Welcome to the Q&A Forum

May concern was these screwed up links would somehow impair ranking, but I guess not.  Thanks for the link.

I'm not saying I want to chase them.  I'm not about to submit emails to each of these sites, since it's obvious they don't speak English.  On the other hand, I do possess all the urls, and I would like to report them...somewhere.  This is abuse, and should be stopped.

Below is a sample link...not the word "hollister" used throughout the page..

http://web-tutor.in/content/add-your-customs-table-views?page=3

Whether is accidental or intentional, there's got to to be something I can do to get back at these jokers.

What if this is intentional?  Furthermore this problem is spread across many sites.

Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra".  Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's.

Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?

Exactly, I removed some URLS, and tweeked the priorities, in Dreamweaver, then saved.  I want to make sure nothing got messed up.   WMT has the ability to test before submitting, which I just learned.  I used xml-sitemaps.com stand alone, which passed the WMT test.  Now I'm going to do some editing, and try it again before submitting.

Before submitting to Google, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for testing sitemaps out before submitting?

Thanks guys! Upon further research what's happening is "Entity Escaping", where symbols have to use a code...ie & = &, so it's all good.

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

I've been creating sitemaps with XML Sitemap Generator, and have been downloading them to edit on my pc.  The sitemaps work fine when viewing in a browser, but when I download and open in Dreamweaver, the urls don't work when I cut and paste them in the Firefox URL bar.  I notice the codes are different.  For example, an "&" is produced like this..."&".  Extra characters are inserted, producing the error.

I was wondering if this is normal, because as I said, the map works fine when viewing online.

I'm assuming you changed the name of all the urls' to some degree?  If you kept the structure of the site and the name of the pages the same, I don't think you'd see this happening.  If you did restructure and rename, you may have triggered an automatic algo penalty.  I would check the external link profile to see what keywords are linking back to you.  If the new urls are different from the old, that may have been the cause of the drop.  404's are always a concern, especially with old sites since there could be hundreds of pages that you may have thought were dormant, but Google keeps visiting.  Even though these pages may not be linked anywhere, Google has them indexed and is still visiting.  Same goes with images!  They may be missing on the new server.  But from what I understand, such 404's will correct themselves over time, as Google will un-index them.

Marketing and success are both in the url, so having a / or a - isn't going to be the final determinant on how you rank.  The thing I'd worry about is "marketing/success" implies marketing has greater importance than success, in the root scheme of things.

You can 301 to any place, so if it's beneficial to change the structure the site, now's the time to do it.  Beware though, when you change the structure of the website, and are placing pages in different folders, you're changing the URL, so it will affect your ranking, hopefully for the positive.   I think what you're proposing would be an improvement.

Sounds good, LinkFool...Thanks!

PDG-Commerce

Thanks StreamlineMetrics....I do have a lot of older files that somehow got indexed, that I have no relevant new location to send them to.  Do you think I should avoid deleting them as well?

I have the bad habit of renaming a html page sitting on my server, before uploading a new version.  I usually do this after a major change.  So after the upload, on my server would be "product.html" as well as "product050714".html.  I just stumbled on the fact G has been indexing these backups.  Can I just delete them and produce a 404?

Thanks for your insight Marty.  What I've discovered, that categores with the most pages, are the ones most adversely affected.  For instance, if a category has 20 pages, it ranks horribly, whereas a category with only 1 to 3 pages does good.  Consequently, I think I'm running into a duplication threshold penalty on the larger categories.  Figure since I have nothing to lose, I may try hard coding on a couple of the 20+ page categories and sees what happens.

I have an eCommerce site that dynamically creates category pages, which produce canonical tags in the header.  For multiple page categories, it adds the page number to the URL.  For example, this category has 3 pages....

Because most categories have too many products, I can't follow Googles suggestion of creating a "view all" page. Furthermore since all these pages use the same template, I'm unable to insert a NOINDEX tag in all the pages after the first page.  Also, in this scenario, I'm unable to insert the discreet code for Next/Previous, which is also suggested by Google.

My only option for maintaining these dynamically generated category pages would be to hardcode the first conical tag in the template, which would then be produced on all subsequent paginated pages.

Consequently, every paginated page in this category would have the same canonical tag pointing to the first page.  Would this incur the wrath of Google and would I'd be better off leaving the pagination they way it is?

I agree many product pages with long titles is normally not a problem, so long as each title is different.  The only issue is due to the length, the most important keywords are diluted or may not even be indexed if they're at the end of a long title.

One time should not be a problem, but the only issue is will it give your new site the same boost?  Your taking juice away from one site, with no assurance it will work on the new site.  But if it works, it's brilliant.