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Hi Jay, I was going to direct you to the SEOChat forum but I think you may have posted there very recently. There is a sticky post on there regarding SEO tools that will have some good suggestions for you. Sadly, that post wasn't sticky enough that I could locate it just now. I think it was somewhere within this section: http://forums.seochat.com/guide-90/ I saw this answer in response to a similar question on SEO Chat and I've got to say, it's rather amusing: "The SEO software that is worth using is the one between your ears .... and yes that works with all browsers." Good luck in your quest!

As part of the normal backlink profile you would absolutely expect to see some nofollow links (In many cases, you can expect to see more nofollow than follow (Moz's inbound links have a ratio of something close to 40% follow to 60% nofollow). Of course, if you only have a few inbound links there's every chance that 100% of them could be passing equity. However, as your site grows, you'd definitely expect to see that percentage drop off. Being honest, I can only see this ratio being something to concern yourself with if you are trying to make your backlink profile "look natural", rather than allowing to develop naturally. Often, the kind of places that allow you to "get" dofollow links (i.e. paid links/directories etc.) are of lower quality and Google will have a pretty good understanding what they're up to and simply discount the links, which could see you investing a lot of effort and gaining nothing of any worth at the end. So, in summary, there is no optimal ratio of follow/nofollow links, only good links (natural/relevant) and bad links (paid/spammy). Concentrate your efforts on building great contents, satisfying your visitors (by giving them what they want) and building relationships within your vertical and you'll gain far more from fewer links. It may seem counter-intuitive, especially if you see your competitors gaming the system, but their success will likely be short-lived. I know that the "build great content" and "putting the user first" messages can seem a little trite, but you hear it a lot because it's true. Good luck with your project!

I think Robert covers it pretty well. I would just add that it will probably be easier for you to rank for the long tail terms like "frosted jelly donut" as well if you're already ranking for "donut" if you've developed a logical hierarchy in your site architecture. When ranking for donuts, creating your sub categories or internal pages linked from your page that's ranking will pass along more authority to those pages targeting long tail terms. That said I agree with Robert's assessment that assigning your time half and half is a good strategy if you have the resources to do so without becoming stretched too thin.

Why would porn site links have to be bad links? Of course, if a porn link goes to a kitchen website, there is a problem there. The idea behind this, at least for me, is that when you spot links that you analyze and determine that are bad links, whatever the reason, those links should be disavowed. Under your own criteria there will be good links that Google might consider bad links and vice-versa. My advise is to do not leave all that work just to Google. No one better than you to take care (when you know exactly what you are doing) of your site. Keep in mind that all of these are my opinions and what i I'd do in this certain position. Best luck. GR

This article may set your mind at ease: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo PR drop off no longer drops off circa 15%  as of early - mid 2016, which has been confirmed by some lovely Google folks (referenced in the above article). I think that you're only going to benefit (mainly in terms of management), ongoing.

Thx for your quick answer. i was thinking about the same idea for your answer: "You could noindex / disallow access to all but one website so that Google can't see lots of duplicates, but the sites are still going to be available to browse for a user." The problem with this idea is that, the ISP might block the 'one website' (domain that we used to boost the SEO)  in the future. Which according to my knowledge we have to buy new domain aliases that is not blocked by the ISP and start all over again increasing the SEO for the new domain. Is there any other solution for this?

Hi Anouk, I don't see any reason why you couldn't use the generic Article (rather than NewsArticle) markup on your informational pages, if that is how you want Google to view the content (as an informational 'article'). I'd be cautious with it if you want the content type to be seen as something else by Google, and/or if it is very long-form, heavily resourced content. You may want to test it on some of your info pages and compare what happens to the pages with the markup vs the AMP versions that don't include the markup. Hope that helps.

I'm going to try to turn you around, because you're going down the wrong road. It's a bit of a read, but stick with me. Stop thinking about sculpting your internal links, and start thinking about how to create a user friendly navigation. Your SEO and conversions will flow from there. Let's pretend you're in the home services category and you install and replace floors. The services you provide are repair, installation, and replacement of tile, wood, and vinyl floors. You'll want to have a homepage that allows users to navigate to pages that describes the services you provide and the products you offer. So your top navigation could have a menu that looks something like this: Tile Floors -Tile Floor Repair -Tile Floor Installation -Tile Floor Replacement Wood Floors -Wood Floor Repair -Wood Floor Installation -Wood Floor Replacement Vinyl Floors -Vinyl Floor Repair -Vinyl Floor Installation -Vinyl Floor Replacement Now you've got at least ten pages that you can start to write content for, and each of them is easily accessible. If you have pages that you consider important to your users and your business objectives, best practice is to make them easily accessible from the homepage in your main navigation, and to make them accessible from related pages as well. In keeping with the home services theme, something you may consider a "non important page" could be your legal disclaimers. It's important alright, but not necessarily for the majority of your users. It's acceptable to link to content like that in the footer. The reason I'm trying to direct you to think about the way users interact with your site is because that's the way Google has designed their algorithm to work. Since users interact with the footer much less than body content, Google has tagged links in the footer, and those links pass less PageRank. If you spend your time trying to game the system, you'll ultimately lose, whereas if you focus on your users, you'll ultimately win. To go back to our main navigation example for our flooring company, if I followed your strategy I might place content in confusing places, moving my "tile floor repair" page to the footer or a sidebar where users can't find it and Google devalues. So focus on the users and the PageRank will follow. Good Luck!

