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Read through this post by Rand: https://moz.com/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow . Quite old, but still valid in my opinion. So if you want to nofollow the tags only because of sculpting the follow links value, then there is no sense making it. We are using a similar approach with pages we do not want to index, but they are beneficial for our visitors. (similar case to yours)

I think the first question I need to ask you is the following Did you have a manual penalty in GWT? Did your rankings drop from algorithmically? Do you know exactly which updates you were effected by? (panda, penguin, top-heavy, layout...) What made you decide to disavow links? Did you even need to? One of the biggest mistakes I have seen many others do when their rankings drop is "panic" and start disavowing links. SEO'rs tend to run to the disavow tool when they may not even realize that their issues have nothing to do with that. Of course if you have a manual penalty they you have something to go by, but if you are effected from an algorithm change then you have some work ahead. I think the first step you need to do is try and figure out which update(s) you were effected by. That will give you a better idea where you need to focus your attention. Here is a great article that will help you to understand Once you get past that then here is an awesome article in which even helped me to recover, it takes some work but I promise it was the best thing I ever did.

Hi Tom, I guess if you used a /blog sub-folder, any links to individual posts will pass juice down to the main /blog landing page. If you go for the /blog-name URL, juice will be spread across the whole domain.

Hi, Yes, it will be a pain for your writers, but that's what they're paid for. For example, if you had four t-shirts, all different colours, it wouldn't be too difficult to write unique content for each. I wouldn't use the same content and just change the colour, this may cause you problems.

I would be interested to see whats going on with your "long tail game". Long tell keyword for me = money, So... I wouldn't jeopardize ranking for "Red Polo t-shirts" just to rank better for Polo t-shirts.  I would suggest maybe boosting up the unique content on your Product pages to make them rank better for specific long tails. I like the fact that all of my product pages are indexed individually just for the simple fact that I have a customer base that google's Part numbers. Those product pages show up every-time and almost every-time it rings the cash register.  This just might be something to think about... but if all of your product pages are duplicates then they are not helping with the long tail so I would say canonicalze them and redirect them to get rid of the dups and see if it helps with those head terms. Hope this helps Chad

Hi Gavo, There are others out there but I like Latergram.me for scheduling posts. For research, Iconosquare. You can also follow and unfollow there. For actually using the profiles, we do it the old school way, buy cheap smart phones for each one. LOL. I haven't heard of any app that can handle all the functions of instagrams. I've seen and tried everything. From bots to custom software. Haven't seen a good one yet

Hi Lina What Google wants is unique markup and tagging for that image. It relies on things like image optimization (for SEO), Schema markup, and image sitemaps to assist in understanding the photo better and what it represents so it can be returned in search results. You can learn more about reverse image search here. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Christian! Besides the other great answers provided above, it looks like this is likely caused by server errors, and also the fact that these links seem to be blocking user-agents. Are you able to make adjustments to either of these? If you have further issues, please write into help@moz.com and we'll take another look. Thanks! Kevin Help Team

The only other thing I would suggest is to hang onto the domain names. Don't let the registration lapse so they can be picked up by others.

Agree with James & Gary that you've done the right things and it may just take time. That being said, I've had a LOT of success in the past with adding a link to your sitemap in a G+ post. Now, correlation is not causation so it may just be Google getting around to the earlier suggestions - but I've seen it help even when I didn't have WMT access to do a fetch in the first place. So I would definitely also link to your site &/or your sitemap on G+ and create a link that way. As James said "try building some links" - that would be the first one I try.

SEW is under new ownership. I submitted a post a couple of weeks ago for my monthly column and the majority of the links in my post were nofollowed by SEW.  I wrote to the new editor to ask why and they reviewed the links and decided the the one that I had included that linked to my own site did contribute to the conversation well, so they removed the nofollow.  I had also mentioned Alan Bleiweiss in my article and out of courtesy, linked to his site.  (It bugs me when people mention someone and then link to their Twitter profile...if they're good enough to mention, why not give them a link?)  They would not remove the nofollow on that link. I think that publications like Search Engine Watch, Moz and other high quality sites that accept user generated content have to be really careful about how they link out. Personally, if SEW told me that all of my links would now be nofollowed, I'd likely keep publishing there as I do get business as a result of my articles.  But, I am guessing that there are quite a few authors that would stop submitting articles to them. I think this is a case where a few bad apples spoil the lot. I bet you the new editors reviewed some article submissions and saw that people were using SEW as a platform to link out. If SEW got an outbound link penalty that would not be good...so they might have gone a little over to the side of caution in making nofollow decisions.  With that said, it looks like they have now edited the article you quoted to go ahead and allow followed links.  I also checked a few other articles and didn't see any excessive nofollowing so maybe they've loosened up a little.

Hi there You can, but it's not often that people link to a mobile site since it's configured to redirect. As long as your site is properly tagged and redirecting, I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you have a disavow file for the desktop site, you should be fine, but run through your backlinks to make sure. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there It really depends on the purpose of that page and if it exists. What is it supposed to be? Is there another page on your site that has the content contained on this page previously? Content lives elsewhere - 301 redirect, remove from sitemap, and update internal links / backlinks  Page is gone for good and has no where to go - Create a 404 page that's useful. Remove from sitemap and update links / backlinks to a new page Hope this helps! Good luck

Q1: Google is very bad at dealing with stuff like this, they really don't care to much in my experience. I have seen otehrs try and flood the front page with things like twitter facebook and linkedin to push down negative content. Try to use these strong networks to boost his name. Also might as well give it a shot and report it to Google. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en Q2: Every day Googlebot gets smarter and more nosy! It crawls javascript it does al;l sorts of things. Crappy sites go up and down and have index issues eventually Google will get to them and index them. This is likely what you are seeing. If they are pretty bad then get them in the disavow file ASAP. A Penguin update is not that far away and you need to be ready a month in advance.

Hi Mike, Your solution is pretty common and effective. Like James said, this doesn’t transfer all the linkjuice (wide spread misconception). In the original pagerank system there was a damping factor of 0.85. So through every link or redirect 15% pagerank was lost. Although it’s unknown if these rates stayed the same during the years you can expect a small lose in linkjuice. This is why people do outreach to change their backlinks after a sitemigration. In most cases I recommend to only try to change your most important backlinks since it’s probably not worth your time chasing down every link you got. Hope you this helps you plan your next steps.

Hi Gary, Many thanks for assistance and help with this. I will take a look at doing that. Kind Regards Pete

Yes and anything to do with WordPress link cloaking and redirects the must have plug-in is 'Pretty Link Pro'. It provides super easy link management and handy analytics on every outbound link you create. I've been using it for years and it's great.

Many thanks All , some very good points raised. thanks Pete

Hi there Here is Google's resource on link schemes - I suggest you read it. I would also suggest (based on Google's resource here) that you make this link nofollow. Since this is a sponsorshipesque link and you're a local business (if you're not, don't do this), then make sure you take the proper steps. Where would this link live exactly? Content? Sidebar? Ad? Let me know - thanks so much!