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Thanks mate. I suppose given my new site hasn't even been indexed as yet I was more thinking how much penalty there could be... I thought maybe I could redirect and then somehow let google know that the malware isn't present on the domain any more is all. I'll leave it alone as it doesn't sound like its worth the risk.

Thanks for the input. Wanted to make sure I was on the right track and not missing anything. Wish 301 redirects to similar products were possible but we don't carry any version of those products on this site leaving no good redirect page.

Thank you for posting here! We heard your response at Moz and considered the matter settled.

There are standards for the sitemaps .txt and .xml sitemaps, where there are no standards for html varieties.  Neither guarantees the listed pages will be crawled, though.  HTML has some advantage of potentially passing pagerank, where .txt and .xml varieties don't. These days, xml sitemaps may be more common  than .txt sitemaps but both perform the same function.

The links to sprint I am seeing are nofollowed.  There is also a tag on them that suggests that they are being automatically inserted by software as part of an advertising program. If that is correct then it is similar in nature to the way that programs like skimlinks work.  They look for particular terms and place monetised links on them.   If those links are no-followed then that would seem to be totally acceptable under Google guidelines.  What they don't like is selling links that "pass page rank", which the nofollow prevents. If you wanted to pursue that sort of approach then there are a number of programs and plugins that do this.  Personally I prefer links styled in such a way to be styled differently, so that users can understand which links are paid and which are editorial.

Sorry to say we're digging in the crates here... but one of the companies we acquired and took over full ownership of in May of this year had a site with no htaccess in standard html. I went meta refresh for my redirects. I'm thinking if I verify the site in WMT and then acknowledge that is has been moved to our current domain, this should probably be the most legit way to inform GOOG that we made the move. If anyone has any feedback that is more up to date, I'd love to hear it. Thanks!

Thanks. I appreciate the help with this. Yeah we are more concerned with user experience rather than passing link authority. The concern was just that implementing that many redirects could potentially hurt the main site from a Google perspective but I definitely appreciate the input. Makes my decision a bit easier.

Thanks for providing a time frame David, was that using the demotion tool or just naturally?

Did you see much movement with your SERPs after submitting the disavow?

Hi There This can be common with new sites. Google will test out it's rankings in the beginning to see how users respond etc - and then it may "settle" to a more normal ranking. These small adjustments to on-page things like H1s (which is not a strong signal) etc are probably going to make very small differences. I would recommend looking at other factors such as back links, domain authority, local citations etc. You can use the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool to gather lots of metrics around why certain sites rank where they do, and where you stand compared to those that are ranking. Take a look though these link building strategies as well as GetListed for some help on the links and citations. Hope that helps! -Dan

Good article. Thanks for posting I need to read some more on it. I wondered how the refinement might influence the Title content. I don't typically include "buy" in the title but I've got to look at our serps and re-think this.

Hey Alan Possibly. As you have likely noticed, there are so many potential factors here it always requires some experimentation. To answer a few of your points: 1. I don't see why you can't have two businesses at one address as long as that is totally legit and they have different names and phone numbers. 2. Look at how your neighbour has his address configured and make sure yours matches that format (if that is working) and that matches how that is laid out in Google maps etc. Then, do a citation audit and make sure you look at any historic variations in your name, address and phone number and update those lisitings. The link in my original post above outlines a structured way to approach this. 3. Will Google take time to show the address - yep, for sure. They may even show it, then not show it again, and then show it again. It's choppy waters in the local ecosystem but if you are sure you have everything correct and have audited external listings then just wait it out a while (2 weeks) and it should be okay. Hope that helps! Marcus

You can also get similar results to GetListed with yext.com you dont have to subscribe to their service but can see the results of local listings, that need adding and fixing. Check it out see if you are happy with the results for Canada

If you're not currently suffering any ill effects, I probably would ease into it, just because any large-scale change can theoretically cause Google to re-evaluate a site. In general, though, getting these results pages and tag pages out of the index is probably a good thing. Just a warning that this almost never goes as planned, and it can take months to fully kick in. Google takes their sweet time de-indexing pages. You might want to start with the tag pages, where a straight NOINDEX probably is a solid bet. After that, you could try rel=prev/next on the search pagination and/or canonical search filters. That would keep your core search pages indexed, but get rid of the really thin stuff. There's no one-sized-fits-all solution, but taking it in stages and using a couple of different methods targeted to the specific type of content may be a good bet. Whatever you do, log everything and track the impact daily. The more you know, the better off you'll be if anything goes wrong.

Robert. Thanks for the response.  I hate those sites as well and hate to see how they have exploited RSS.   It's a shame Google can't figure out who they are and who the real content creators are.  This should save me several hours a month by not having to file DMCA complaints.

Actually, these articles are "posts" on a wordpress blog, but I am not using category pages or monthly pages or other things that would make them look like a blog. Instead they are linked into my website through the homepage, through category page, and every product that they are about links to these article pages. Really there is no difference between a blog post and an article. The difference is that a blog usually integrates its content into your site in a way that is both dumb for your visitors and for SEOs.  So, use the posting ability of wordpress for its convenience, but build those pages into a website using the traditional methods that serve visitors and SEO.

No problem, feel free to reach out if you have any other RegEx related questions. Regards, Chris

David, I am in a similar situation and considering using the Disavow tool, although there seems to be some folks here who are fearful of it. Wondering what you ended up doing?

Is this solved Joel, I had a similar question that related to Rich Snippets and was to post the answer but justsaw the date?

Oleg makes some good points about putting those links on an index page for the articles (like the articles "section" of the site, which would be linked to from the home page) instead of putting every article link on the home page. However, I would argue that if these articles aren't helping "your website accomplish its goals" they shouldn't be on your site at all. Even if "SEO" is considered a goal of your website, you're bound to fail if you publish article-style content just for that reason. So in your strategy I would really think about how this content is helping your users. For example, where in the process of their journey on your site they might need/want to see that content (e.g. 'How to Choose a Widget' might be linked to from your widget category, or 'Ten Ways to Use Your New Widget' might go on a widget product page)? That would be where you want to link to it from.