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This is the correct answer. To expand on this slightly, just make sure none of the 404s are internal (ie there are no links on your site pointing to one of these dodgy pages as a result of the hack) and you're all good. Remove the entries from your htaccess file to avoid having to parse them constantly and let any external links to dodgy pages 404. This sort of circumstance is exactly what 404s are made for! The only site at risk of a ranking drop from these 404s is the one pointing to those dodgy pages - who cares about your hackers' rankings?

Hi Bob, Like so many things in SEO, I'd be looking at this from a UX point of view first and foremost, then do a quick revision through your SEO glasses before implementing. Will making this H1 change help or hinder your user experience? To offer my own opinion in response to this question, I think the answer is 'hinder'. As a user I would much rather see just the name of the shoe both on the category page and in the H1 of the product page. It's clean, succinct and doesn't feel like someone had an SEO agenda when they crafted it. I'd even go so far as to say I'd think twice before handing over my credit card details to a site that used product titles like "Adidas Action Series Shoes size 5 through 10 for running, walking, and hiking" rather than simply "Adidas Action Series". Even the word "shoes" is quite redundant here in my opinion. To give you an idea of a website that ranks very well in this field in Australia, check out HypeDC. They're not our client, nor have they ever been but they deserve that link because they do a great job in most areas and they highlight my point. They sell shoes (and all things shoe-like... sneakers, boots etc) and yet they don't jam the word(s) into every title, heading and paragraph they can. If you're looking at the Nike Air Huarache Ultra shoe, that shoe's product title on the category page is simply "Nike Air Huarache Ultra". That's it. No mention of shoe, shoes, running, walking, hiking, footwear etc. The page title is almost identical and even the content on the product page has no mention of the word shoe! While I wouldn't necessarily recommend avoiding the keyword like they have, it's a clear demonstration that Google understands your website as a whole so there's no need to go jamming all those keywords everywhere. Craft a pleasant user experience and make sure your website in clear, as a single unit, what you do. You may be wondering how the hell HypeDC ranks so well without using the keyword even once? All I can offer is external suggestions but I'd say it's a combination of the following: They don't sell 'cheap shoes' so they know their target audience are "shoe people" who are pretty likely to know what they want already so I'd expect the search volume of specific shoe models is quite high. Just referencing the specific model on a product page likely works in their favor for these searches. Their link profile is highly relevant, as is their anchor profile. This means from the link profile alone Google can start to understand that HypeDC = shoe store. They have no shortage of pages on the site that relate directly to things in the shoe industry. A "shoe size guide", a bunch of shoe questions in the FAQ, a page for each of their shoe manufacturers etc. I'm sure there are plenty more but this post is already getting long (sorry!) but you get the picture. Don't get caught up in "where and how exactly should I place my keyword in this element to appease the Google Gods?", just make a user friendly website and 9 times out of 10 you will have made a well-optimised one by accident! I realise shoes is possibly not even your vertical but I'm just working with the example at hand. Everything I've just said can be applied to any industry because the core principles don't change. I hope this helps!

Hi Isaac, Those are different queries. And yes it does matter to Google the exact match keyword phrase. That said, it raises the question: How much leverage does google give it? Well, it depends and varies from site to site. In the case that you are optimizing on-page, keep in mind to not over optimize for that phrase and add some variants (such as you've said, or adding some extra words to the phrase). In the case that you are analyzing a link profile or willing to "do" backlinks, try to keep the exact match not over the 10%. Of course there is no magic number, its just to be safe. Hope I've helped. GR.

Yups I agree with the answer that is given here, if you're using any way of event tracking currently on your site it might be a good idea to look into changing that to the dataLayer and making the switch to a Tag Manager as well. By doing this you can make sure that with future changes for your site you can depend on a protocol that isn't depending on a specific tool or changes that a tool like Google Analytics will make in the future.

Look at the keyword you are trying to rank for.  Perform several searches and see what currently ranks in the SERPs Two things to look at Are you going to look the same or different from everyone else? If everyone who is ranking right now uses the title "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston" then go with something like "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston".   Likewise, if everyone else uses "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston", then go with something like "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston" You get the idea.  If you want to get clicks, you need to stand out from the rest a bit. What is the user really looking for? What is the searcher intent? Google is big on searcher intent. Forget what you and the owners think. What is the problem that potential students are trying to solve? Have your client go ask a bunch of his students / parents of students. Are they looking for "the best"? Are they looking for "the cheapest"? Are they looking for "the most experienced"? Are they looking for "most experienced with teenagers" etc.  Use that with the KW volume to drive your decision. Here is an example. Let's say the keywords are "violin teachers Boston". It has good search volume and goal completion rates. You have the owner talk to clients and find they really looking for Violin instructors with the most experience. You then see that all the pages in the serp use the listicle approach - top 10 violin teachers in Boston, the best 5 instructors for violins in Boston" etc  The results seem to indicate that people are looking for the best/experienced violin teachers in Boston, but the pages that are ranking are trying to fulfill this intent by using a list approach. Brainstorm with ideas around the keywords "experienced violin teachers in Boston", that don't include lists and try that out. You should now have the basic keywords covered for volume/conversion/ranking purposes, you have searcher intent covered, and you have something that can help you stand out a bit on page 1 among all the other titles.  Make sense? Cheers!

