Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I too have seen this behavior, and don't know of a one-fits-all solution. Personally I'd start examining things with the specific URL. Do other results in those SERPs have stars? -Dan

These: http://screencast.com/t/p120RbUhCT They appear on every page I looked at, and take up the entire area "above the fold" and the content is "below the fold" -Dan

I think it's less about submitting them to, as you put it, the vast amount of info graphic directories, and more about having something that will resonate with your audience. If it's something you believe has good information, and will bring in business, then produce it and publicise it, but I'd hesitate to mass submit to every infographic directory you can find.  Pick the x most well known, or most relevant to your industry. If the information is good, and well presented you should gain real links from real people, which is significantly more useful than any number of directory submissions!

It could be that something went viral that caused your site to rank higher for a limited time.

Thanks, you seem lucky to me.. Almost after 2 month i have got the code for making all these encoded url's redirect correctly. Finally, now if one types http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 then he's redirected through 301 to the correct url http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10

Thank you Jesse, that's pretty much what I thought, but I wanted to have someone else confirming me that. Thank you very much, appreciated your help! All the best,

Thanks Carson. I deleted all my EZA/isnare/squidoo and closed the accounts. All the spam sites had taken the content published at EZA so I gathered all of them using GWT and majesticseo. After checking all of the backlinks I ended up disavowing 550 domains. As you say, there were some good links too, and only a handful of pages that the articles linked to, so my next step is to stop them redirecting. I've also contacted all the good linkers and they are updating to the .org too. We're getting there  Fingers crossed.. just goes to show that even something as justifiable as articles can bite you.

Companies that spend more time building their brand are going to be trusted more than companies that spend most of their time on SEO. Companies that have well-known brands and high-traffic websites with hundreds of thousands + quality external links, an aged domain, lots of brand-related signals (e.g. searches for their brand) are going to be given the benefit of a doubt. The rest of us are S.O.L. until we can build that brand presence. You have to toe the line. Yes you can learn from the big brand sites, especially when it comes to things like upselling, cross-selling, brand building, email marketing... but having worked with a lot of big brands I can tell you that their SEOs don't typically know anymore than others. They also have to go through a maze of bureaucracy to get anything implemented. As such, I don't pay much attention to what they are doing SEO-wise. If something works for them it probably has more to do with the power of their brand and domain than it does with a particular tactic. Emulating them with regard to SEO is typically useless, at best, and often dangerous.

Thanks for your answer. I'm afraid I have a lot of pages 404. why not have a 301 redirect to the parent item or to a results page with a message indicating that the announcement sought does not exist anymore?

As I said, that is what I would recommend doing. Zappos is not, and it could easily be due to limitations with their eCommerce or fulfillment systems since each color is probably a different sku. It could just as easily be due to the ability of these pages to rank better for each color, in which case they have an advantage over most other competitors because they can get away with it, as you have noticed.

Happy Monday to you! I agree with Mike - you need to use the 301 redirect to point from the old pages to the new pages. If you are reworking the site, and have to use parameters, consider dropping the parameters in a hash - this hides them to the bots and you get full SEO benefit for links Credit Rand for this excellent walk through - http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash There are other ways to deal with parameters and re-sorts of a result page, but it depends on your situation.  Bottom line, if you are going through the effort of a site restructure, don't set yourself up to end up with the same problem you have now. Figure out what your "Golden URLs" are for categories and products around key words and then find a way to "hide" all the other versions of those same pages (in this example you want to hide all the re-sorted and search result pages) from Google.  This is why I would often use a "no follow, no index" meta tag on a page vs a canonical.  Do not waste GoogleBot's time crawling a bunch of pages that you are not wanting to rank anyway. Setup the structure so the crawl is clear and focused on the pages that are the most important. Cheers!

Well if you know that the frame is already indexed you can do a site search of the frame and see what it looks like as well as the last cached date. The query would look something like this: site:example.com/iframe-page.html This will give you the page that Google has indexed. If you are going have the pages not be indexed i really so no SEO value into adding a hyperlink pointing to the frame itself (why build its authority if it is not in the SERPS?). So i would really just take into account the end users experience. If they can already see the framed content, why have a link that just shows it again? If you are able to share some URLs i might be able to give some more specific answers, thanks! Kyle

Yeah because of the age of my website, there was just news that was picked up YEARS ago... a lot are hi-pr links, i just want to make sure I do the right thing with em because as it stands right now any traffic gained from these now is 75%+ bounce rate.  Good anchor text for most, 301 is what I was thinking about first... then i thought, maybe just wrap the pages in my new header and hope the searches dont remove or derank these random pages. Again - We are talking about 50 pages, which bring in about 4k clicks a month... Albeit not huge, just didnt know what to do with them. One more Idea - I make a new different header that used a "nofollow" on all links for all my category & brand pages, then use it to wrap these old pages... The idea would be to preserve the "old content" , and hopefully keep the pages ranked #1 for their respective low volume searches... Would that even work?

Hi! I consider that your first original idea of justifying the rating system (aggregatereview in Schema.org) bounding it to the "how much this answer was useful?" is correct. Said that, I did not really understood if to a question is possible to offer more than one answer. In that case the aggregatereview value should be something like "the average quality of the answers given to this question is 3/5). So you should use the Schema just for that average of all the starred answers, and not adding Schema for every aggregatereview assigned to every answer.

Links in PDF do pass link equity. Be sure though that the PDF are correctly saved as text not image. I warmly suggest you to read this great guide about SEO for PDF by Lunametrics.

thanks: I tried it. Buzzstream identified about 25% contact emails of the list. In the end I did not find a way to export the email adresses out of buzzstream. I contacted support but now after 1 week no repsonse.

For SEO reasons I would strongly recommend that you don't show a splash page to visitors because this is going to cause crawling issues for the search engine bots. I would load a popup (like you mentioned) and then when the user accepts the warning it stores their response on a cookie.

I won't be so sure that those expired domains are what's helping them rank.  As their competitor, I'd more likely snicker at them behind their back for spending the money on buying and hosting those domains with the thought that it's helping their main site in the search results.  Here's an old Danny Sullivan article on the topic

I think this is a great approach. Use your web analytics software to record the internal site search for your website. This is easy to set up in GA admin. Adobe Analytics (sitecatalyst/omniture) has this feature too.