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Hi Nakul No, we have not generated those links. We had a 300 links in wmt, but only 3 or 4 were generated by us. I mean, that were the ones that were linking our 2 main sitews (company sites) with that blog. That's all. What we did is just change that links to no-follow. All the other links were just atomatically generated. What do you think? thanks

Hello M, It all depends on the site. I find most eCommerce sites need substantial copy-editing or writing of unique, useful product descriptions and category page content. That is probably where I would spend my time with regard to on-page. Of course you can't ignore major technical issues either. In terms of building links, asking influencers and brand evangelists to do product reviews has always been good PR, long before Google. Just don't ask for a link (though you will probably get one) and don't request that it be made "followable" if it's not. Just be happy for the traffic and exposure. There are lots of other link building tactics and content marketing strategies that work for eCommerce sites, but it all depends on the site so it's tough to really say what's best for your client in 2014. Nine times out of ten what eCommerce sites need the most of is better, more unique, more useful product page copy. Good luck!

Well after four score and twenty other solutions I tried, I eventually tried a solution that my web hosting company suggested. They created a bogus domain name for me and pointed it to the root folder. The only drawback to that is that our billing account goes by the bogus domain name instead of the main domain name... yeah... boo hoo right? Lol Then they made our main domain name point to the magento subfolder via the dns zone records. That way I'm able to treat Magento as if it's a root folder install, but still keep it in a sub-directory. I get to keep my actual root folder free from magento installation files, and there are NO complex .htaccess rewrite rules, or modifications to the /magento/index.php page either. All in all, it's a great, fast and easy solution to the issue I was having. :)))

Thanks guys, very interesting stuff and something we expect to see a lot more of throughout 2014, and perhaps implemented on SearchBuzz at a later date. Regards

If the links are toxic, your firm is correct in that it's important to start the removal process. That said, I don't see any reason not to start optimizing pages for your terms. These aren't dependent tasks in any way. If the links were built by you and are toxic and your pages are not currently well optimized, you should definitely be working on both of those things. If it's time that's the issue, think about what you can do on your own. There's no need to have a paid firm gathering contact info from the linking sites when you could easily be doing that yourself. Make sure you're communicating with one another so that they're helping with things you need help with

AJAX-driven content won't be crawleable, but there are alternative ways to get content indexed. I've talked with Rob about the AJAX piece Peter mentioned, and he's actually feeling like it needs another update. The resources Google provides for these situations are actually quite helpful: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en It's possible to have an infinitely-scrolling page that Google can see via an HTML snapshot of the page or one of the other mentioned solutions. You can also include pagination for Google, even in infinitely scrolling content and use the same method. This kind of thing CAN be done in a crawler-friendly way... but it's usually not. The pages may still be indexed via a sitemap, but it's best to make sure the crawler can crawl the site anyway.

If you have a lot of links that you can control the anchor text on, that's a pretty sure sign that you should remove them. These aren't the links that Google is going to reward or ignore in the long term. Whether you're currently being hurt by them would require a very thorough review on an expert's part, but I'm sure that links you place manually are links Google doesn't want to count. There are thoughts that Google is using its "link churn" patents to use the rate at which anchor text or links change as a part of rankings, but it's not known exactly how the mechanism works. Regardless, if the links are spammy and you're subtracting spammy links rather than adding, you won't get hit by any mechanisms designed to flag artificial rank manipulation. Do try to remove links before you disavow them. Disavow is a last-ditch option, and Google still won't accept it if no effort has been made at removal.

I'll just leave this here. https://twitter.com/SEOmessiah/status/425417000186150913 What is the value to you? Exposure? Traffic? Links? Duplicate content has little value in the eyes of Google. And this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

Very pleased to have been of assistance heres links to older threads where i asked similar before, for further verification and credit to those that originally helped me: http://moz.com/community/q/removing-a-staging-area-dev-area-thats-been-indexed-via-gwt-since-wasnt-hidden-from-the-index http://moz.com/community/q/staging-development-areas-should-be-not-indexable-i-e-no-followed-no-index-in-meta-robots-etc

In the olden days, before search engines, our elders judged links based upon the traffic they would send. You have to consider that someone is going to click on that link. Maybe that set's the site up as an authority in one person's mind. Eventually they will run into other people that are like-minded . Maybe these people go out and publish something, with followed links, from somewhere pretty nice. It may be a long shot, but Wikipedia tends to rank well for informational queries. The links that may follow would help later. You have content on a site with pretty high visibility. I would ask you, how is this a bad thing?

