Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you to everyone for chipping in their thoughts on this.

Logan, good article. It gave me a new idea and wanted to see what y'all thought.

If my main goal is to not have all these 404s from unpublished pages and to re-direct the incoming link value to pages that could benefit, what would you think of putting up a noindexed page that links to my top pages that I want to give greater authority to? Then, put in a request to de-index those old urls that have the noindexed (duplicate) content. That would mean not firing off a 404, just showing the same content on hundreds of noindexed/deindexed pages.  Given your point about re-directs, chained re-directs and speed for mobile, would that do more for me than re-directing all of these old urls to new pages?

Compounding the problem a little, this particular site has a catalog that comes out twice a year where many product pages are constantly being unpublished. So, even if I re-directed the old unpublished pages to existing urls, some of those might be going away and need another re-direct to add to the chain shortly.

Any thoughts on this appreciated. Thanks! Best... Mike

Hi Logan,

Thanks for the insight. Would a few hundred re-directs be a site speed bummer for Shopify hosted site? I've worked on other sites that had decent speed and hundreds of re-directs. Firing off spitstorm of 404s on urls that used to be landing pages for links seems sub-optimal as well.

Best... Mike

I'm working with a site that needs a whole bunch of old pages that were deleted 301'd to new pages.

My main goal is to capture any external links that right now go off to a 404 page and cleaning up the index. In dealing with this, I may end up 301ing pages that didn't have incoming links or may not have ever even really existed in the first place. These links are a mix of http and https.

Is there any potential downside to just 301ing a list of several hundred possible old urls that currently trigger the 404 page?

Thanks! Best... Mike

Hi,

I have a U.S. client who is stuck on a name that he wants to get as a .io (British Indian Ocean) domain name for a new site.

Aside from the user confusion/weirdness, how much harder do you think this makes this sites organic in the U.S. in the future with a .io domain name?

FYI, the other part of the domain name he wants to use is short, meaningless and implies nothing in and of itself.

Thanks!

Hi Donna,

Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it.

Best... Mike

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes, the thing that makes me nervous about that recommendation from the article is how do I even begin to weigh the odds on it being a net gain and then convey it to management? I mean, it's one thing for me to think, "yeah, let's roll the dice" and another to convey the trade-offs to a very typical management in something like numbers.

Thank you for noticing my avatar portrait. I did it over a Summer in the south of France. It will probably be worth a fortune once I am gone and regarded as a giant of the early 21st century world of art.

I wrote Moz about the "Staff" thing and it looks like they deleted the title... all titles really.

Best... Mike

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the insight and resource. What do you think of while waiting for the next year mobile responsive site, to 301 the two existing mobile sites to the desktop site? How would one begin to estimate the effect of that? Thanks, again.

Best... Mike

Hi,

I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites:

m.ExampleSite.com

mobile.ExampleSite.com

ExampleSite.com

The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know.

This is how they currently hand this:

What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why?

Your thoughts? Best... Mike

P.S.,

Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.

Yes, thanks Dana!

Best... Mike

Hi Egol,

Once again I am acquainted with why you are objectively ranked #1 in the Moz community. That was encyclopedic!

Yes, I should have mentioned that I understand site A losing externally linked content would hurt site A.

What I was really getting at, which you answered, is that it's no search crime against humanity to effectively part-out a site. It's not viewed by Google as "what the heck are you doing?" ... for all concerned.

Thank you for the insight.

Best... Mike

Recently started working with a large site that, for reasons way beyond organic search, wants to forward internal pages to a variety of external sites.

Some of these external sites that would receive the content from the old site are owned, admin'd and/or hosted by the old site, most are not. All of the sites receiving content would be a better topic fit for that content than the original site. The process is not all at once, but gradual over time. No internal links on the old site to the old page or the new site/url would exist post content move and 301ing. The forwarding is mostly to help Google realize the host site of this content is not hosting duplicate content, but is the one true copy. Also, to pick up external links to the old pages for the new host site.

It's a little like domain name change, but not really since the old site will continue to exist and the new sites are a variety of new/previously existing sites that may or may not share ownership/admin etc.

In most cases, we won't be able to change any external link pointing to the original site and will just be 301ing the old url to the contents new home on another site.

Since this is pretty unusual (like I wouldn't get up in the morning and choose to do this for the heck of it), here are my three questions:

• Is there any organic search risk to the old site or the sites receiving the old content/301 in this maneuver?

