Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Robots.txt should be sufficient, but if you want to completely block them, here is a useful resource: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/blocking-bots-based-on-useragent

We have 1000s of links coming from www.wn.com. I have no idea why they link to us and our GA stats don't show any traffic from wn.com. Could I disallow www.wn.com in our robots.txt file?

Google will only have a problem with these pages because they are low quality and duplicate content. If they are in your main navigation and serving the user the same content as the bots then they aren't doorway pages. They are just a weak attempt at trying to gain local long tail search traffic, excuse me if i sound less than tactful. I think they can result in a panda penalty and I wouldn't continue building these out. Also the URLs are keyword stuffed: http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/bbw-dating/lincolnshire-bbw-dating/cleethorpes-lincolnshire-bbw-dating/ better would be: http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/bbw/lincolnshire/cleethorpes I would look at better optimization of SEO too. For instance in your title tag you don't need "Top 10 dating reviews" it's the name of your URL and you're wasting title tag space, you're missing the Linconshire location keyword in title tag, Adult I think need to be in there and probably even escorts should be a main keyword for your site. People looking for escorts might be willing to sign up for adult dating sites, it's online sex encounters, close to the same thing. Existing: <title>BBW Dating Cleethorpes | Top 10 Dating Reviews</title> Better: <title>BBW Dating in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire UK | Adult Dating and Escorts</title> Also location needs to be in content (maybe google maps of the area or some location info on the page) Good luck, feel free to thumbs up if it helped you out.

Hello Ignitas, I recently cleared 2 layers of slugs from the url of a page I was optimising.  I changed it from domain.co.uk/sub-folder/slug/key-phrase/ to just domain.co.uk/key-phrase/ and after a couple of weeks since Google indexed the change I've not seen any major uplift.  Still hovering between 7th and 9th place. I suspect in time it may help as it will be easier for people to add deep links to my landing page with a simpler URL.  I think now people just link to the homepage as the full url is too long to include but thats just a theory. I agree with you that shorter ones look better and when I look at competitors who hold top positions for my phrases they almost all have shorter slug-free urls so I'm continuing to move that way even if I haven't seen the ranking increases to back it up yet. Steve

Hmm, Well first off a 301 is preferred over a canonical when dealing with cross domains. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA I doubt 1 backlink is the cause of this. I think maybe you have the canonical set-up incorrectly? I'd go the 301 route and see what happens.

Probably creating backlinks with those name variations in the anchor tags might help. But why spend time and resources trying to make his site show up if people Google his name and/or name variations and not focus on making the site show up when people Google keywords related to the content/services/info John Smith offers?

Thanks for the input Irving.

Worthy: High quality guest posts (great content on great blogs) Infographics Q&As Link from social media Relevant broken link building / A few press releases Worthless: Directory links Blog commenting for links Buying links Profile / forum links Links pages

Yes, that is what I am doing now but like to have it automated using triggers like explained at http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/search-engine-optimization/seo-dashboard-google-docs-seomoz-analytics/.

I think you should focus less on your page content and more on how your website is coded and your inbound link profile. The title tags and description tags on both of your sites contain special characters that shouldn't be there, like bullets and Check marks.  Clean those up first. On your tiling website you've included your phone number in the title tag, thats a definite no no and I've seen sites penalized for that in the past. Just taking a brief peak at your inbound links, I'm guessing links from sites like this is more likely to be the reason for you problems than over optimization: blackhatpwnage.com/how-to-get-high-page-rank/ Your back link profile overall is very key word specific.  That combined with all of the above is the more likely reason for your problems than "over optimization" of your keywords. Best of luck!

Heck yes! Very grateful. Thank you!!

Hi I personally would host them in a subfolder - especially the PDFs as they are likely to gain links and these links will help strengthen your domain. However if you have them in a sub-domain they won't have the same benefit from the links as Google essentially treats sub-domains as a separate domain. This will also limit the ranking ability of PDFs as they won't benefit from your domains authority on a sub-domain. Have a look at this article for a bit more insight into subfolder vs sub-domain - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites I hope this helped..

Are you a US company or a UK company? It won't really make any difference where the domain is purchased, and very little where it is hosted really but it makes sense to host for a UK audience in the UK (less distance for requests to travel) but you could overcome this with geo targeting in webmaster tools. You can register a US domain (.com etc) with a UK company though - no need to do it via a US registrar. This is one of those tiny, weeney issues - if you are targeting UK folks, do it all in the UK and be done with it. Certainly don't agonise over it for any time! Hope that helps! Marcus