Our software is web-based, hence the log in. One of customers' complaints has been the difficulty in finding the login page, so we wanted to make that easier for them. We've identified that over 70% of visitors to the product page are current customers looking to log in, so we'd like to save them a step by serving the log in page directly.

Hi William, It mostly depends on how much volume based on traffic you're generating. If you're just hosting a simple WordPress site with on average a couple of thousand visitors you could use AWS but it's probably not really for you as the setup time will be much higher. Although if you're receiving tens of thousands of visitor everyday then it could be worth it as you can easily scale the number of servers you run. Hope this give some insights.

Hi Theo, This is an old post you commented on, but I wanted to expand on the question and ask your thoughts: I have a real estate website where I show MLS listings (properties for sale shared by Realtors) which means these MLS listings also exit on 100+ other real estate sites. For my various MLS result pages I use rel=prev / next for paginated pages. Now, here is the question: should I also ad a "no index, follow" on these paginated pages? According to a Google blog post it said no need to use when using rel=prev / next. However, in my case these pages are very similar to other pages around the web and not original content. Yes, I know I could make more unique by adding content, but that is not what my users want. I need a simple clean look with minimal words. So, if I have a result page with 10 pages, would no index follow 9 of those pages make sense to reduce the duplicate content on my website? Or, is issue that my result page will look "thin" compared to competitors and that will impact my ranking negatively?

I fully agree about the links warpath. My point is that in my opinion you are at far greater risk from trying to hide the nature of the interconnected sites with machinations on hosting, IP addresses etc, than to simply legitimately link them. Any attempt to artificially pass significant ranking influence between these related sites is bound to be caught by Google eventually because there are just too many signals available for Google to spot. While I'm unwilling to say "never" where Google's algorithm is concerned, I would say a legitimate, natural interlinking between these sites is BY FAR the safest approach, compared to the alternatives. The only safer way would be not to interlink at all. I do feel your pain. Google is playing with people's livelihoods with these inaccurately applied penalties, whether algorithmic or manual. Paul

thank you, Moosa. Let me give you an example: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/waikiki-real-estate-condos-for-sale/ - on that page "Waikiki Condos for Sale" I have created a landing page which seems popular with users. I do not want to add content to the page just to keep search engines happy. As you will notice, there are 30+ pages for this "Waikiki condos for sale" page. It is not directly duplicate content, as my site shows different layout and wording that other sites, but it does not change the fact that the listings are identical. I have corrected added the rel=next prev tags and maybe that is enough. However, I wonder, should I "no index, follow" page 2, 3, 4 of the series, with the reasoning I will have less duplicate content? Or, will such no indexing lead search engines to think my "Waikiki condos for sale" page has that much less content than competitors and therefore struggle to rank? On a bigger scale, not focused specifically on this "Waikiki condos for sale" page, will the "no index" part help the rest of my site perform better, as the ratio of original vs copied content will improve?

Thanks Ashley, but the question still remains if I will lose any ranking and authority by 301-ing a page that was a top level page on my old domain to a related interior third level directory on my new site. In other words, does Google assign additional weight for a page being a top level home page, and will that weight be lost when 301 redirected to a deeper level page? It makes sense for Google to do so, as most likely content on the home page is less likely to be spam. Here is an article discussing this: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2011/05/09/pros-cons-merging-websites/

Domain Authority is a metric that Moz uses, but is not a metric that any search engines use for ranking.

adding canonical tags does not sound right since the paginated pages are not duplicate, rather part of a series which I have addressed by adding rel=next/prev…….

Hi Jeff, That was my first thought as well, then i got into the old site and saw that I was going to have to re-write most of them anyway. I am hoping to get back some of the juice with solid on page SEO and new content.

Hi David, That looks like a tricky issue you have there. Your dates don't immediately look like matching with well known updates, but to be honest a lot of stuff was going on in the last 3-4 months of 2013 so it is easy to get confused! You say that you traditionally ranked well for 'daily bible verse' related searches. I am not familiar with what phrases these might be, but have your rankings actually dropped on your 'main' keywords or have they remained pretty steady but you still see the traffic drop? I would look into trying to identify better where the traffic was lost and that might help identify why. So you could look at things like landing pages and compare between the month of lost traffic with the month before. Once you have your list of landing pages that lost significant traffic you could look at any keyword data still available for those pages to try to get an idea of what kind of queries (and intent) were bring traffic to those pages and then go and have a look at what kind of serps those type of queries return now. Have some big sites (wikipedia or similar) moved into top positions? Are knowledge graph boxes answering the question without the user needing to click through to your site? Understanding what content lost traffic (and/or tracked keywords lost rankings) should give you a better idea of what happened and be able to guide you in planning your next steps. Hope that helps!