behind a login wall, remains hidden to the search engines. So, you have to weigh that factor when deciding which content to display to everyone versus the content to display to only logged in users. How do you suggest handling canonical in a UGC world ? Canonicalization isn't too hard to manage. Your forum software should include canonical URLs, but if not you will want those implemented into the template as soon as possible. The use of the rel=prev and rel=next tags are highly recommended. This allows you to keep the main forum thread as the canonical URL and Google understands that the subsequent pages are related to the main page and how they add value. Do you have specific editorial guidelines enforced on UGC ? Again, that's up to you and your community. What work editorially for one forum may not be the most desirable for another (e.g. the use of profanity). As long as the content being added is of value, then I consider it good content. With forums, you can be a lot more loose with the guidelines and allow users to interact as they desire. Don't let your forum become infested with Spam, obvious self-promoting threads, and make sure all links are nofollow. Many forums implement restrictions on users in regards to links and only when they prove themselves can they add links to their posts. Link and Spam management are very important for forums.

Hello Mike, This is definitely a situation where proper analytics and consistent reporting that show losses when changes are not implemented (and gains made when they are) is necessary. If you can prove that slow action (or inaction) on their part is hurting their bottom line, then they will be spurred to make the necessary changes. It can be a challenge to maintain willpower and work ethic when you know that small changes on the part of your client will make discernible differences to their success. I have a client that followed this same pattern - small alterations such as additional content or meta tags were multi-month endeavors. The action we took was a combination of the ideas offered by Martijn and EGOL - we began by making monthly analytics reports for 3-month periods showing the cost of inefficiency (noting changes and the average amount of time they took compared with revenue figures before/after said changes were made). After 3 months, we made the alterations ourselves at no cost to see what kind of difference it made. Within 2 months of the changes we made, their bottom line had increased by 18% when compared to their average monthly earnings. When we showed them this, we made the argument that we could be responsible for their ongoing updates (for a fee) and they were happy to move ahead with that system. 2 years later and we still have a great working relationship with them. As marketers and SEO's, it is our job to lead our clients to revenue, even if they don't understand how it works or place little value on it. We have to provide value and get their buy-in. After that, we can take on more challenging (and inspiring) projects to keep ourselves entertained. Hopefully this gives you some ideas for moving forward. Keep plugging away and feel free to fire any questions you have my way. Best regards, Rob

Thanks Paddy! We'll definitely try these solutions.

Thanks David, Thanks for your response, very helpful I agree, there is a lot of room for improvement. Its written on an old .aspx CMS platform and i'm having a real nightmare trying to get used to it.. It ain't no Wordpress - that much is clear! Page titles + descriptions were the first things I was going to get started on, I've just been defining the core keywords before I get going! Cheers

I personally would start by using the Panguin tool which gives an overlay of your Google Analytics - make sure you set your date back enough to cover the time prior to when you got hit in order to see if you have been hurt by any of the updates. I have been using this tool for several years and would definitely recommend it - I have done in several other Moz Q&As previously. Samuel Scott's response mentions the post by Alan Bleweiss and he mentions this tool in it. Depending on what your analysis uncovers you may find this an interesting read - http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal Hope this helps!

I believe it is because Sephora is using a recommended 3rd party product review aggregator, Bazaarvoice. They most likely share their product reviews with Google through a data feed file and Google understands enough to implement the reviews in the Organic search. I've only seen reviews shared this way for the purpose of includes reviews in Google Shopping (previously, PLAs), but not organic search.

Agreed. We used to have the video on the homepage, and we recently moved it to a page of its own. I do think we should incorporate it into other pages for the best effect.

I would forget about Domain Authority -- it's about as useful as PageRank. On which of those two sites should you get links? The one that is more prominently read among your target audience. If I have a website about basketball, I'd prefer a link from another big basketball site with a DA of 20 over a site on, say, cooking that may have a DA of 60. In the age of "earning" links, the best links comes as natural by-products of just doing good marketing and public relations. And involves the process (which I outline here and here on Moz) of KPI setting, audience identification and research, messaging and positioning, channel research, content creation, and campaign execution. Do this process well over and over again forever, and the best links will come your way without you even needing to think about it.

Sorry I missed this! If you have your website architecture set up well you can always request Google to index a page and all pages that it links to. You'll see this option when you click the Submit to index button. You won't have to submit a substantial amount of individual pages this way. I personally would keep an eye the pages of most value. These are the pages you are optimizing for that show up in the search results and are generating traffic. Hope this helps.

Hi Justin, Sounds like you already know what you're doing! I would proceed with exactly what you have said and wouldn't be worried at all about the loss of authority between redirecting to a URL without a / to a URL with a /. The loss of authority will be almost insignificant and you will not lose your rankings or organic traffic from from doing this.

hi Brady, No - there are different pages like this http://www......../bmw/gallery/img1 http://www......../bmw/gallery/img2 http://www......../bmw/gallery/img3 ...

Wondering if this ever got resolved? I have a few clients on Hubspot as well and we are concerned that since the blog lives on a subdomain (blog.website.com) we are concerned that the core site is not getting the SEO credit it deserves. We have had to submit the blog sitemap to GWT separately just as you would a www. version of the site. When asking Hubspot about this they were not able to really answer since it's more of a Google/SEO question. Thanks in advance... still on the hunt to find out more!

We are excited at the prospect of being able to put up multiple languages, at both the cost and effort level that your company describes. But a couple of specific concerns that we need addressed before we could try the service is the potential for incurring Google penalties for both duplicated content and auto-generated content. Can you provide some detailed insight as to how your service has addressed those issues?

Those are poor quality pages and poor quality backlinks for your site. Get rid of them.

