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There are plenty of very large sites doing this--it's natural for them to link to the sites that they own. It all really comes down to the sites' link profiles, and if their link profile is diversified enough. If those links are the only links (or a large portion of) the links that they have, there might be an issue. But if the parent site is trusted enough, has a high enough Domain Authority, then most likely the site won't be penalized for the parent site linking to them.

Thanks for the detailed answer Jonathan. What you suggested was definitely in line with my thinking - indexing just the single topics at most and trying to either noindex or canonicalize all the thousands of possible variations. I definitely agree that all those random combinations of topics/objects hold no real value and at best will eat up crawl budget unnecessarily. I can make sure Google treats these parameters as URLs via Search Console, they're unique to this piece of content; and I think I can noindex all the random combinations of filters (hopefully). I'm still waiting to hear more from the dev team but I have a feeling that I won't be able to change the format to subdirectories instead of differentiating everything with query parameters - not the ideal situation but I'll have to make do. Anyways, thanks again for your thoughtful reply! Josh

Yep! You can set all kinds of Custom Alerts in Google Analytics. Go to Admin->Custom Alerts (far right column) and configure them any way you want. Here is an example that might be close to what you are describing above. Alert Name: High Sales Product: This Applies to: Product SKU = Value Alert me when: Product Revenue = Increases by more than = Value % There is some flexibility in the metrics to configure the way you want. You can't do everything but hopefully you find some options that match what you are looking to do.

Perfect.  Easy directions to follow.  Project Complete, thank you for the help.  WHY IS IT SHOWING ONE STAR.  I DONT SEE HOW TO POST 5 STARS?  Confusing.

Haha, JUST figured it out, thanks Anthony. I had looked at Open Site Explorer, but perhaps not while logged in to that particular client project, because I didn't get the side bar the first time I looked. Got it and that's exactly what I needed. Thanks again!

Spot on! "If you see them giving great advice for free, imagine what you will get when you pay them"

Hi Beth, My apologies I had a brain fart - I meant to type "LSI" keywords - it stands for "Latent Semantic Indexing". Basically these are keywords that create syntax and context for a keyword you are targeting in your content or on-site SEO to help Google return reliable results. Example: Let's say a user wants to learn more about the solar system and starts searching for planets. Without the proper context, Google doesn't know if it is returning results for Mars the planet or Mars the Roman god of war. Chances are they are searching for something recent rather than ancient mythology, but since both could be possible, Google can misinterpret user intent and direct the user to the incorrect website. Now let's say a website has statistics on Mars - its size, distance from Earth, where it is in the solar system, etc. If a user searches for "where is Mars", the context provided by the query and the stats given on the website will give Google everything it needs to rank that website above websites that focus on Roman mythology. On the other hand, if someone searches for "Who was Mars", Google will use LSI keywords like "Roman gods" or "Roman mythology" to create SERPs and websites featuring these contextual keywords will rank higher than those that don't. Long story short, LSI keywords are used for SERPs and queries featuring the 5 W's (Who, What, Where, Why, When) and H (How). It is a new model Google is moving towards which features a specific focus on the Knowledge Graph and becoming the answer for users rather than directing them to other websites. Hope that helps! Rob

As per David above you can also use OpenSiteExplorer to delve into a competitor/relevant sites links to see which are passing the most value. This is great if you are trying to find relevant pages that are linking to your competitors and that will also be of benefit to your own site.

Hey there! You won't be able to add Insights tiles to reports, however in many cases your Insights tiles are pulling information that is visible in other parts of your campaign. You can get that information by placing those modules in the report! Examples would be rankings movements or On-Page Optimization suggestions. Just follow the link at the bottom of the tile to see the page where we found the information! Our Multiseat function provides read/write abilities, not read-only, so unfortunately anyone who has access to your account will also be able to make changes.

I know   I just took your language topic to say it rankbrain iproves understanding. Don't thought you excluded other languages rly. Special with such a typical german lastname

Hi, thanks a lot for your inputs. I'm an external SEO for couple of companies and elaborate their SEO strategies. Most of my clients are small software editors, they're struggling to get media attention and building high quality content is a huge investment. Loosing a 50 Domain Authority link because the media changed its business model is a huge loss for them. I was wondering how other SEO guys were handling that. If you continue to target those medias? They still have a huge audience, but we loose the linking benefit.

I'd like to add that there's a lovely Moz Academy video that covers this sort of competitive link analysis.

Go to an attorney who practices intellectual property law.  You need to play your cards properly in these types of situations.  What you learn from this situation can be helpful for future situations and what you establish with your attorney will streamline actions in future situations. Discuss the following and other topics with the attorney:  adequate terms of use for the website, warnings on your website for potential infringers, how others might be able to use your property under fair use, proper copyright registration, informal notices of infringement, formal notices of infringement, DMCA complaints, potential liability and costs that can be incurred if you step into this, other topics that apply to your specific situation.. An informal notice often stops infringement, a formal notice often works when informal notice does not, a DMCA can get their copy of your content out of search or off of a server.  DMCA can also get you in trouble. Legal advice in these situations often costs less than most people fear. Not taking action or taking the wrong action often costs more than most people realize. Sometimes you can learn a lot from a preliminary discussion with an attorney by phone without incurring any costs.  Depending upon your situation and who you consult, you might spend $X000 and come away with knowledge and resources that will significantly reduce your infringement problem.   I've done it with more than one attorney just to get diverse perspective and an education.   I've gotten my money's worth and my wallet ain't smokin'. That's about what I can say about this.  I am not qualified to give legal advice.

Hey there! I just followed up on the message you sent into our help team, but I wanted to also post the answer here for reference. It looks like the robots.txt file may have recently been changed for the site because I created a new campaign for the subdomain and I am not getting that same error. You should no longer see this error on your next campaign update or you could create a new campaign and you would no longer see the error there. I did notice that you ran a number of crawl tests on the site since the campaign update, but the important thing to realize is that the crawl test can be cached for up to 48 hours. (I removed the crawls in this version of the screenshot for privacy.) We also cache the crawl tests from campaign crawls, so it looks like the first crawl test you ran on the 29th was cached from your campaign crawl and the two subsequent crawl tests were cached from that first crawl test. Again, I wanted to note that it looks like there are only links to about 2 other pages (terms and privacy) that are on the specific subdomain you are tracking, so we aren't able to crawl beyond those pages. When you limit a campaign to a specific subdomain, we can only access and crawl links that are within the same subdomain.

Additional responses to this question can be found here: https://moz.com/community/q/best-sitemap-for-large-website

All of those factors are important. You should be determining the focus keyword for each page on the site, and then make sure that your url, page title, headlines, along with your meta description, alt tags, image names, and overall page content are working together to optimize the page for the chosen focus.

Hi Amir, Would you mind sharing a link to your blog post? I am also hoping to see ideas and insights from other professionals using Moz Content as a strategy tool.

Thanks Ryan and Chiaryn!  All looks good then!  So happy