Welcome to the Q&A Forum

thank you for the insight. Let me ask you a related question: I own a website in a non-related field. The website is not doing anything for me, but is a trusted quality site. Can I redirect that website's homepage to my other website's homepage and otherwise just close that site down? Or, since the 2 websites have nothing in common (1 is about oranges the other about apples so to speak) would this be a move that could be considered manipulative and I shouldn't be doing?

To Google, there is not. The R=301 at the end of the rewrite rule defines it as a 301 redirect, so it's practically the same thing. For a one-off redirect I wouldn't use the rewrite format. This is usually for when you need to grab big chunks of URLs and redirect them all at once. Still, if it works this way, there's really nothing wrong with it from the redirecting standpoint. If there was, when people used it for large quantities of redirects, it wouldn't work.

It appears the disavow tool dropped me out of the rankings. And I deleted in and appeared to be right back in the rankings. Thanks,

Great article though MOZ for example does not appear in "news" search which seems weird. Does it mean it won't come up in alerts for terms like "SEO"...? Also, do you think I should ask for inclusion in the news? Does it help with SEO?

Hi, and thanks for the response. 1. Yes they are on separate domains 2. Do you have any references or experiences to share as per the question title? I.e., what actually causes you say that this will be "ok", whereas this will "cost authority", etc. This kind of information by itself isn't much to base a strategy on...

Good tip, thanks.

Thanks guys! Part of the problem is we cut the ties with our previous webmaster... I have taken over the account but he left me kinda high and dry, and everybody else here doesn't know anything about our website. So I'm just trying to figure out what's best practice/easiest/better in the long run. We are in the middle of a complete overhaul of our website so I decided we would buy a cert and make our entire site secure. We do some insurance verifications and we can afford it. Might as well. Thanks again!

Yes, which is why I thought the first page might be a bit more helpful as a reference point.

I've heard it both ways, that a sitemap is a way around the digits in the URL. But I can confirm, for sure, that if you are approved by Google News (must submit for approval), that the digits in the URL will work for sure.

I'm confused about one thing - how did you request URL removal in Google Webmaster Tools if you no longer own the domain? It looks like Google is caching some pages of your Southernafricatravel.com domain and showing them as appearing on Preferredsafaris.com. When I dig into the cache, it's actually showing your main/active site. This could be because of an old canonical relationships between them (whether actual canonical tags, 301-redirects, or something similar), or it could be because they contained duplicate content and Google chose to view them as canonical. Sometimes, that happens even if you don't specify it. I don't love that the new owner has put up spam irrelevant to the domain, and it's possible that could bite you somehow, but I suspect it's unlikely. Once Google sees that this old pages don't resolve, I think you'll see them gradually disappear. There is no duplicate content at this point.

Spot on that worked a dream... went from 82 to 92 on google page speed test

Hmmm, this is a weird one. My guess is, since Google originally found those links (maybe before your site launched, but the pages were linked to and live through the IP address?), it keeps returning to them and finding them. In that case, not much you can do, but keep those canonicals on. Canonicals really can save you from duplicate content problems: I've had clients with multiple versions of every page based on the path you take to a page, and canonicals have allowed them to rank well and avoid penalties entirely. As long as you're doing everything else right, hopefully this shouldn't be too much of an issue. Sorry this ended up falling on you!

We have never done anything blackhat or spammy, but over time we have just acquired crappy links. We had a traffic drop when the first penguin was rolled out so we thought cleaning up some of the old crap would be a good idea.

there could be several reasons. Has Moz found new sites pointing to your domain. Check out this link explaining the basics of Domain authority, http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority but as they look at links and Moz Trust it could be a case of you getting a few good links, and removing a few bad links. Also note that a drop is not always a bad thing and really you should compare your score against your competitors. Your DA has increased by 3, but if all your competitors has increased by 4 then in theory you are worse off, but this also applies, if you drop by 1 and ur competitors drop by 2 then you have gained even though you have dropped so I would always recommend benchmarking yourself against your competitors and not using it as a stand alone number.

Hi denverish, The results for now are quite interesting... As I mentioned above I added texts to the category pages which I wanted to turn into landing pages. In one case, I also added NOINDEX to the matching category on the blog and in the others I didn't. The result was that where I added the NOINDEX the blog category obviously disappeared (was mid second page) and an article from deep within the site replaced it - BUT NOT the wished landing page. Keep in mind that the category page on the blog linked to posts that each linked back to the desired category page. The other pages on which I added the texts are gaining real good placements within the SERPS. Most are now on top of page 2 and are tougher phrases. It is as if all of the posts within the category I now "NOINDEX" have lost their weight! I am today planning on removing the NOINDEX and will see in a month or so (hopefully sooner) where I stand. I am surprised from the result!

You can check the cache copy, in some cases Google appends the parameter and in some cases it does not. This depends on the authority of the specific URL.

Yes don't use underscores. Underscores make your url looks spammy and so do long urls. Go for the first example for sure.

I still can't get it to work

Google's John Mueller said many times that reporting a site does not mean you will see immediate action. The penguin algo has not updated for over 1 year!!! So immediate action implies 1 year or more sometimes! What they do is gather lots of data and use it to factor in to a new algorithm update. This can take a very long time and as I have argued many many times, is a very infective approach as by the time they are rolled out the guilty sites have a new tactic in place already. Doorway pages are frowned upon and will eventually get hit by some algo.

Hi, Social signals does affects rankings in long time period, if real people talks about your brand and your website, shares them it's good for you. But don't waste your time and money with buying social signals.