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Hi

Our site's front page has almost 900 internal links on it (it's an ecommerce site with about 25,000 products). A lot of these are on a pretty involved dropdown menu, which is on every page.

I can't really do anything to get this figure down (its outside my remit), but one thing the developers have done is make all the menu links nofollow on the mobile version of the menu (site is responsive) - otherwise there would be even more links!

My question is as to whether doing this for the mobile menu is a good idea, in terms of SEO?

Many thanks Britney

Thank you, that makes perfect sense.

Thanks EGOL, that makes sense. I'm looking for backlinks to products essentially, so not a great deal of content but perhaps some "newsability" (we won't be beaten on price in the UK, for instance).

Many thanks Jordan - I've read that guide and it's really useful.

What I'm still unsure about is whether it's worth me getting someone to do, timewise.  The guide seems aimed at getting backlinks from bloggers - can that make a big difference on higher competition search terms? My rivals have many backlinks from Govt. & national media sites, for instance.

Hi Martijn

Many thanks for your response. We have been redirecting old product URLs to the shop URL (not the front page, but the front page of the shop)  but I think ideally we just want rid of all these pages as the client is considering getting rid of the shop completely.

What would we do with robots.txt in this instance? Is there a tutorial you could point me at?

I've got a UK-based site with about 10,000 backlinks, according to majestic, and just 4 according to Open Site Explorer? Confusing! Rivals tend to have more - 28,000 in the case of our nearest competitors.

So I'm not sure the best way to go about building backlinks? Or if it's worth actively seeking to build them?

The index page of the site has a Moz PA of 45 (DA = 35) and I'm looking for any ways to increase these - need to get the DA up to 73 to compete with largest rivals.

One of our main rivals has about 60 .edu links - would be great to emulate that, but I'm also not sure how you go about this? i.e. when you spot a good backlink someone else has, how would you begin the process of also getting that link?

I had a problem with a lot of crawl errors (on Google Search Console) a while back, due to the removal of a shopping cart. I thought I'd dealt with this & Google seemed to agree (see attached pic), but now they're all back with a vengeance!

The crawl errors are all the old shop pages that I thought I'd made clear weren't there anymore. The sitemaps (using Yoast on Wordpress to generate these) all updated 16 Aug but the increase didn't happen till 18-20.

How do I make it clear to Google that these pages are gone forever?

Screen-Shot-2016-08-22-at-10.19.05.png

Thanks Dmitril, I'll have a look through those

Does anyone have any recommendations for Youtube SEO Resources in 2016?

I've done a lot of work with Local SEO on video but having to move up a notch to national SEO in a competitive field

Thanks for your response BlueCorona!

The pages concerned are for products and the 'wraparound' text regards free delivery and next day delivery - this is relevant to all the pages and also helpful to tempt the user to click as it's pretty much the best deal in the country. Would you still say that is detrimental?

Individual meta descriptions over time... we have 25,000 products and add / remove many products on a daily basis so I don't think it's really a realistic option.

Thanks Marisa - my changes are certainly customer-based (definite statements about free delivery and next day delivery)

Thanks Marisa, pretty much as I was thinking (hoping!)

If there is one different word in each description, that is presumably enough to stop them being seen as duplicates?

Also, I was intrigued that you said "Google doesn't officially use meta descriptions" - is there some doubt over this? I thought they'd confirmed it themselves?

I think the choice I have to make is, is it better to have 100% unique descriptions that are too short (keyword only, as at present), or much less unique ones that are 130+ characters. I guess the latter wins.

I'm working on a large website (circa 25k pages) that presently just replicates each page title as a meta description. I'm thinking of doing a 'find and replace' in the database so I change:

to

where the preceeding and following text would be the same in each case eg

Is this unique enough? Obviously the individual keyword would make it technically unique each time....and manually changing them would take the rest of my life

Thanks Andy - I was thinking about using video syndication software to solve the time issue, but I can certainly see your logic with Youtube / Google

This doesn't seem to have been discussed here for a number of years, so I'm wondering what people think of video syndication in 2016?

Is it a good idea for website SEO (backlinks in accompanying text)? Or for raising general web presence? Or generally pushing the video itself up the SERPS?

Or is it better to concentrate everything on Youtube?

I'm looking to raise a website profile that produces 4-5 videos a week presently but is only getting an average of 500-1000 views in each video.

Hi Ikkie

That's great & very helpful - many thanks

Search console is showing quite a lot of soft 404 pages on my site, but when I click on the links, the pages are all there. Is there a reason for this?

It's a pretty big site - I'm getting 141 soft 404s from about 20,000 pages

Thank you, that gives me a lot of clarity

Thanks Egol - this website took over a year to build and cost 7 figures to build, so not so simple I'm afraid. (It's integrated with stock controls in a shop and warehouse and all sorts)