Hi Thomas, You are correct that Mobile First is changing the game when it comes to tabbed / accordion content. Google's take on this now is that they will help usability by not having pages and pages of content on show. From a desktop point of view, will this help when visitors arrive? Will they know to find the answers they seek behind a tab? Can you have one design for desktop and another for mobile? Google haven't really said anything about using tabbed content on a desktop site once Mobile First hits, but based on the fact that it will be powering the desktop SERPs, I wouldn't have thought it was a big problem - as long as it enhances the page for a desktop user. One more thing - John Mueller did tell me in a recent Tweet that layout can affect ranking, so take the time to test what works well for your visitors - it could be the difference between a win and a loss. -Andy

Thank you Andy, this does answer, and confirm, my situation/expectation. But, what you are suggestion is quite a high-maintenance solution, because if my client adds another couple of plates, they'd all need new canonicals to the 'main product page' that we want to rank.

There's some good news about 301 redirects that you may have missed: Since early/mid 2016, changing the directory structure (alone) and creating 301 redirects isn't going to (or shouldn't) cause any loss in PageRank. The fact that 301s generally resulted in a loss of around 15% of PageRank (which was confirmed by Matt Cutts in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw) is simply no longer the case. Sceptical? So was I. Read on... In February 2016, Google Web Trend Analyst, John Mueller confirmed this: Q. Do I lose "link juice" from the redirects? A. No, for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS no PageRank is lost. (Source: https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PY1xCWbeDVC) Further, Google's Gary Illyes confirmed this in July 2016, on twitter:  "30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore." (Source: https://twitter.com/methode/status/757923179641839616?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) (Bear in mind, PR is not the only ranking signal.) So, changing URLs for SEO purposes, including "Improving directory/subfolder structure" is considered less risky now that 301 redirects preserve PageRank (as long as the content and structure remains the same). There's a great article on the subject of 301 redirect rules: "301 Redirects Rules Change: What You Need to Know for SEO" here: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo Remember: For this to work out for you, the content of the page at the receiving end of the 301 needs to match the original source as closely as possible. Good luck!

Hello Jaro, What Andy says is right, im backing him up. Remember to not include that URL in the sitemap. Also is a good moment to say that with the robots.txt you just tell google bot not no follow it, that differs from indexing it. There are cases where URLs are indexed instead of being "blocked" in the robots.txt. The fine way stop google from indexing a certain URL would be adding the meta robots tag including a noindex atribute. Here there a quote from the Webmaster central help forum in Google: If you block a file from crawling and Google discovers a URL for that file on another site, it may still index the file using whatever information it can find, even though crawling is blocked. So robots.txt disallow does not necessarily stop something being indexed. (in the ets answer, a note below the Disallow part) Hope it's clarifying. Best luck. GR.

Hey Muzzmoz, This is a little outside of my area of knowledge, but I asked around our team and got a recommendation of Open SEO Stats as a tool, which links to the Whois information for whatever you're looking up, surfacing domain age. I hope this recommendation helps

No problem

Thanks for the reply. Presented like that it doesn't look quite so offensive I take on board your feedback; I did look at address your question, near the end of my post, though I confess my language was a little vague, so I'll try again: Having this phrase as part of your title page will not hurt your rankings; there are far greater sins you can commit than that. (Just don't expect to be rewarded - I'm sorry, I can't help myself!) Something else to consider,  mentioning specific savings (to the penny) might be more eye-catching than $1000s, which comes back to my point about case studies. If you do use it in your title. you can split test delivery and engagement of a few variants and see what works best for you. Good luck with the project - I'll hit you up if I start getting any damp problems

Hi Jaro, Please see my answer to your other question. Perhaps have a read of these two resources to get some ideas as well? https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-for-ecommerce-websites/ http://backlinko.com/ecommerce-seo Depending on how your site is structured, the platform and many other factors, there could be other considerations. -Andy

I'm afraid it's going to need to be added manually. (They acknowledge this is a pain, here: <a>https://schema.org/docs/faq.html#10) </a>and explain why  - sort of. There's a getting started guide, here: <a>http://schema.org/docs/gs.html</a> You can use Google's Markup Helper, which may make it easier for you to implement: https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/?hl=en There's a great help section on this, here: <a>https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4599161?hl=en&ref_topic=4589289</a> If the code is in the footer (so re-used across the site) you should only need to tag it once. Some schema properties that relate to your industry may be useful, too: <a>https://schema.org/Hotel</a> Good luck and happy tagging

Putting the user's experience first is your priority (and always should be). if your visitor is more engaged with your site content (and brand) because of these videos you'd want to add it anyway, right? A video can answer questions text simply cannot, particularly in your niche. Keeping visitors engaged with your content for longer is going to have a positive effect on both the user and Google's perception of your site i.e. if your time on page goes up (and your bounce rate, potentially, drops - as users reach out to find out more/download brochures/contact you), which are signals that you are delivering a good user experience. Sometimes, we focus too much on inbound links, when our primary focus should be on a great user experience. All the best!