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I would say you need to have crawlable links from the initial landing page. Can you not create a page with links to the different sites rather than having a drop down box? You could then have text links for the search engines to crawl. Alternatively you could use a javascript drop down.

As long as the search engines can get past the initial page there should be no issues with them crawling the rest of the site.

I would also question how you are going to display the different versions of the site in terms of duplicate content. Are the different sites going to be hosted in different subfolders? e.g. www.domain.com/en and www.domain.com/us?

If they are going to be hosted like this I would strongly recommend considering your strategy for avoiding duplicate content across these sites.

Hi Guy,

I would question why you were looking to do this in the first place. Removing these links will not have a positive effect on the "weight" of the homepage, this is not quite how it works.

Basically all of the weight of the page will be divided by the amount of links on it. So if you remove links the these internal pages, you will not make the homepage stronger, you will make the remaining links stronger.

In the case of nofollow, this has the effect of vanishing linkjuice. If you no followed half of your existing links, the followed links would still pass on the same weight as they did before, but the no followed links will now pass on nothing, effectively halving the weight passed on by the homepage. This is not the scenario you want.

So in answer to your question, I wouldn't actually do either of these, unless there is a different reason for you having to make these changes?

Hope that helps.

Sounds like that may be part of the issue but I wouldn't expect such high fluctutions. Keep on creating good content, share it and promote it, and keep away from using really anchor intensive keywords.

Best of luck!

This could be part of the problem. It was something I noticed initially when looking at the site, 301's will often result in different metrics being reported on and may be part of the misalignment between links and PR.

I meant the links themselves were fairly strong, not the total amount

There's a PR6 page linking to one of the sites which looks quite strong.

My advice would be to give it some time. OSE can take a while to update sometimes and when it does you will have a better overview of your link profile. You can then approach it with a bit more information.

Until then just keep on promoting!

What's the general level of competition like for the terms you are tracking? If its a low competition niche and you are the only real player in it, then it might be something you are doing wrong rather than the other sites doing right.

Are you still ranking well or have you suffered a big drop?

I would say there's a couple of factors to consider here:

1. Are all of your guest posts still there / links still in place? Sometimes for whatever reasons these can disappear.

2. Where have you been posting? If you have posts on suspect sites you may find that these can be hit with a penalty / devalued and your links become less valuable.

3. Have your posts been moved from front page to lower pages on the site? If the full post was being displayed on the front page and then became relegated to a subpage this may affect the weight it passes.

4. Did you vary the anchor text? Especially with the penguin update, you need to be varying up your anchor text. If all of a sudden you are getting lots of exact match keywords that don't look natural this may have triggered alarm bells with Google.

Social signals are likely to help with the posts strength, you should be aiming to promote your content on social networks anyway as part of your SEO efforts.

Hope that helps.

Looking at the links in OSE, they are reasonably strong, but I wouldn't have thought any of them would have been strong enough to catapult you to a PR 5.

I would be inclined to to pay too much attention to toolbar PR as it can be very misleading, but it is quite interesting how quickly it has increased.

Are there any other links you are aware of that have been built recently that wouldn't have been picked up by OSE?

Hi Mark,

They may have redirected a previous site which has passed on a lot of the weight. This might not have been picked up yet.

I notice both sites redirect the www. to non www. Has this been done recently? It may have something to do with it.

I would say keep them if they are good links, but you would probably want to look at changing percentages of anchor text and adding in some more "natural" terms such as brand names and generic terms.

A good guideline to a natural backlink profile can be found here:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/

Been referencing this one a lot recently as I find it's a great way of explaining types of anchor text.

Hi Valdas,

It depends if you would like to keep the content and rankings achieved from the individual sites. I would imagine this is important, in which case I think the best approach would be to transfer the sites from their current domains into the subfolders on the new domain. This way each page would still exist but just on the new domain e.g. www.newdomain.com/site1/post-1

This would then leave all the content in place and allow you to capture all the long tail traffic you were getting before.

To do this would be more time consuming as you would need to 301 redirect each individual URL to the new URL but it would help you to make the most of the work you have done on each of the individual sites.

You wouldn't be able to judge your sites rankings on this metric alone.

How long are the URLs? I would say this factor has a very small weighting when it comes to rankings. If you have a strong domain the search engines shouldn't have a problem with ranking it.

The main issue directly affecting rankings is diluting the keyword match in the URL. This article has a section on URL length which you will probably find helpful:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

I would add in the products also. The sitemap's there to help the search engines crawl your site - the products are the pages you want to be indexed for sure.

I would say that redirecting has value with that amount of domain authority.  A redirect would make use of the weight acquired, switching it off would lose all of this completely.

If you are worried about the amount of work involved in matching old to new URL then you always have the option to redirect to homepage. This will still pass on the weight to the site although not as effectively.

How many URLs are we talking about?

Also I'm pretty sure you can do a domain replacement via .htaccess without having to do individual 301's - can someone correct me if this isn't the case?

I would say this is not an issue, Google is able to see and match images, but I would assume that these only make up a very small percentage of the overall page which isn't going to set any duplication alarms ringing.

If you were worried you could always change alt text and filenames, but I really don't think this would be a major issue as long as all the text is unique.

It has the potential to go either way. You would really need to look at these links as a percentage of the overall backlink profile.

If 90% of the links have this in then it's probably going to look manipulative - on the other hand, they are going to be semi branded links if the company is called something like "superb web design" and these may be considered Brand links.

A good article to have a look at is one posted on search engine journal recently -

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http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/

Also you would want to have a look at Open Site Explorer to see the diversity of anchor text to the site:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Ben

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Robert has pretty much covered it here.

I would say it depends on the level of competition. If the competition is low you could probably have one page focused on both locations, but if it's high you may need to consider having a targeted page for each "page + location".

The homepage is the only tricky one. Obviously with this generally being the strongest page on the site, splitting this may result in one high strength page (homepage) and a low one (newpage).

Hi Nick,

You're probably best looking around for some more detailed articles on different types of keyword research. It's a broad area with lots of different approaches and tools.

Here's a few links to SEOmoz articles to get you started. I'm sure more people will give their opinions on tools etc.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/keyword-research-guide

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

Ben

Hi Richard,

My thoughts would initially be:

a) yes a 301 redirect is probably the best way to avoid the duplicated pages and pass the weight on

b) if you have 301 redirected them they won't be 404 errors, the weight of the previous URLs will be passed on (although there is a slight decay factor involved with redirects so you won't get 100% of the weight)

c) I can't see how there will be too many errors as long as you 301 small.com to big.com sitewide. If anything big.com should get a boost from any links that the small.com pages had. Also this should help clear up the duplicate content issues.

Hope that helps,

Ben

Mark's right, you need to be providing signals to the search engines as to which one is the original. Quite often if most of the metrics are similar, the first article that Google crawls is given the weighting of the original. Linking back from the duplicate will help. I would also suggest leaving a delay before syndicating the content to allow Google to find the original.

With regards to both pages ranking that is slightly odd - is this on a very specific / long tail search? For example have you searched for the whole article title or something like that?