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Another vote for noindexing tags.

They serve very little (no real) benefit for SEO and cause more headaches than anything else. I never really want to see tags indexing and competing with primary internal pages that actually carry the information I want people to find.

Use them, but just don't index them.

-Andy

There are no others that will really use it - assuming you aren't talking country specific search engines such as Baidu.

Once you submit it to Google and Bing, that is pretty much where you organic traffic is going to come from.

-Andy

...but it's something I am very wary of , especially considering the mess the last chap caused

I do feel your pain and links that are not natural to Google and are not earned, can cause you issues.

As a little tip, look at your site - if you were visiting your site for the first time, would you consider it link-worthy? Do you carry good linkable assets that others will feel they want to link to because they are useful? If not, then concentrate on this first. You can also use BuzzSumo to have a look at what the winners in your market are sharing and reach-out to those individuals who share it. You are also able to see if it has lead to any back-links.

Make / write something better than the other guy and then get busy with your outreach.

-Andy

Hi Jon,

Use of the canonical tag in this situation is just what it is intended for. Have a quick read of what Google says in these situations:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

• Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD get consolidated with links tohttps://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html.

While Google do say it is a recommendation, I find that in situations like this, it will work just fine for you. As David said, give it a go, but I can't see that you will have any problems. Google is pretty good at sorting these issues out, and especially so if you tell them which is your preferred page for ranking:

"While we encourage you to use any of these methods, none of them are required. If you don't indicate a canonical URL, we'll identify what we think is the best version or URL."

-Andy

Option 2 sounds like the logical option - I don't think a flat structure would make sense for what you have to work with.

Interlink your content from other pages and don't try to be clever with structures here - it's whatever makes the most sense to what you are trying to do.

Of course, it is ideal to try not to place any content too far down the tree but if you have no options in what you can and can't do with changing the structure itself, then I would work with what I have.

-Andy

If you only have a few sites, there is no harm in interlinking and this can actually help Google see relationships between company sites - this depends if you want them to. That said, I tend to nofollow them if they are different, in which case there is no problem at all.

Because links of this nature normally appear at the footer of a site, they would probably pass nothing in terms of page rank anyway.

Keep the links neutral - just the brand or URL, and you should be good to go. But tread carefully if the sites are too similar because then Google might start questioning why there are a number of sites that carry the same / similar information and why is it not all on one domain?

-Andy

Hi,

First of all, what is making you think it is so bad? I would be cautious of trying to convince them so much that you end up alienating them and diving in there with someone else to try and get your point across, might just do this.

I like to turn to statistics and testing at this point. Are there pages not converting well? Is there is a penalty of any sort because of the copy? Have you thought about adding a live user testing application like Inspectlet to show them how people are navigating the pages?

-Andy

Correct - Bing and Google are as far as you need to go

I do know you can submit to Yahoo but don't know anyone who ever needed to do that.

DuckDuckGo crawls other search engines to gather its data, so nothing needed to be done there.

-Andy

In terms of a neutral link profile, it needs to, above everything else, appear natural. If your link profile consisted of nothing but dofollow links, then this could be considered unnatural.

There is no limit to the number of links that denote something odd, per se, but you must step back and look at it from Google's eyes. Would they want to see 400 article links all coming from submissions at the same site? Would this suggest article spam? Are these articles each going to be high quality?

It is much more natural to have a few links from a site, but if someone is genuinely seeding all of your content, then I would expect this to be, at worst case, a neutral signal to Google. They will know how good the articles are, how often they are shared, who is posting them, etc.

Also, keep your anchor text neutral / clean. Don't over-optimise it as this will undoubtedly bring problems with it.

I don't really like plugging my own site, but have a read of this: http://bit.ly/1LyeiAh. You may get some additional info there.

-Andy

Hi,

It is always good to have nice clean URL's, but I wouldn't advise trying to change them all just for the sake of wanting to change them, especially if they are ranking so well.

What could be way better than 1st place?

Google has even said in the past, not to change URL's for SEO purposes.

If you had a problem because of this, then it might be a different discussion, but for the most part, a URL plays just a tiny part of what Google looks at.

I hope this helps.

-Andy

Hi Andrew,

Re. your comment:

My main concern is that in the eyes of Google I'd be stripping a lot of content off the domain all at once, and then replacing it with these shell pages containing nothing (in terms of SEO) but meta, a headline, navigation links, and an iFrame.

... you are right to be concerned about this. It is going to look, as you say, like a very thin page with no value-add for anyone visiting, or Google.

If the pages served no real purpose to Google, you could always robots them out, but what is being suggested isn't a particularly good idea if you are still wanting them to rank in the SERPs.

-Andy

Hi Tanveer,

You will get absolutely nothing from forum signatures, other than perhaps the odd click. As a link building strategy, these are amongst those on the "avoid" list.

-Andy

Daft question perhaps, but are you sure nothing is blocking access as it seems to suggest in the screenshot?

When did you do the fetch as Google?

-Andy

Hi Bob,

Those sound terribly long. What is the thinking behind such big articles? These can often work against you because people see how big they are and then don't read it - this can have a number of negative impacts.

Do you think that people are going to be reading the whole thing? Have you got tracking in place to monitor what people are doing on the page? (use HotJar).

-Andy

Guest posting is still something a lot of people do and some see some great results, but it must be done carefully - very carefully! Get it wrong and you will be seeing the wrong end of a penalty from Google.

-Andy

Hi,

The top and bottom line, is how many are needed.

I have clients who dominate huge search terms and have pages with many hundreds of links - others who only have a small number and the only difference between the two is what is actually needed.

If you have so many that the page is confusing, then I would reduce them. If you do have many hundreds, why do you have them? Can they be reduced without affecting usability?

There is no one answer to this and each case much be looked at on its own merits.

-Andy

EGOL has already covered this off nicely.

I also have clients with lots of links from Pinterest and never seen a single issue. I would just continue doing as you are - I have also found Pinterest to be a great source of traffic for the right sites.

-Andy

IMO it is quite natural please share your views.

Well, it's natural in as much as you didn't request them, but they will do nothing for your SEO. For this reason, I suspect you will find Google will completely ignore them.

The best links are those that are earned by creating amazing content that others want to share with their visitors, not by a link in a coupon page.

Not a legitimate link building strategy I'm afraid.

-Andy

Hi,

The page title is a two-fold benefit.

1. It explains the page to Google
2. It tells visitors what they can expect

Best practice here dictates that you write your title for your audience, but not ignoring the important keyword(s) for Google as well.

Try not to keyword stuff as pages like this tend to look unnatural before you have even got to them.

-Andy

Hi Raymond,

As EGOL said, random posts like this are highly unlikely to hurt any efforts, but it does help if you have a hook in articles that allows you to make use of internal linking.

What you need to be thinking about it how can you show Google that you have the necessary EAT (Expertise, Authority & Trust) in your field? Are you producing articles, papers, research or any other thought-leading content on what you do? Are you active socially and are you being mentioned and corresponding with other thought leaders?

There is so much that can be done to help and it just takes a little planning and effort to get the ball rolling

-Andy