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Hi Tom, Thank you very much for the fast reply and helpful answer! I have also posted a couple CDN conversations on: 1. https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-effect-of-cloudflare-cdn-on-page-load-speeds-hosting-ip-location-and-the-ultimate-seo-effect 2. https://moz.com/community/q/what-happens-with-seo-when-a-site-is-served-via-cloudflare-cfn If you feel like adding your thoughts there as well (entirely up to you) I would value them immensely. Kind regards, Mark

Yeah, they don't explicitly mention 301s. But similar to a 404, a 301ed page is technically also not an "existent URL with good content." It's a permanent move, i.e., that particular URL no longer exists, though the content does exist at a new URL. Dr. Pete wrote a good post about rel=canonicals a couple years ago that's worth checking out—numbers 3, 7, 9, and 10 in particular. As far as the lack of consistency in the results, if you're treating all the URLs the same way, it might simply be a time lag. I could see how using 302s for a long period of time would end up showing the vanity URLs in the index. The only way I think you could consistently get a particular URL to display for a result would be to establish it as the official, "canonical" version of the page, whether you do that with 301s or rel=canonical.

In general, you should consider whether a link is valuable for the people visiting the other site. If so, then it is worth adding. If not, and it is simply a link exchange for the sole purpose of attempting to improve SEO, then you should not bother.

How long has the site been up? What about IP? Good content and links are how you build a good strong site, but there are many other factors at play here. It seems from SEM Rush that IP has been around a bit longer and might be ahead of you in terms of business development on the web (marketing, link building, outreach, etc.). Are you focusing on one area of printing in particular? What do your goals look like?

Hi Lukas. The main guideline to follow here is isolating your original content for Google News. This means having the non-syndicated content in its own directory, making sure it's the only content you're submitting in the XML sitemap for News, and when you are accepted into Google News, making sure you keep all the syndicated content out of that news subdirectory. If you do that, it's fine to have all your other syndicated content in the /SYNDICATED directory. I wouldn't about linking to these articles from other parts of your site. Google won't penalize duplicate content that's syndicated, they just attempt to determine the original creator of the content and filter out the syndication partners from the search results. There's no harm at all having this content on your site or linking to it. As for using NOINDEX or a robots.txt disallow on the syndicated content, it's largely up to you. I know some SEOs who prefer to signal to Google to stay out of there and keep it out of the index, and some SEOs who let the content be crawled and for Google to make the call. The most important thing is to create a clean, news-only section of the site and only submit that for Google News inclusion, and maintain a sitemap just for that section. Good luck! Matthew Brown Moz

Hi Mark, Sure, I would still submit these kind of domains as well to Google Search Console as submitting the domain name doesn't say anything about the indexation of the URL. It's a monitoring which you could use to submit URLs to be indexed but it's not a required thing. We have certain subdomains or root domains in there for our CDN for example that don't provide us with any additional SEO benefits but we still would like to make sure we can monitor some metrics there.

That's a great place to dig in. @Mark - One of our staffers will get to your question soon! It's his birthday today, so we told him to answer when he's recovered from celebrating.

I hate to say it—and maybe John will have some suggestions and prove me wrong—but it's exceedingly difficult to suggest keywords from outside the business. There's a lot to consider when choosing keywords including your (or your client's) business goals, products, and market, among others. You'll probably have to do some keyword research yourself. John shared the chapter on keyword research from out Beginner's Guide to SEO and I shared "Keywords to Concepts." I'd also recommend checking out this webinar on using your Moz Pro subscription for keyword research. A bit has changed in the app, but the advice still hold true. Otherwise, I'd recommend Google's Keyword Planner—it requires an AdWords account, but you don't have to be actively advertising—and Übersuggest as good tools for getting started. Good luck!

You just confirmed everything I suspected. Thank you!

Currently my 301's are being directed to relative pages. but for example: www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do <------ Current Redirect from (www.shoes.com/category/myredshoes.do) www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page1 www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page2 www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page=all   <----- **Current Canonical ** www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page=all   <--Should I Redirect from www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do I basically want to distribute my authority to one page and contemplating if redirecting to a "page=all" along with my canonical will improve the overall performance for that page.

Hi Rich, I cleaned up a clients site using a method similar to what Derk described.  The developer basically kept all the site exactly the same, removed infected areas and then let Google know.  The vulnerability was in an old plugin. It took 24 hours and the 'this website may be hacked' was removed by Google.  I dont think it is as dire as you think as long you have a competent developer.

