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Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the response. Folks out of Google do not see the full page that Google saw. They see a snippet of comments and a pitch to log in or register to see full comments (in a forum). They don't see different content right now... they see less content, but the same as Google saw. Is that clearer?

Thanks... Darcy

The times of looking to rank numero uno for one term are long gone. What sounds like your existing strategy of having good content is the way to go. The risk with an agency that would even focus up on one term and promise number one is that they are going to inadvertently wreck your link profile.

If I were you, I would read the beginner's guide to link building https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building and continue to make good content. Don't allow an agency to manipulate the hell out of your profile for the sake of one term.

How do we safely show logged-in members/Google one type of content on a page and logged out/non-members another kind of content without getting slammed for cloaking?

Right now we do this thing where we show Google everything on the page, but new visitors partial forum comments with the pitch to sign up and see full comments. So far, we have not gotten into trouble for this.

The new idea is to show non-members a lot of marketing messages and one kind of navigation and then once they sign up and are logged in, show different or no marketing messages and a different kind of navigation.

How do we stay out of trouble with this? Where is the cloaking line drawn? It's got me kinda nervous.

Thanks... Darcy

I kind of think of text in expandable tabs like could be useful to someone, but not the majority of people.

Tom is right that it could be a better user experience. But what does it say about the text... not really super important for most people. That's a little like way way down the page.

Have you searched for your text in tabs to see if it's indexed? I did that not long ago and found that mine wasn't and since moving it out of expandable tabs it now is.

It's possible it was not the only thing going on, but it would be interesting to check.

I'd start here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo and think of it like a fun game that may take moments to learn, but a life time to master.  That guide will lead you to still more handy resources.

Hi Cole,

Fresh by Google (if not noindexed) in this case would be kind of like the freshness value of a "fresh" error.

Maybe that's extreme, but point being, the content is not needed by the web, since it already exists. If there was absolutely nothing else being added to or changed about the site and my one option was adding duplicate content, I'd noindex/follow it and figure I might have gotten some small, small, small benefit from updating the site a little, maybe an improved user signal. I'd for sure keep it out of the index. I guess that's how I'd do it, if it had some value for visitors. If it's only value was adding something fresh and not that great for visitors, I'd find the extra hour necessary to re-write it into something fresh, unique and valued by visitors. .

The other thing about syndicated content is that after you make sure where else you can find it on the web via an exact phrase search in Google, it may not mean you've seen the only instance of it as it may evolve. Having duplicate content indexed with other sites of possibly low quality may put you in a bad neighborhood as sites with common content. If I had a ten foot pole, I wouldn't touch it with it.

I hope that helps. Best... Mike

Yes, important. Any reason you wouldn't? Which pages don't?

In phrasing the question as "is it considered fresh/unique," I'm going to assume you mean by google for the site's organic benefit. So, I guess the reasoning would be is the fact that it's fresh to the site a bigger positive than the negative of duplicate content. Is that what you're getting at? Personally, knowingly on-boarding duplicate content would be too big of a potential negative for me to consider doing it. I've done it as a noindex/follow for reasons other than Google, but not for some mystery freshness bump.

Not that you can't find examples of duplicate content ranking in more than one place. To me on-boarding indexed duplicate content seems like just asking for trouble.

Hope that helps. Best... Mike

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for the info. To answer your question, the member profile pages are noindexed because there are 80,000 and most have little to no non-duplicate info. Some members fill in something. Most do not. Of the ones that do, they often pull the text from LinkedIn. Rather than have 80,000 duplicate or nearly duplicate pages in the index, we noindexed them.

Best... Darcy

"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff.

I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what?

Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages.

Thanks! Best... Darcy

Cyrus, thanks for hanging in there with my questions. If I just give back a 404, what am I showing them on the page?

I would think seeing the main questions page would be better than just sitting at the original url and looking at 404 page notice - seems like a bad user experience if Google wants to get all user-experiency about it.

Thanks... Darcy

Hi Cyrus,

Have not experienced a dip, but things have been a little static.

Can you do both... forward the page and give back a 404?

What would you do?

Thanks... Darcy

Yes, I would think that at the point Google crawls it and finds it forwarded it would drop it from the index and not waste resources crawling it again unless linked somewhere. I will keep an eye out for links, but don't believe that there are any.

Thanks, Dirk... Darcy

Hi Cyrus,

Thanks for the info. These are forum pages where no one ever answered the question, so

there is no helpful info and very little content.

They were forwarded up to the main questions page (one / up the url structure).

The page they were forwarded to is like a questions category page, not specific to the subject of the

forwarded page. These forwarded pages don't get much/any traffic because they never ranked

and we didn't promote them.

If it doesn't hurt overall search on other pages, I'd rather not go to the substantial effort of finding subject-relevant pages to forward to, since no one will ever go to the original url and need to see something super relevant.

Your thoughts? Thanks! Best... Darcy

Hi Erica,

I'm saying that the only place it shows a soft 404 is in GWT errors. Screaming Frog, web-sniffer and now Fetch As Google In GWT, all show them as 301 re-directs. I can't re-direct them more than they are. So, is GWT just goofy?

Thanks... Darcy

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for the suggestion. As noted above, I put the whole list thru screaming frog and a few thru your suggestion of web-sniffer.net.

95% of the whole list is 301s and 100% of the few put one at a time thru web-sniffer come back as 301s.

My question remains "Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results

and if so what should I do about it?"

Thanks... Darcy

Hi Erica,

I put the list through screaming frog and 95% of the urls are shown as 301s.

Do you think screaming frog has it right or is there something they wouldn't catch?

Thanks... Darcy

Hi,

One site I work with unpublished a lot of thin content. Great idea, right?

These unpublished pages were then 301'd up to the main category page that they previously existed in.

Now Google Webmaster Tools calls them out as soft 404 errors. This seems unexpected since the pages

were 301'd. Here is my question; Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results

and if so what should I do about it?

Thanks... Darcy

Besides crawling with a bot, what kind of info about site construction, html, etc does Google get via users via alternate methods?

Thanks... Darcy

GWT calls pages that have "noindex, follow" tags "access denied errors."

How is it an "error" to say, "hey, don't include these in your index, but go ahead and crawl them."

These pages are thin content/duplicate content/overly templated pages I inherited and the noindex, follow tags are an effort to not crap up Google's view of this site.

The reason I ask is that GWT's detection of a rash of these access restricted errors coincides with a drop in organic traffic. Of course, coincidence is not necessarily cause.

Should I worry about it and do something or not?

Thanks... Darcy