Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You should be building your blog on your domain and your domain only. This is where you can gain a ton of backlinks and traffic to your site. Do not put a roadblock between your users and your site. Move that blog on over!

Just checking in on this - it seems the predictions have panned out - as I see the site now shows 2,170 pages indexed on the site search. Has this resolved for you as well?

Thanks for sharing your point of view ! I will contact Overblog to see if we can do something for that. If not I will import all the posts and put a small text in the old blog with a link to the new location of the post.

Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense. Christina

You're welcome

Yes and no - you need to approach it conservatively. Adding useful links throughout the website is fine. To be on the safe side, I would avoid using exact match anchor text frequently unless it's actually the page title. For example: A link on their site that says "best kitchen knives" pointing to your homepage at mikescookware.com is going to be bad. A link on their site that says "best kitchen knives" pointing to mikescookware.com/best-kitchen-knives/ is going to be better, but still pushing the line too far in my opinion. A link on their site that says "check out Mike's list of best kitchen knives available" pointing to mikescookware.com/best-kitchen-knives/ would be fine in my opinion. After a certain point, each new link from her site isn't going to be quite as valuable as the first links were, purely from a link equity standpoint. However - each additional link could be providing value in terms of click-through traffic and actual visits to your site, which is just as important as any link equity that may or may not be passed. As long as you're not dropping a link to your site from a significant percentage of the pages on her site, and you're mostly linking to internal pages of your site with resources or products rather than directly linking to your homepage, I think you're OK. I would go heavier on the resource/blog links than I would on product/category page links. My end-of-the-day rule of thumb is that if it feels spammy to a stranger or looks like advertisements all through the site, you probably need to scale it back.

Authority links are only one part of the equation. Regardless of source, Penguin looks quite heavily at anchor text. If the majority of anchor text pointing to your site is exact-match non-branded stuff, then it's entirely possible that Google could look on this as an attempt to manipulate rankings artificially. Without seeing more, I can only tell you that it's happened before and may be possible, especially if many of your links are from the same site.

Tommy, If you completely dropped to nowhere for a phrase you ranked well for it may be more than just a little bit of pagerank lost through the redirect. What Holger says is true, but the amount lost is pretty insignificant. If you share the exact URLs (before and after) we may be able to look into it for you. The way your domain is set up with multiple nested subdomains could be causing an issue too. The more specific you can be (keywords, etc...) the easier it will be for people to give you relevant advise.

As well as the Mozinar Ruth did at http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition

Hi Alexander, If not a lot of people are linking to them AND if the page has an expiration date of sorts, you'd probably want to 410 the page. 404 and 410 both tell Google that the page no longer exists; however, the 410 (GONE) is more specific than the 404 (NOT FOUND). The 410 "should" naturally get the page out of Google's index faster as well. Or, if it is an ongoing thing, you could consider changing your URL to /group-course and then just constantly change the content on that particular page, letting the URL accumulate inbound links and drive traffic... I don't know exactly how you are using the page, but just an option. Hope this helps. Mike

Should I be worried that Google may interpret the resultant user behavior as a bounce or pogo-stick? Lots of people come to my site and go straight to search.  That is a very common thing.   Yesterday, on my site the search results page was the third most visited page - receiving 2768 views. If you are using google custom search you can define a search page URL on your own domain and have the search results delivered there.  That has the advantage of keeping the visitor on your domain and then your analytics can detect the queries being used. That is how my site is set up.  When I use google to make a custom search engine I get the code to create a search landing page on my own site.

Hi, A few weeks later now and index is now on 63.000 url's so that's a good thing. Another weird thing is the following. There's a (old) url still in the index. When i visit it redirects me to the new url, which is good. Cache date is 2 weeks ago but Google still shows the old url. How is this possible? The 301 redirect is already in place since April 2013.

It will affect your rankings, in those countries. If you don't care about SEO or traffic from those countries, don't worry about it. We block most countries like .RU, etc. We don't want to sell anything to then, and we certainly don't want anything they have to sell

Ideally, you should avoid 301 redirect from index.php, as it will cause to go in infinite loop. I too have used 301 redirect earlier, but later applied a better way is Rel=canonical tag Still, if you look for 301 redirect - below is the code which will help redirecting :- RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ /$1 [R=301,L] May also see this url for all sort of redirection from html, php, non www page to www page http://www.gabblet.com/post/2011/09/27/301-redirect-for-index-non-www-to-www-using-htaccess.aspx Let know how it goes

Thanks Miriam for taking the time to answer my question

I agree 100% with Moosa what he is has described is exactly what you need to do. You might want to argue with your boss little bit about the reduction ROI however 301 redirecting is the correct way to go about saving your site. Sincerely, Thomas

Two URLs containing the same content will be considered as duplicated content, do the domain level redirection so that every URL should redirect to the home page of the preferred domain.

I would not advise buying EMDs for the purpose of linking into your main site, or for redirecting to your site after those EMDs get exact-match external links. Theoretically, if you had good content on the EMDs that you wouldn't mind putting on your main site some day (because catch-all redirects, like an entire site redirecting to the home page, are treated as 404s, according to John Muller of Google) you could gain something by redirecting the EMDs to that content on your main site once the EMDs had some decent links. However, the amount of effort it would take to do this would be significantly more than what it would take to put good content on your main site to begin with. Google has been lowering the importance of exact-match domains and exact-match anchor text for some time now. Shortcuts don't work forever. I don't mean to sound like some preachy white-hat guy, but even if you could get it to work for awhile you would be risking the reputation of your primary domain. When a site gets banned people often lose their jobs. They go on unemployment. They can't pay their mortgages. They can't afford health insurance. So yea, maybe a little bit preachy. Don't do it. Just my two cents. PS: I did try this a few times about five years ago on a few of my own personal sites. It didn't take long for Google to figure out how people were manipulating the algorithm by purchasing EMDs and redirecting them for this purpose.

Do any of your or anyone reading have any first hand experience with removing dates?