Hey To some extent this is the wrong question and thinking here - both of these could be right and both of them could be wrong. It's impossible to answer this without looking at the context of the linking page - example: Page on the target site for violin teachers in new york Page on an external site that also lists violin teachers in new york but also links out to other resources Using either of those anchors would not make sense here and could potentially be classed as manipulative - the name of the site you are promoting may make more sense. Again, hard to feedback on what would be right here but I would simply use what makes the most sense on the context of the linking page. Remember -  Google already knows the context of the target page so concentrate on making that page as good as possible and getting links with natural anchor text on relevant resources that could also drive referral traffic and you will likely be in good shape. Hope that helps Marcus

Hey, I agree. But this client has poured a lot of money down the SEO consulting plughole (not with us) and is just not keen to throw more money at this site that is seemingly just burned. I suggested second opinion a while back and he did try that and the other consultants (good guys that know their stuff) just hit a brick wall as well. It's a super odd one although we are trying to help and doing some experiments (pro bono) as I am sure there is something to learn and a good case study here somewhere.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, probably depends on your search term. For SEO as a search term here in the UK I am getting 6 with www., 2 without and 1 using another subdomain. For "us election" all but one use www (the one that doesn't uses another subdomain). I am not aware of any preference by Google, however, you should be consistent in your use (in canonical tags, sitemap etc), and make sure the one you don't opt for 301 redirects to the other.

Depends ... do you WANT the brands to compete with each other? That might sound strange but it really isn't. Mabye the three brands have some feature that separates them from each other and makes them uniquely suitable for a different target group. Then it might not be bad to have all three rank for slightly different (long tail) terms AND each for the generic overall term. The brands itself also may carry different values; answering in a vacuum on what I would do is hard to impossible. Nico

Awesome, hope you're able to get this setup. Domain-wide duplication would be a tragedy!

Shoot! There may be something else going on. Give us a shout at help@moz.com and we'll see if we can figure it out!

Bernadette, many thanks for the reply. This is a very tricky issue, and I'm still very confused. If I go to dresses and then 'red' i get a set of products, if i go dresses and then 'blue' i get a different set of products so I cannot see any potential for duplication there. All of these products may appear on other pages in small numbers - for example one of the red dresses would appear in the lace dress filter as it is a red lace dress, however, the other 15 dresses on that page would not match the red dress page. There are about 250,000 products in the store, so while products will appear under several attributes, the chance of the same 16 products appearing on the same page for multiple attributes is tiny.  I guess this is why I'm thinking there wouldn't be a need for a canonical tag as no page is really duplicating any more than a tiny % of another.  There is only one way to access the list of products on any one page. If i borrow Amazon as an example - would rather not share my url at the moment as it isn't 100% finished.  On amazon we have a page for Black Prom Dresses at https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_two_browse-_0?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946173031&bbn=9780907031&ie=UTF8&qid=1476896938&rnid=1836991031&lo=clothing  (whoa that's a big url!) with the canonical tag of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prom-Dresses-Edit-Black-Clothing/s?ie=UTF8&bbn=9780907031&page=1&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946173031" /> If we go to red dresses we have a url https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_two_browse-_0?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946185031&bbn=9780907031&ie=UTF8&qid=1476897017&lo=clothing https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prom-Dresses-Edit-Red-Clothing/s?ie=UTF8&bbn=9780907031&page=1&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946185031" /> Both of these two sets of dresses were reached by going Dresses and then clicking on the colour filter. Both have unique urls. This is pretty much the same situation as my site - the products on each of those pages is different so is not a duplicate of any other page on the site, so would they really need that canonical tag? I'm not sure if I have managed to confuse myself. My understanding of the canonical tag is that it is to be used if you have the same, or very similar content on more than one page. You point all versions to just one page to avoid duplicate content penalties and to make one page have all the links which might point to alternative versions. Therefore, if the page isn't a duplicate of another, is the tag really necessary Thanks, Carl

Hi there! We do take canonicals into account. Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, which means it will flag any content that has 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text. If you're seeing duplicate content flagged, it's likely due to issues with how the canonical tags are set up. For more info on canonicalization best practices, check out this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization If you're still unsure why your pages are being flagged, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com!

phero, once you disavow a domain or a URL, all it takes is for Google to crawl it. Once they crawl the page, they will see that it's been disavowed and recognize it.

I think that "2017 Diaries" has a bit of competition and this site is still getting started.  It probably has slowly rising traffic but needs some high-quality linkable, shareable, noteworthy content that people want to read.  The blog is focused on product promotion rather than something to inspire the customer to write, plan, schedule, etc.