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I wouldn't count on affiliate links passing value to your site in the long term.

http://www.webpronews.com/heres-what-googles-matt-cutts-says-about-affiliate-links-and-nofollow-2012-06

Note that most of the presentation is addressed to affiliates rather than to the program owners. Google tries to identify affiliate links and discount them, so you might not be gaining any value from these links anyway. If the links come from low-authority or low-quality sites AND have anchor text, it's surely not worth the risk. From Google's perspective, you shouldn't try to gain link equity from a link when financial compensation is involved. Ads, affiliate links, and other paid-for links should technically all be nofollow.

Images and branded links for affiliates may help avoid penalties (even though Google will probably devalue the links eventually), but where you're already penalized and in need of a manual reconsideration, I'd just get as close to what Google wants as possible.

It happens A lot of links are hard to remove. If you're sure you have a penalty from links, I'd build a list of those links you've tried to remove, submit a disavow file to Google, and explain what happened in a reconsideration request. In that request include where the links came from, what you've done, and how you'll continue to clean things up and play by the rules in the future.

Hi Ruchi,

I think your approach to removing landing/sub pages is fine, but ultimately less effective than removing links. If the page has nothing but bad links pointing to it, I'd say kill it off (you can just give a 410 response) and refresh your content as best you can. Cut the landing pages, but also try to cut the links at their source.

The root, however, is going to be tricky. noindex/nofollowing your home page is not something I'd suggest. It might not work because Google will just assume index.html is the same page and count the links towards the index anyway. I won't worry about the theory on that, because it could be worse if it does work. You'd also be blocking any good links pointing to your root page. It's also a pretty terrible user experience if you direct users away.

Definitely do not try to block links in .htaccess. This doesn't work - at best it prevents Google from crawling your site on that occasion. At worst it sends Google the message that your site isn't reliably online.

Try to remove all of the links you've built, starting with the lowest-authority and anchor-text-heavy links. If your removal fails, consider using the disavow tool on spammy links. Hope this helps

To be clear, are you trying to get organic traffic to promote the game itself, or are you trying to use the game to promote a product/service? If you're thinking about the game itself, I'd worry more about making a game people like and getting good reviews to it in the app stores - SEO is among the last things I'd consider to help a game succeed.

If you're trying to use the game to promote something else there are some things you can do. Without more details (your industry, the target market, etc.), though, I'm limited to general advice. Put it on your site; make it easy to share the game on other sites and the results on social media; try to tie it in more closely with your offerings; give people a reason to link to your site naturally, e.g. scoreboards or additional features.

Happy to provide more thoughts with a little more info

It's good to keep in mind that the Google keyword tool isn't 100% accurate, and it's often VERY wrong when it comes to smaller keywords. Just because Google suggests a small number of monthly searches per month doesn't mean no one's searching for it or for very similar related terms.

Also keep in mind that organic search isn't the full story. There are personal bloggers who made money without even trying to target terms. They simply built an audience through great quality writing and content. XKCD, for example, gets millions of visits per month. I guarantee most of the traffic to XKCD is direct, referral, or using Google to find something specific they've already seen. So the fact that there's 0 or )-) search volume doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth writing.

Finally, don't trust anything Alexa tells you. I've seen their guesses estimate 10-50x too low or too high. I'd doubt the site is making "good money". I think they're just trying to grow traffic at this stage.

Google generally doesn't say, as knowing exactly what was impacting rankings would help spammers perfect their art. You will know for sure, though, if you have warnings under the "manual warnings" section in Google Webmaster Tools.

If the links are toxic, your firm is correct in that it's important to start the removal process. That said, I don't see any reason not to start optimizing pages for your terms. These aren't dependent tasks in any way. If the links were built by you and are toxic and your pages are not currently well optimized, you should definitely be working on both of those things.

If it's time that's the issue, think about what you can do on your own. There's no need to have a paid firm gathering contact info from the linking sites when you could easily be doing that yourself. Make sure you're communicating with one another so that they're helping with things you need help with

Hi there,

Unfortunately it's not easy to say why you're not ranking for your keywords without a full analysis, which can easily take hours.