• Will the new sites pick up the link equity benefit on pages that had third party/followed links continuing to point to the old site but resolving via the 301 to this totally different domain?

• Any other considerations?

Thanks! Best... Mike

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the message and I get your point. None is actually forwarded to the other. .com has a for sale sign on it and .com.br is a site. Of course, not sure what went on in the past, beyond OSE says .com has no link profile.

What would you say to a client who is concerned he'd have to run around buying his .com.??? in alot of other countries.

Thanks!

Hi onurcan-ikiz,

I think what the tool is getting at is trying to get you to think about the issue, which it sounds like you are.

Are these pages more like category pages? Do these pages have unique content that single product pages don't? Are you actually trying to rank these pages for some identified topic? Do these pages currently produce in organic search? Do these pages compete with other pages of yours over the same terms.

You are right to consider the difference between Google and Moz. Keyword stuffing is not a search felony like buying links. It's more like a clue about a possibly ineffective approach.

Best of Luck!

MIke

HI Joel,

I can understand wanting a study to convince someone of something. Thing is, Erica is right.

You figure 100% of the people on this page are on this page. Some smaller percent will by definition be on the next page with the sign up form.

So, unless there is something magical about the button that adds to their commitment to filling out the form or some amazing content (that should be on page one if it's so amazing), I can't see how more visitors would fill out the form on page two. It would have to be so many more that it makes up for all the people that didn't click the link or button.

If the signup form is too huge for the content already on page one, you may want to try asking for just name and email on page one and the rest of it on page two. That way, you would at least get enough to keep marketing to them later if they bail on page two of the form. Of course, test that to get the data you need.

What the page two form advocates have is a hypothesis. Such is the stuff tests are made of.

Sorry about not having a study, but it really is not very debatable. Of course, every site is different and who knows what variables in information or channel you're dealing with.

Best of luck!

Mike

I like that idea. Keeps some of the upside (if there is any), but reduces the risk.

Do you have any other likely suspects besides the affiliate link thing?

The site seems like you could attract some editorial links. Like school music departments for .edus, right?

How bad a % search hit did you take in the last two months?

Best... Mike

If you want to be on the safe side. The only downside would appear to be that if the problem is not affiliate links, you've nofollowed and 302'd the value out of them. Maybe take a look at how much of your link profile is affiiate, non-affiliate and followed/nofolllwed to try and get a handle on what that maneuver might cost you, in the event the affiliate links aren't the problem. I kind of think G has already discounted them, so maybe no big loss.

Hi Fabrizo,

My suggestion is to contact all the affiliates, as you are, and get them to nofollow. Keep records of your efforts. I would consider 302ing, so you are not passing link value and therefor on the face of it not benefiting.

I wouldn't disavow them. I think the more likely scenario is that Google stopped counting them as editorial links... not a manual penalty (which you would probably have been notified of). G just figured it out and stopped giving you the boost from them.

Of course, there could be other problems unrelated to affiliate links. But with nofollows, 302s, and building new links.... how wrong could you be?

Best of Luck... Mike

Hi Fabrizo,

Are these links obvious affiliate links, like CJ.com or similar?

I'm saying that in my experience of working with dozens of sites with affiliate links pointing to them, I don't think it's a very big penalty risk to virtualsheetmusic.com.

If you've experienced a drop in organic search traffic over time, short of having a penalty notice from Google in hand, it's more likely that those links have been de-valued as non-editorial and thus taken some wind out of your sails. This might feel like a penalty, but really it's more like they just don't help like they used to.

As such, spending some time building some editorial links would be more to the point than an intermediate page.

Best... Mike

Hi Fabrizio,

I don't think I would worry about it too much. Most of that risk, however little it is, is on the site linking to you. In Google's head, affiliate links are not editorially given links... more like (at worst/in concept) bought links, where the site gave the link in return for the affiliate income and therefor needs a nofollow.

Re: the risk for the linked-to site and as you know, affiliate links are not actually controllable by you. Also, Google has become decent at identifying affiliate networks and dismissing the value of them in the first place (assuming you're with some network), as mentioned here by Matt Cutts a while back: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/google-affiliate-links-seo.html

Finally, it looks like the site has enough other types of links that it's link profile is not crazily all affiliate links. Personally, I would put that energy into gaining some more editorially given links.

Best of luck, Fabrizio!

Mike