Hey There! Sounds like you're doing a lot of things by-the-books and "right" "on paper" but it's really tough to know if you're on the right track for sure without seeing the site or an example of some of the links being build, or content, etc. I say this because "40 links a month" for example sounds like a nice number, but also sounds suspect because that's a pretty sizable amount of links, which makes me wonder about the quality of them. What I'd be curious about is - what are the things outside of SEO or SEO tactics/fixes have been done? I'm thinking in regards to social, audience building, brand building, design upgrades, content, adding value etc? Also, what type of site is this and how big is it? The other thing that's tough to know is how well the technical things were implemented. For example, switching to https among other things can create a lot of redirect chains. I would try to undo redirect chains and only do page->page redirects (instead of having chains of page->page->page->page etc). And right, it's tough to know if your disavow is helping or hurting without knowing a lot of the specifics. If it was me, I'd make sure you're focusing enough on others things besides just directly on SEO. That doesn't mean you'd ignore SEO when doing social, content, audience building etc - just that you're taking a more holistic view. I think Google definitely favors recovering sites that prove they are building something people want.

If your an established business/brand the odd-ball non thematically relevant content is just going to be weird and could have negative effects on your brand reputation - regardless of the quality of content. While what your saying does indeed work for increasing domain authority - it's not something I would suggest doing for a long lasting business.  I bet you could create equally if not better content within your niche that customers/users in your space would find 10x more valuable then your on-off content for a few unrelated links.

Hi Anuj - I think you are operating from a very false assumption that is going to hurt your organic traffic (I suspect it has already). The XML sitemap is one of the the very best ways to tell the search engines about new content on your website. Therefore, by not putting your new coupons in the sitemap, you are not giving the search engines one of the strongest signals possible that new content is there. Of course, you have to automate your sitemap and have it update as often as possible. Depending on the size of your site and therefore the processing time, you could do it hourly, every 4 hours, something like that. If you need recommendations for automated sitemap tools, let me know. I should also point out that you should put the frequency that the URLs are updated (you should keep static URLs for even your coupons if possible). This will be a big win for you. Finally, if you want to make sure your static pages are always indexed, or want to keep an eye on different types of coupons, you can create separate sitemaps under your main sitemap.xml and segment by type. So static-pages-sitemap.xml, type-1-sitemap.xml, etc. This way you can monitor indexation by type. Hope this helps! Let me know if you need an audit or something like that. Sounds like there are some easy wins! John

it has been almost a year now from the massive hit. after that, there were also some smaller hits we are putting effort into improvements. that is quite frustrating for me, because I believe that our effort is demolished by old duplicated content (that creates 80% of the website :-)) Yeah, we will need to take care about the link-mess...  Thank you!

Piggybacking on Kane - since these bad/phantom pages were in one folder, can you request removal in Search Console? It should at least speed things up. Unfortunately, the links can show for weeks or months after they're removed, even if Google doesn't seem to be caching them. If the pages aren't indexed/cached, and the numbers in the console seem to be gradually dropping, I'm not sure if there's a lot more you can do, unfortunately.

Hi  Panagiotis Triantopoulos, There isn't any hard and fast rule for it. So, go ahead with a different anchor text without a doubt. As far as it's making sense w.r.t the linked article (descriptive enough to talk about the article theme), its good to go. Hope that answers!

My pleasure.

Hello there, There are benefits to taking this route - you will generate some link juice for your website (less than it currently has obviously due to the 301). You will have to make sure that your hosting is set up separately so you are not risking any kind of algorithmic/manual penalty. Keep in mind that a redirect will also impact the UX since you don't know whether that traffic is through search visitors, return visitors, or if there are hacking issues leading to ghost visitors. If this traffic is made up of the latter 2 options, you may face branding issues when they are not finding the website/brand they expect when they look it up. There are many variables, but the biggest I see are these: What is the cost? You need to know what you're spending and whether the investment will be worth the link juice/traffic you get out of it. What market are you targeting? If this business is locally-focused, you need to look into the local side/map pack listings and whether this will benefit you. If it is more broadly-situated, this is less of a factor. Are the benefits worth the costs? 17 TF/23 CF are not terrific metrics if there is a significant cost to the website. I would say that this is a buyer beware scenario. Do you have a way of knowing whether the metrics will stay the same after purchase? Anyone can buy or re-direct links for temporary rankings and remove them after purchase. Again - buyer beware. I would say you are probably better off generating your own content and building up your site (and link profile) yourself - that way you know what you have and what has gone into the site to generate your own rankings. There are a lot of risks to take for the path you are suggesting and while there are benefits, the likelihood of success would be low enough to make me cautious. Hope this helps! Rob