Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You've got the basics, Kristian. If a page is on a strong domain, it will inherit some of that domain authority to the page. So if two pages are equal, but one is on a stronger domain (or stronger subdomain) the one on the stronger domain will likely rank higher and have more "juice" to send when it links out to other pages. There are many examples of blog subdomains that are actually stronger than their parent domains because that's where the site owner is investing most of their attention and effort. So... bottom line is... just because pages are on a blog subdomain doesn't mean they are necessarily worth less just because they're on a subdomain. Each has to be assessed individually for value, just like with the primary domains. Consider this: blogging sites like Typepad and WordPress.com all have their users' site on subdomains, yet huge numbers of those subdomain-based blogs rank really well and are very high authority. So assess a blog page on a subdomain as you would any other page. If it's related to your niche and a connection makes sense form a user's perspective, it's a reasonable target from which to earn a link. Hope that helps; Paul

Even if it's original content, filtering flimsy pages with little data for the user are what panda is all about. You can noidexed follow them and then gradually open them back up as you add additional content. look at your pages report and see top traffic generating pages, those pages are getting traffic because Google likes them and is ranking them. You definitely don't want to block any pages that are getting ranked and bringing visitors.

Thanks Irving. Yes, our marketing department would like to cross-promote our other sites, so the SEO element is not our main concern here. Clearly nofollow the links seems the best policy to ensure we cross link without falling foul of Google.

Does anyone have more suggestion/alternative strategies? Many thanks in advance.

Having a lot of links in your navigation isn't a big issue.  Just understand that the more categories & pages you have, the more links you will need for them to rank well.  So you are really setting yourself up for a big link building project getting relevant backlinks for all those pages.  But from a site architecture standpoint, there is nothing wrong with the way you are setting it up.

We have a large site too and we have different sitemap.xml files for different sections of the site and submitted in WMT where we can see which sections are having indexing issues under WMT > optimization > sitemaps Maybe that is a good thing though, do you have 3.4 million legit pages or are dupes getting filtered out? Has anyone changed your parameter handling or coding on the site URLs, or robots.txt file or noindex meta tags?

301 redirects can pass some link value, but some of the link value will get lost.  Also, unless the old sites are topically similar to the new site, Google may not pass any link value at all. If the sites are related to your new site, try including a couple of links from your old sites to the new one.  Write some new content for your old sites that's topically related to your new site, and include some in-context links.

Joe I agree with Shane that it is very possible to keep rankings after changing domains, but that is if everything else stays the same. You are moving to a totally new platform so not much is going to stay the same. I would not expect rankings to stay the same after the switch. Still, if you must do it, make sure all of the 301 redirects are in place and working correctly. Do the best you can with what you have to work with. I'd advise against switching if most of their revenue comes from Google organic search. However, some retailers actually find Amazon to be their leading channel (over search, even) so it all depends on what their business goals are. Good luck!

thanks for you comments from someone very experienced like yourself in the old school methods now needs to adjust and that takes a lot of effort and re-training my biggest mistake must be putting my website on the bottom of a escort site on each page thinking it will help my ranking lol still waiting for them to come off !! ....you live and learn )

Hi Alan I think a little more info would help. Are listings going to be replaced and updated (and the page address stays the same) or are new listings going to be added (ie: new pages will be added)? Basically, if the page URL stays the same, ie domain.com/neighborhood/listing/ and you're simply updating content - then Pages are the best way. And you would just use nesting etc to get the structure set up. If the URLs change, and new ones keep getting added, then you may want to use Posts. My guide to WordPress on Moz explains a lot of this stuff in detail. And I did a little tutorial video on posts vs pages This is a little unique case scenerio, so if you can give a little more info (or an example!) that would be helpful! -Dan

Can anyone recommend an infographic best practice type article thats up to date?

If visitors need to be logged in to view the content, then Google won't be able to see it either.  If you show Google different content than what users would see, that would be considered cloaking, which could lead to a penalty. So you need to find some kind of balance between having enough content on the page to give it a chance to rank vs incentivizing people to sign up for your service.

Hi Antonio, You have asked many questions here. I will try to cover as many as I can, within the scope of Q&A. From a purely local perspective, Google is interested only in your brick-and-mortar locations. You may have 1 listing per location, and each one must use your legal business name or DBA, a unique (not-shared) business address and a unique local phone number. You cannot have 2 businesses at the same address, nor 2 businesses sharing a phone number. Any confusion here can result in penalties, so it's really important to be totally clear in how you list yourself, and be sure that your website and all citations of the business precisely match the way you have listed yourself locally in Google's local products. I am concerned that if you go with the suite number approach you are mentioning, above, that the similarity in the 2 business names is going to bring up a red flag at Google. Google's guidelines state: Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. I believe that Google might find the approach you're considering to be a violation of this guideline. If your business is Joe Bloggs, then that is one business, regardless of how many websites or specialties you may have. Your Google listings can link to separate city landing pages rather than the homepage. That is fine. So your listing for your brick-and-mortar location in city A can link to the landing page on your website for city A, and so on and so forth with cities B, C, D, etc. Regarding categories, it's fine to choose custom categories, but it's a good practice to make at least the first category one of Google's pre-set categories. I like to find at least 2-3 pre-set categories, but this isn't always possible. Just make sure that your custom categories follow the rule of is-not-does. So plumber, not plumbing; chimney sweep, not chimney sweeping. Regarding a wide service radius, remember, local results revolve around your physical brick-and-mortar locations...not your service area. So, focus local attention on your physical locales. Everything else needs to approached from an organic standpoint, with a hope of getting organic rankings for these other cities and regions where you're not physically located. To begin targeting these service regions where you're not physically located, consider the practice of creating fantastic, unique landing pages for various locales. Do not create thin or duplicate content. Start with your 5 most important targeted geographic spots and create big, creative content for them. Then, move onto the next 5. Just remember, your goal with these is organic - not local. I hope I've answered the bulk of your questions helpfully!

Oh this was/is major. I had one keyword go from # 8 to #480