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Hi seequs, to complement Cyrus answer, here is an explanation of Matt Cutts related to your question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU. And if you think about it, it wouldn't be fair since not everyone uses Google Analytics. About the spam harming your site, if we talk about ghost spam there is nothing to worry(except for your data of course) since there is not real interaction with the spam and any of your pages, it all happens in GA. On the other hand, Crawler Spam does access your site, and it uses your resources, although is nothing to be alarmed since visits from this type of spam are less frequent than ghosts. If you want to fully block crawlers you can do it by adding some lines to your .htaccess file, like this STOP REFERRER SPAM RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for-website.com [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F] It seems that the problem with the spam is not that simple. For what I understand they are preparing a guide. In the meantime, if you are not already using a filter based on valid hostnames, I recommend you to do it, one filter, and you will forget about the ghost spam. You can find more information about this solution here http://moz.com/community/q/seeing-massive-spikes-in-direct-traffic-with-100-bounce-rates?#reply_298133 Hope it helps,

make sure you have a 301 strategy in place! You could also use a canonical tag in order to solve the duplicate content. using only one website is always better in the long run!

Hi there The DA and link equity will need to be there.  In fact, the TLD (.org, .com. net etc) has no impact whatsoever. Yes, it may 'appear' to look more 'natural/authorative' if you had 100 links from .org websites as opposed to, say, .info websites - but I'm as certain as I could possibly be (without looking at it myself) that Google's algorithm doesn't look at a website's TLD when deciding it's authority and strength.  Nor would Moz's metrics. The website needs to have many more quality factors for it to be considered worthwhile, such as links, social metrics, high quality content, user engagement, age and more. Hope this helps.

Hi there I would put the content through a content audit. What's relevant? What's not? What can be updated? What can be consolidated? Going through this exercise will help you prioritize your plan of action. From there, I would make sure you take a look at Moz's migration guide, as it can help you set up the transfer of your content to the other website - this includes URL mapping, redirects, sitemap considerations, as well as measurements. Hope this all helps! Good luck!

Thanks for the quick reply Martijn, I will 301 these back to the homepage. Just strange that Google is reporting these when they do not exist anywhere on the site.

Thanks everyone. Since 301 redirects are out of the question, what I've done is found all the directories that really shouldn't be on this site at all and noindexed them. None of those pages are good for rank for anything so it doesn't matter. The client is instructing their 'customers' to get their sites off the doubleknot site and onto their own domains. Once those are moved over there will still be lots of links pointing to doubleknot and fixing them will be a nightmare because there are just too many, but I'm going to see if they can do a sitewide edit and add rel="nofollow" to each link pointing to doubleknot's irrelevent directories and also see if we can do a mass search and replace to point the links to the right domain when necessary. If there is not a pattern, that will no be possible and someone will have to do it by hand. With noindex and nofollow working for us, that might be enough My client is a team of IT and computer science experts, and they've been advised of the problem. They're looking into ways to put their degrees to work to clean the data. @Richard, to answer your question, their rank is terrible. That's why they called me. Their website is also not at all optimized so I'm restructuring the architecture and asking them to provide new copy. Then I'll do the standard on-site optimization. It could be that might be enough to turn things around. And then it's linkbuilding time. Time will tell. Thanks again!

Thank you for your answer,  yes we moved from www.example.com to uk.example.com and the new countries will have  us.example.com now since all old links were for the www.example.com UK we are thinking of using the  change of address in Search Console.

Another free tool I regularly use is www.keywordtool.io - it provides access to all the Google Auto-Suggest queries and allows easy export into excel. I find it helpful both for long-tail keyword phrases and for crafting ad text.

Thank you for your insight. Rebuilding all the content in the blog has been time consuming. The blog was originally dealt with like a blog and we are moving away from that with structure and content that will be helpful to the consumer and rank. I plan on having a company transcribe all the videos for us at this point. Once again, thank you for the help.

Thank you so much Gianlucca! Lots to take away and get fixed.

Thanks a lot Patrick. I'm pretty sure, this is exactly what I need. Ill read up on it asap, and implement it.

Hey! I am not familiar with that app so I can't speak to it. I am willing to bet it's an issue with their crawl, because again, I am not seeing anything on my end other than the issues I listed above in my quick scan. Does Check My Links have anymore documentation to how they crawl 404s? I can't imagine it's any different than other crawlers, but again, not familiar so I can't say either way. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hello Sandi, That was just one example. I came across several others in which there were multiple versions of the same page with self-referencing rel canonical tags. I would fix that as soon as possible by removing and redirecting one of the versions or choosing a single canonical. I think a directory called /buy-isagenix/ is a little bit spammy, but not so much that I would worry about doing a bunch of redirects at this point. You can probably just leave it as-is. Make sure you have 100% uniquely written content on all of your pages, including the product pages, to avoid these situations: http://tinyurl.com/povmkr9 . Hopefully fixing the duplicate content problems from the non-canonical URLs and the manufacturer-supplied copy will help your rankings a bit.

I'd like a robot that knows how to fetch coffee, go to the mailbox, take my car for inspection and bring it back.

Hi there You can include the release/creation date if it is relevant to the industry - something like SaaS or item models or something like that where features are added. I would highly recommend if you do include information like this (and even if you don't, really) to check out Schema that will help you markup important information about your products, possibly helping your search engine performance. If it's just one type of product that doesn't change often or hasn't in years, it's not really necessary to add dates or anything though. Hope this helps! Good luck!

If you're saying you'd put some (not all), of your most profitable product pages directly below the root domain (in the first folder) then I can see how that would work. But if you're talking about putting all 50,000 product pages directly below the root, no. That would distribute your link juice too broadly and confuse visitors and search engines. Seems to me (and I could certainly be wrong), only big, established and recognized brands go the route you're suggesting.