Not what you asked, but other than SEO I would say comments do have an effect.   I have heard advertisers say they were looking for sites with comments.  Their thinking was they wanted popular sites with followers and they is how they judged it.

Hey You can use the URL removal tool to expedite this and it is one of the few times that Google actually recommends you do so: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1269119?hl=en. Likewise, the URLs will eventually fall away but it can take some time. The most important thing here is to ensure the site is 100% protected going forwards and does not get reinfected. The pharma hack often has three backdoors in WP itself, a plugin and often the database. These can go for months without being called and suddenly, the site is reinfected again and they are getting better all the time at making this harder and harder to clean up. This is worth a read: http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/07/understanding-and-cleaning-the-pharma-hack-on-wordpress.html We often also see a second degree payload with some black hat SEO and outbound links on the site so even when you get rid of the main problem, you may have a few small residual problems. I would suggest an SEO audit, some pro active security and at very least review the outbound links from the site to make sure they are all legit (Screaming Frog is your friend here and it will show external links + linking page). Hope that helps! Marcus

Hi Paul - You're correct from the start, you want to 301 those dead pages to their closest related page. Maybe the sports team or sport category. From what you've written, I'm sure you can figure this one out - nice job!

Hi David, I've reviewed a lot of legal sites lately.  So many of them have been affected by Google's Penguin algorithm because of unnatural link building.  If you've had links built in the past then you may need to do a thorough link audit in order to clean things up before you can move on. For some sites there can be Panda issues as well that need to be cleared up in order for the site to see improvement. What is difficult though is the "moving on" portion.  When Google ranks law firms for a particular city, how do they determine whether you rank at the top or not?  You can only go so far by cleaning up links.  You can go a little farther by improving your site from an on page perspective so that it performs well for both crawlers and for users.  But then what do you do? The next component that Google uses in order to determine whether you should rank better than your competitors is links.  In the past, you could create your own links in a myriad of directories, article sites, bookmarking sites, etc.  But that's the type of thing that gets sites penalized.  Google only wants to count links that are truly valid votes for a site.  But I would imagine that there are not a lot of people who want to write glowing reviews of their attorney and link to them.  Still, there are some valid ways to get links to legal sites: -There are some directories that are acceptable and probably could send you clients as well. -You can get links from valid industry partners. -You can sometimes get good links by finding unlinked mentions of your firm and getting them to link to you. -The BEST way to get links is to produce content that people would find useful and then promote that content so that people will link to it.  But, this is hard to do.  There are companies that can do this, but you have to be picky when choosing one.  And, if you find one that can do this well, it will be expensive. When it comes to identifying whether you have a Penguin or Panda problem or another type of algorithmic issue that is holding you back, and fixing those issues, I can help you with this (although I do have a bit of a waiting list.)  In regards to promoting your site once the algo issues are fixed up, probably the best option is to go through the list of recommended companies here (http://moz.com/community/recommended) and asking them the following questions: -Tell me how you would get links to my site? - I would want to hear specific answers and not marketing speak like, "We'll leverage our blah blah blah and promote blah blah blah with our proprietary method." -Do you have references?  - Don't let them hide behind NDA's.  If they have successfully helped clients in the past with their rankings then they will have plenty of businesses who are happy to give them a reference. Hope that helps! Marie

Hi Victor, IMO, there are no two identical cheesecakes. So I would not consider it as an issue, UNTIL they are not a complete copy-paste to each other. Let's say that I have a way to cook a Hungarian goulash, and my best friend makes the "same" Hungarian goulash, but he does "personalize" it. We have two recipes, still we have two different recipes. The way you could make it more "unique" is to let the community comment on these recipes (for ex. have a button like: "give your compliments to this chef!" and give the possibility to the users to give a personal opinion about the specific recipe. This way community members will generate the unique content to each of the recipes. (lets face it, I do not think comments will be copy-pasted to the similar recipes). This is a personal opinion, I'd love to hear feedback from others. Gr., Keszi

Mark, thanks for the question. My short answer: If you are doing anything that is potentially risky, then don't do it. I mean using guest posts at all -- whenever I see people talk about using this strategy, I die a little inside. Here's the long answer. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's anti-spam team, said here that people should stop using guest posts to build links. In response, Jen Lopez of Moz wrote this great essay that I highly suggest you read at least twice: As with anything, you don't want to be out there trying willy-nilly to get your posts on every blog for the sole purpose of building (probably bad) links. It's important to have this tied to your business and marketing goals, as you would with any other tactic. SEO is only one piece of the larger strategy, and if you focus solely on writing posts for link building purposes, you're missing out on a ton of other possibilities. Here's why guests posts are usually bad ideas: Websites that just publish countless random guest posts on desired topics are rarely authoritative websites in those niches. Does anyone actually visit those sites? Do those sites send legitimate referral traffic? If the answer is "no," then Google likely views them as having little authority. So, a random link on a random post on such a site isn't going to help you that much. Any guest-post website that charges for publishing posts is almost certainly violating Google's guidelines. Paying for links directly (or indirectly via paying for posts) is very, very risky. You are "building" links, not "earning" them. Why should Google give you credit for a link that you essentially give yourself? So, what's my answer? Read this Moz essay of mine that was inspired by Lopez's response. The key is to stop thinking about links and to start thinking about marketing. The best links, rankings, traffic and more are actually just good by-products of doing good public relations and publicity. My essay goes into to detail, but I'll summarize here. First, determine your website's target audience. Second, find out what major news outlets, publications, and blogs are actually read by your target audience. Third, use the methods that I detailed to get news coverage or a quality article or opinion piece (not a few hundred words of fluff) published on those websites. Yes, it's hard. But nothing good comes easily. ONE of those links is worth 100 or 1,000 random guest post links.