One thing I did notice is that you have a lot of exact-match anchor text links. Some of the links you have aren't of the highest quality (e.g. exact-match anchor text submissions to Reddit) and should be avoided. If they don't hurt you, they certainly won't help.

Instead, try to think of what you could do to get in front of actual local people and get yourself some awareness and editorial coverage. Other than that, it's just about creating useful and relevant content that can be promoted to your target audience.

AJAX-driven content won't be crawleable, but there are alternative ways to get content indexed. I've talked with Rob about the AJAX piece Peter mentioned, and he's actually feeling like it needs another update. The resources Google provides for these situations are actually quite helpful:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

It's possible to have an infinitely-scrolling page that Google can see via an HTML snapshot of the page or one of the other mentioned solutions. You can also include pagination for Google, even in infinitely scrolling content and use the same method.

This kind of thing CAN be done in a crawler-friendly way... but it's usually not. The pages may still be indexed via a sitemap, but it's best to make sure the crawler can crawl the site anyway.

If you have a lot of links that you can control the anchor text on, that's a pretty sure sign that you should remove them. These aren't the links that Google is going to reward or ignore in the long term. Whether you're currently being hurt by them would require a very thorough review on an expert's part, but I'm sure that links you place manually are links Google doesn't want to count.

There are thoughts that Google is using its "link churn" patents to use the rate at which anchor text or links change as a part of rankings, but it's not known exactly how the mechanism works. Regardless, if the links are spammy and you're subtracting spammy links rather than adding, you won't get hit by any mechanisms designed to flag artificial rank manipulation.

Do try to remove links before you disavow them. Disavow is a last-ditch option, and Google still won't accept it if no effort has been made at removal.

If you have 1.5 million pages and you think your sitemap is comprehensive at 83,000 then yes, your CMS is needlessly generating pages. It's usually not a big deal from a ranking standpoint, but it can make other important issues hard to detect. I would clean it up, but that's a business call you'll have to make.

The first step is diagnosing where are the URLs are coming from. What you do next will depend, but I will give you the best advice I can without knowing what types of extraneous URLs you have and how Google is treating them:

First, I'd start with WMT > Crawl > URL Parameters. Quite often your CMS will generate URLs, and Google usually knows how to handle them. If there are a lot of URL parameters, Google them and see if they're exactly the same as other pages. If they are, make sure you have canonical tags in place to point them to the main version. There's more you can do with parameters, but it'll depend on what you find so I won't go into more detail. As a general rule, though, a CMS should not generate a page unless it is uniquely useful as differentiated landing page or a page for people to link to.

Also check for parameters in your analytics program. They could actually be messing up your pageview data depending on how you report.There's a post on fixing that in GA here:

http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/03/29/remove-url-parameters-from-google-analytics-reports/

Next I'd look at the "Advanced" tab in WMT > Google Index > Index Status . Are there a lot of URLs removed? If so, check on these pages and see why they're removed and why they exist.

I would also run a crawl with Xenu and Screaming Frog to make sure crawlers are finding a reasonable number of pages and that they're not getting stuck in crawl loops. (crawling variations of a page endlessly). These kinds of issues can prevent new pages from being indexed on time because Google is wasting time (your crawl budget) running in circles.

This is what I'd do:

• Use the brand name in the anchor text
• Allow people to remove them (or, to be extra safe, turn it off by default and prompt people to turn it on)
• Keep the links followed.

You could definitely debate the last point, but as long as you're not paying people for the link itself or trying to manipulate Google's algorithm it shouldn't be a big deal. If you're extremely risk averse, go ahead and add nofollow to the links.

This is a little hard to talk through without seeing it, but I think I see where you're coming from. You have content on the current canonical page that third-party affiliates are also using on their sites - is that right?

Is the content different enough that you can't just canonical the SEM pages over to the organic page? In any case, I think your solution is fine as long as the organic page is the page that can be found through navigation. If the SEM pages don't have external links (I don't know why they would) it's really not a big deal - even adding links is probably unnecessary because it's not going to help much from an orphaned SEM page with no link equity.

Sure, let's get a coffee! Feel free to PM me when you get here.

