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Many of the big affiliate and price comparison websites route links through an internal folder first. This allows them to record the conversion, set a cookie, etc... It also makes all of those outbound links look like internal links. Usually it looks somethingl ike this: Web Page hyperlink for "Visit OnlineStore.com" is actually a link to YourDomain.com/partners?merchant=OnlineStore. From there it will redirect (what kind doesn't really matter here) to OnlineStore.com along with any affiliate code you have added to the URL for their tracking purposes, if necessary. Typically /partners is blocked in the Robots.txt file so the search engine can't even follow it to see that it's an external link.

Perfect. I heard something back from ahrefs that was very similar. Thanks, again! Summary (as it relates to ahrefs, at least): If a website is crawled by a backlink research tool, any applicable backlink to facebook.com/Company123 should show up.

Completely agree with everything said here except for the "OSE = quality, webmaster tools = quantity" bit... Maybe we redefine it as OSE is simply not as good/consistent or as reliable as webmaster tools? Just maybe.

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here with some good news - Keyword Explorer now has updated metrics and keyword volume is now international! Whoo! Russ Joneshas been working with the team to support a larger capacity for international volume data, and we've got significant coverage for UK, Canada, and Australia, more moderate data for other Western languages and countries, and a small amount in regions and languages beyond those. Over time, we'll be refining and adding to the keyword volume corpus so we can continue to improve. You can read all about it in this blog update! I hope this is helpful for you! If you've still got questions, feel free to write in to help@moz.com and we'll do our best to sort you out.

I totally agree that is scary, but then again safe. But if I were in your shoes, I would make the change over a period of some time. As you are actually making the changes, which am guessing takes some time, you can at the same time uploading them so that Google views this effort as it is, an effort, and not a one day thing. but on the other hand, you are not doing something wrong, just remember not to over-optimise!

As long as the ONLY thing you're changing is the domain name (e.g. all URLS within WordPress will remain identical) the redirect process can be accomplished with a single rewrite rule in your site's htaccess file. There's no reason to write (or bog down your system with) a redirect for each individual page URL. The configuration of this redirect will depend on whether the primary URL uses the www prefix or not, and whether it uses https. In addition to the rewrite rule, you need to verify the new domain in Google Search Console (and transfer any preexisting disavow file to it if one existed for the old domain) as well as using the change of address tool to further inform Google of the change. To help speed up the indexing of the new domain, it can be helpful to leave the old xml sitemap in place for a week or two so that search engines can more quickly discover the redirects. It's also beneficial to try to get at least some of the most powerful existing incoming links from other sites updated to point to the new domain. This takes direct outreach to the other site owners with the request, but it can help rescue some of the slight loss of ranking authority lost through the redirect, and is another good signal to Google of the change. Finally, be sure you've updated the domain name in your Google Analytics account as well. Hope that helps? Paul

Thank you Paul, This is exactly what I needed. I've been trying to push us in this direction but it's sometimes hard to break old habits. We might even be able to save a bit of money going this route. Thank again for the input! -Brandon

Another good practice to take into effect is to start going to Google Webmaster Tools and going to: Search Traffic > Links to your site Goto full view and download / export a copy to cvs, open in either google sheets or excel and date it, next time you have an issue, you can repeat the above process and then using a compare feature ( plugin / extension ) in google sheets ( not sure if there is one for excel ) and figure out what links were removed much faster. Ahrefs can do a good job, but since it doesn't have all your backlinks, can also be just as much frustrating.

Thanks for your opinion David.We use a dedicated solution based on Symphony framework but we migrate to Kohana currently - thats why we decided its good time to make changes in the SEO field as well.

Just FYI, noindexing to handle duplication isn't really best practice now and isn't advised by Google. Rel=canoncial is there to help with duplication issues.And you certainly don't want to be implementing iframes to your site to try and get around this -Andy

The naked domain gives an extra room for your permalink to be more visible on SERPs thus making some extra keywords visible instead of being chopped off. So it has an SEO benefit for people who are habitual with creating long-tailed keywords inside permalinks. If you think shorter is better, then the non-WWW approach will make you feel better. There are apparently no “technical” benefits to using the non-WWW approach, only that it reduces redundancy and is no longer needed. To be practical, it makes no drastic change whether to use a naked domain or domain with www as the sub-domain. A domain which is hosted at the root directory like www, is better remembered by people as a brand. People are habitual to recognizing websites with www extension and are observed browsing sites in address bar using the www extension most frequently. The following advanatages you may get from it Ability to restrict cookies when using multiple subdomains. Using the WWW hostname allows for easy segregation in the file tructure of your website. More flexibility with DNS. However, my preferrence is always to use WWW You can ready further guide on this page: http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/www-vs-non-www-for-your-canonical-domain-url-which-is-best-and-why/

Also by Adding text between images you are more likely to keep a visitor longer on the specific page, which also inceases rankings and possibilities of conversions. You can also convey text messages in the middle of a paragraph or text message. A post am working on we added a line that promotes the training courses page in the centre of two sets of text..see here: http://www.empmedic.com/prepare-well-earthquake-go-bag/

You can do a "site:" search directly in Google like this and I currently see this --> http://screencast.com/t/ZVqq5iumQ - you can probably do a site: search on the whole domain, a subfolder or a specific page etc.

Why not: www.website.com/news/news-and advice-story-1 (with internal linking to relevant product page) www.website.com/news/news-and advice-story-2 (with internal linking to relevant product page) Or is there a need to have product-category in the path for some reason? Can a product be in more than one category? How are you handling that?

This kind of thing definitely happens. It is often the result of a link injection malware that finds vulnerabilities in websites and then posts hundreds of links on them. Usually, link spam will not affect your rankings, but it can. Fortunately, Google provides a tool to help you tell Google that you weren't the one who built those links. Moz has a guide to using it here: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool. It can take a while for links to get disavowed, so in the meantime, do whatever you can to build high-quality, relevant links to your site and make sure your site is optimized for search as best you can.

Marcus, Thanks a lot! I've never imagined a simple solution as this one. For the template, i've chosen one from here: https://w3layouts.com/?s=404 For the .htaccess, that tutorial was really handy.

Is this happening to all of your titles or just some of them? To me it sounds like you've somehow setup WordPress (or a plugin) to add a prefix to all your titles. Which then forces in "XYZ Company |" before every title you've made. If that's the case you should be able to find it somewhere and change it back.

Hi, we are using www.9.digital and its ranking well in SERPs for related keywords. So i don't think that preference is always given to .com or .net domains. Thanks! ghGwmlD

Hi, This article gives a pretty good rundown of the steps needed (well the intro bit and then straight to step 4). Look out for the cookieDomain: auto setting which is a bit of a gotcha in many cases. Technical reasons behind the cookie domain issue can be found here. Hope it helps!