Link Building / Link Removal

[Stew222]

Hey,

I'm in the process of learning SEO, or attempting to, for my company and am chipping away at the process ever so slowly!

How can I tell if a site that links to my company's site, www.1099pro.com, has a negative effect on my page/domain authority?

Also, if a page doesn't show up in the search rankings at all for it's keywords when it really should (i.e it has the exact keywords and page/domain authority far surpasses even the top results) how can I tell if Google has removed the page from its listing and why?

Thanks SEO Gurus

[cbizzle]

The site appears to be okay. When I searched "1099 pro" on Google, www.1099pro.com was the first result. Using the Moz plugin for Chrome, I found that the site has Domain Authority of 39 and Page Authority of 48, both of which are decent scores. The Moz plugin also shows that www.1099pro.com has 34 +1's on Google+, which is a good sign of the company's validity and their trustworthiness as a link.

[Stew222]

Our home page doesn't have any problems but my individual software pages, listed below, don't show up for their keywords at all.  I can't figure out why they wouldn't show up in the first 50 listings when they used to show up as number 5 or 6.

Keyword:  "1099 Printing Software" (https://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp)

Keyword:  "1099 eFile Software" (https://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp)

[KeriMorgret]

Michael, check your PMs, I just sent you a quick note there.

[cbizzle]

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[cbizzle]

This post is deleted!

[MarieHaynes]

There really isn't a quick answer to this question.  A link is a good link if you didn't create it or pay for it.  Otherwise, there's a good chance it's unnatural. There are some exceptions to that rule though.

I had a quick look at your link profile and I do have some concern over what looks like a bunch of microsites.  For example, are 1042-t.net, 1042s.net, 1097-btc.com and other similar sites all yours?  On a quick look they all look very similar.  These can be called doorway pages by Google and can get you a thin content penalty.  Also, if all of them are linking to your site then this can invite a manual unnatural links penalty.  At this point those links are probably not being devalued by the Penguin algorithm, but it's possible that this might happen with the next Penguin refresh.  If these are pages that you set up so that you can rank for more terms in Google then I really would remove them or incorporate them all into your main site.  If they're landing pages for PPC campaigns then noindex them so that Google doesn't see them as an attempt to manipulate your rankings.

You could have issues other than bad links though.  You've got a bunch of pages indexed that you probably don't want to have indexed such as

https://betasite.1099pro.com/downloaditem.asp?did=469

http://dl.1099pro.com/ftp/

http://host.1099pro.com/ftp/product/2005/

Google's got 1410 pages of your site indexed and I think that a lot of them are ones that probably would be viewed as thin content by the Panda algorithm.  Take for example this page: https://www.1099pro.com/taxforminfo.asp?pid=157\.  It's unlikely that it is useful to searchers to have a page like this in the Google index.  If you've got lots of thin pages indexed then Panda is a big concern.

Unfortunately it looks like there are quite a few issues for you to deal with!

[Stew222]

Hey Marie,

Thanks so much for the in answer - it helps a lot.  Just to be clear, I don't buy links but always hear about bad ones and wanted to double check.  Also, I don't use the other domains, i.e 1042-t.net, to rank for more terms (they are all canonicalized to my main website).  Our company purchased the domains to keep competitors from using them or if new types of taxes came out in the future then we could use them.

I've got a few more questions that I'm hoping you can help with!

1. Because these pages are already canonicalized, should I still meta noindex them?
2. Should I list the unnecessary URL's in my robots.txt and disallow them or metanoindex them (or both)?  What are the benefits.
3. Because I have so many links on a page, would it benefit me to put the "nofollow" tag on the links that I don't need any pagerank to flow through?

[MarieHaynes]

Ah my apologies!  If those pages have a canonical tag pointing to the main site then you're ok with them.  

I'd say to just noindex the unnecessary pages.

I'm really not sure on the pagerank sculpting question.  I likely would not worry about nofollowing outgoing links, but I'm not an expert in that area.

[Stew222]

Thanks for all the help!