Sorry this took a while to address! I would definitely not noindex a URL that is canonical. Rather, make the organic version (the version that can be reached by navigating the site - don't try to rank with a very similar page that floats outside the standard site structure) the canonical URL. It's fairly standard practice to noindex, follow PPC landing pages, and it works fine. Unless the PPC landing pages are somehow being linked to, there's not really any need to add canonical tags or internal links.

If the PPC pages do have links, it's usually because they've found their way into the primary structure at some point. In these cases you can 301 consolidate the pages or use canonical tags for exact duplicates. Again, it doesn't really matter except in the very rare cases where PPC pages have valuable external linking domains.

Thanks, I appreciate that I was saying that because most of your content seems to be app reviews or articles about new apps (there's not a hard distinction in customers' minds) you could structure it like this:

Platform >> App Category 1 (E.g. Books & Reading)

Platform >> App Category 2 (E.g. Games)

Reviews and videos would simply live in their relevant categories. You'd then optimize the category (e.g. Games) to include the terms. For example, "iPhone Game Apps - Reviews, Videos, & Guides" or something. The sub-category Arcade would be optimized with the title "iPhone Arcade Games - Reviews, Videos & Guides". Again, I haven't done in-depth KWR so I might be a tad off on the titles, but this structure makes a lot more sense to me and I think it should be easier to maintain.

Where the domain is all about apps, I'm not sure you need an apps sub-category. I'd also put videos and reviews about apps in the category of app that you're reviewing. You can use a tag for video and review if you want, but I'm not sure it's worth it.

My logic here is that "iPhone reviews" doesn't have the intent of looking for apps - they're looking for reviews of the phone. "iPhone videos" is the same - mostly people looking for videos about the iPhone. As you can see by the top results, Google understands this. "iPhone app reviews" or "iPhone app videos" aren't very high-volume terms, and certainly not the type of hierarchy that users would find useful. Whether the app has a video or not is definitely secondary to me as a user - the first is the type of app. In other words, I might brows productivity apps, but probably not random video apps.

I'm not going to get into a full keyword audit, but just make sure the home page describes broadly what you do. "Reviews of the Best iPhone Apps and Android Apps" seems to describe your site fairly well, but I'll leave that up to you. I will say, though, that you should have a regularly updated post for top app types on the "best ___ apps" in that app type.

I'm thinking that platform (+app type) is the most important hierarchy, and since platform is always a requisite it should be the primary category. For example, /android/arcade-games . This also gives you a slight advantage in ranking for category terms once you optimize the page to target "Android arcade games".

I'm not sure what you mean by the last question. In my head it's just a sub-category for app categories within the platform. You may one day also want to build out the primary category pages to feel like sub-sections of the site.

Happy to help where I can.

From a user perspective, the most important thing is platform. People don't really care about the source of the app, and most apps are available on Amazon and Play anyway for Android. They certainly don't just care about game apps - they care about game apps they can actually use on their device. (Do think long and hard about whether to differentiate iPad/iPhone and Android/Fire or to combine them.)

A lot of people will tell you never to add one post to multiple categories for duplicate content issues, but this advice is misguided. There is no intra-site "duplicate content penalty." Further, these categories should actually be differentiated. Yoast is right that you don't want fully-duplicate categories, but I don't see these as duplicate if you optimize them properly. I alluded to this in my prior post. It's not just "Games" in both - the title include "Android Games" and "iPhone Games."

These categories aren't duplicate from a user perspective either, right? Again, you're categorizing posts to filter out content that doesn't matter to a given user.

I still believe price should not be a category. For most users it needlessly complicates the IA. Rather, post about free apps to relevant categories. At most, use a tag to tag apps that are free.

I'm sorry if this seems to conflict with prior advice, but I feel fairly confident with technical, structural, and IA issues - particularly when they touch on UX. Yoast is competent so maybe it's a matter of context and communication. I suspect we'd agree on most of this, even if we expressed it differently.

Ultimately I would still recommend consolidating categories, removing a bunch of them (really, do people look for "Labor Day Apps? :), and breaking it out by platform. It makes more sense for users and for search engines.