Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Dr. Egol - thank you for the thoughtful answer. I'll give it a try!

Considering Google's renewed emphasis on E-A-T, and since Google+ authorship is going away, what is the best practice for establishing authorship of content?

Is it still rel="author" but with a link to one's bio on one's website?

Should this be done on every page of a site? If so, can it be in the footer or would it be more effective immediately below the page content?

Question Deleted

Thanks, Britney!

Have any of you had any experience with a content provider named Media Shower? Good or bad experience? Which price plan did you use? What's your advice on how best to use them? If you've used them and moved on to a different service, which one did you choose and why?

Thanks!

This is happening to me also. Using the latest Outlook in Office 365.

Thanks for all of the responses - this forum is a great resource!

Over 95% of my revenue comes from organic search; less than 5% comes from AdWords PPC (all other sources account for about 1-2%).

My ROI on AdWords is roughly zero. It's negative if you include opportunity costs.

My question is: if I pause all of my AdWords campaigns, is there ANY chance that my organic rankings (and organic click-through rates) will suffer?

This is really two questions. First, could Google retaliate to my reduced ad spending by dropping my rankings? Second, will searchers think differently about my organic link if they don't also see the accompanying paid link on the SERP?

Thanks for the detailed suggestions!

As a follow up: what metric do you use to decide which offenders to go after, and which ones to ignore? I simply don't have time to go after everybody who has copied my content so I need a way to prioritize.

There are two obvious situations where action is warranted: first, when the infringement is committed by a competitor in my industry, and second, when the infringing content outperforms my own site in the SERPs. What else would you suggest?

Thanks again.

Over the years, tons of original content from my website (written by me) has been scraped by 200-300 external sites. I've been using Copyscape to identify the offenders. It is EXTREMELY time consuming to identify the site owners, prepare an email with supporting evidence (screen shots), and following up 2, 3, 15 times until they remove the scraped content. Filing DMCA takedowns are a final option for sites hosted in the US, but quite a few of the offenders are in China, India, Nigeria, and other places not subject to DMCA. Sometimes, when a site owner takes down scraped content, it reappears a few months or years later. It's exasperating.

My site already performs well in the SERPs - I'm not aware of a third party site's scraped content outperforming my site for any search phrase.

Given my circumstances, how much effort do you think I should continue to put into policing scraped content?

I've found a solution and am posting it here in case anybody else is having the same problem:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([^/]+)/[0-9]+ /blog/$1/$2/$3/ [L,R=301]

Sorry in advance if this isn't the best place to ask this question.

Google Webmaster Tools has recently identified a ton of "Not Found" pages, which are actual pages with some digits appended at the end.

For example, suppose an actual page on my blog is:

(A) http://www.example.com/blog/2012/09/my-post-title/

This page works just fine.

However, GWT has identified the following page as a "not found" page:

(B) http://www.example.com/blog/2012/09/my-post-title/9157586677/1846732913010

This appears to be happening to hundreds of posts on my site. In each case, the "9157586677" portion of the URL is identical, but the remaining 13 digits change from page to page.

I haven't been able to determine exactly what is causing this to happen - it's probably a social plug-in for Wordpress, or perhaps Disqus, but I'm not sure which one. I'll go through a process of elimination to narrow it down over the coming week.

As a quick fix, I'd like to create a ModRewrite rule so that requests for (B) get 301 redirected to (A). Since there are hundreds of posts, I need to do this in a way that works regardless of what's in the "/2012/09/my-post-title/" part of the URL.

Unfortunately, mod-rewrite is outside of my area of expertise. Can somebody please suggest how I can handle this? Thanks in advance.

PS - As for tracking down the cause, I've looked at the source of the pages in the "Linked From" area of GWT and the Not Found link is nowhere to be found. That is why I assume the bad link is being generated by some javascript that is a part of one of my plug-ins.

Update: It seems like Disqus is the source of these phantom links. There's considerable discussion here. I'll continue searching for a long-term solution. Meanwhile, I'd still appreciate help with the mod-rewrite question above. Thanks again.

There are about a dozen PDFs and they are indexed.

I agree that it's probably better to play it safe and keep these files on www.

Thanks!

I've set up a CDN to speed up my domain. I've set up a CNAME to map the subdomain cdn.example.com to the URL where the CDN hosts my static content (images, CSS and JS files, and PDFs).

www.example.com and cdn.example.com are now two different IP addresses.

Internal links to my PDF files (white papers and articles) used to be www.example.com/downloads but now they are cdn.example.com/downloads

The same PDF files can be accessed at both the www and the cdn. subdomain. Thus, external links to the www version will continue to work.

Question 1: Should I set up 301 redirects in .htaccess such as:

Redirect permanent /downloads/filename.pdf http://cdn.example.com/downloads/filename.pdf

Question 2: Do I need to do anything else in my .htaccess file (or anywhere else) to ensure that any SEO benefit provided by the PDF files remains associated with my domain?

Question 3: Am I better off keeping my PDF files on the www side and off of the CDN?

Thanks,

Akira

I already do. So maybe it's not necessary to worry about the blog's root page?

Thanks.

I like the idea of excerpts, and I do use them on the home page of my website (say, www.example.com).

But what about on the root page of the blog, www.example.com/blog - which is not the home page of my website?

Do you think I should do the same? (Kind of like how www.seomoz.org/blog is set up)?

Suppose the "Home" page of your blog at www.example.com/domain/ displays your 10 most recent posts.

Each post has its own permalink page (where you have comments/discussion, etc.).

This obviously means that the last 10 posts show up as duplicates on your site.

Is it good practice to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW on the blog root page (blog/) so that only one copy gets indexed?

Thanks,

Akira

Some SEO folks (such as http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/css-and-seo.shtml) advocate using CSS so that unique content in the body of your page appears earlier in the file than non-unique content (such as, for example, the content of an elaborate drop-down menu system).

What say you? Do search engines now disregard position on page, and look at your pages holistically?