Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Darcy Regardless of how much is in the scroll it is all visible to google. Keeping the text visible on the page above the fold, with a few organically placed keywords is all first rate seo. Hence what you suggest would only positively enhance your clients SEO - add in the usual caveats about keyword stuffing & relevance to be wary of.  So unless I am missing something all good.

Hi Darcy! My name's David Black and I'm the Director of Customer Success here at SEMrush. The "SEO Ideas" (or, as I like to call it "Optimization Ideas") tool contained within your Projects is currently in beta. So, you're one of only a select few that have access to it as well as some other beta tools. It's not that we want to police this stuff because we love having beta testers! However, if you have any questions or suggestions about tools, especially in beta, I would definitely encourage you to contact us directly at mail@semrush.com. Our Support team is killer and our Product Owners are literally foaming at the mouth for any feedback you can provide. We look forward to hearing from you!

Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle on this one - as Richard said, an off-topic domain with low authority isn't going to buy you much. If you want the domain for the name or something, great - but don't expect much SEO benefit. Google has gotten pretty savvy about ignoring this stuff, as buying and redirecting domains has been heavily abused. I doubt you'd be at much risk here, but you'd probably see very little benefit.

take the new 4 letter domainname you can market and brand. Redirect the old domain as best and logical you can to the specific pages on the 4 letter domainname. 4 letters are much easy-er to market. usernames in twitter, facebook etc, and you can make xyxy seatle, xyxy newyork as branding or social handlers for local markets and stuf.. #marketing #branding #worlddomination

Hi there This is heavily dependent on the industry and searches done by users historically. One thing you can look into is Google Trends. Put in phrases or keywords that matter to your business and see the historical performance over the years. You can get the same idea through Google Keyword Planner. You could also interview the client as well as their customers for seaonalities and get an idea of what they are searching for during peak seasons and off seasons. There may be opportunities there to write content and grow traffic during down periods that will help you for (potentially) years to come. Here's some great tips from experts. Hope this all helps! Good luck!

Good advice here. I hope you're linking out too, when it's helpful to your audience.

Wow...I didn't know this!  Thanks Dirk for putting me in the 5000 Moz points club!

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

Short answer: create a custom 404 page, not just for these pages, but one that can show for everypage on your site. A few resources: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93641?hl=en Example: http://moz.com/sadfklfadsadfjs https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=custom+404&pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=ssl#pws=0&gl=us&q=how+to+create+a+custom+404

Danny Dover wrote a nice post about this back in 2008, but it still applies today and is a great read here: http://moz.com/blog/the-evil-side-of-google-exploring-googles-user-data-collection The list is almost mind boggling when you add it all up... especially if you consider the different facets of Google that might not necessarily share data, but certainly could: things like Google+, Adwords, Doubleclick, Registrar Data, Server logs, mobile, Google Accounts, Gmail, Chrome, Android, and so on.. I don't want to spoil Danny's report though, it's still a great read on perspective, even after 7 years. Cheers!

I am a little surprised, because having those pages as "noindex, follow" should not bring GWT to flag them as errors. Monica is correct in addressing google flag anything than 200 as errors, but... Your page with "noindex, follow" should return a HTTP code of 200. If it is returning anything else, it's probably wrong, and you should analyze why is doing it. My religion has a law saying that GWT should return no errors, point. I have also witnessed few times a correlation between lowering GWT errors count to 0 and an improve in SERP ranking; but I have no proof one is causing the other.

Sounds solid. Thanks, Dirk!

Yep. 301 = permanent redirect = this page used to be here but not moved to this new location so lets pretend its always been this way (and transfer any authority to it).

Darcy, Blocking URLs in the robots.txt file will not remove them from the index if Google has already found them, nor will it prevent them from being added if Google finds links to them, such as internal navigation links or external backlinks. If this is your issue, you'll probably see something like this in the SERPs for those pages: "We cannot display the content because our crawlers are being blocked by this site's robots.txt file" or something like that. Here's a good discussion about it on WMW. If you have parameters set up in GWT and are using a rel canonical tag that points Google to the non-parameter version of the URL you probably don't need to block Googlebot. I would only block them if I thought crawlbudget was an issue, as in seeing Google to continue to crawl these pages within your log files, or when you potentially have millions of these types of pages.

The fact that you tell Google bot to follow the links on these pages suggest that there is at least some link juice flowing from these pages. If this assumption is true you should direct that link juice to pages that make you money. You could do that with a 301 redirect or by updating the pages with better (not broken) outgoing links. If the assumption is not true and there is no or very little link juice flowing from these pages that no one ever visits, I would suggest to remove them all together.

Hi Samuel, Thank you for the detailed answer. A couple of things; My two "L" typo is just as written here... not on the site. Sorry about that. On the use of the url parameters indexed, those are used internally, but they're set in GWT as having no effect and to only look at the representative url,.. everything before the question mark. On your point about rel canonicals, one way we use them is in a category pages which are long lists of other pages. In that case it looks at page one of the long list as the canonical. With that in mind, along with all the duplicate stuff in the index (paginated page #s, ignored url parameters), what would you suggest I change? Thanks... Darcy

if you add the meta noindex, follow tag , it will keep the page out of the SERP but allows pagerank to flow through them to other pages. See this interview of Matt Cutts for more info : http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

Thanks, Jane! I really appreciate it. If the now noindexed category pages have already been indexed, do you think I should request removal from the index as well? Best... Mike

If this is still an issue you're facing, have you checked the sitemap settings to see which page types are getting included? For example, a site with a few thousand tags that are not entered in the sitemap but not yet set to noindex could easily produce extra pages like this. The next step is parameterization. Anything going on there with search URLs or product URLs? eg ?refid=1235134&q=search+term or ?prod=152134&variant=blue If you really want to scrape through Google, get a list of your sitemap and scrape queries like "inurl:domain.com/a", "inurl:domain.com/b", "inurl:domain.com/c". etc. This should allow you to dive deeper into the site map to see what Google really has indexed. For URL subfolders with tons of URLs like domain.com/product/a, you'll want to do the same thing at a subfolder level instead of root URLs.

Hi Gianluca, All good info - thanks! One followup question; What is the point of the rel="publisher" link? If a site is linked to it's Google+ page, aren't all pages in effect rel publisher? Also, does it do anything rich-snippets-wise? Thanks.. Darcy