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I think you'd get more results from removing "frogs" so many times from the URL. We had a client doing this with insurance: theirinsurancecompany.com.au/business-insurance/insurance-details.html And it was a disaster. We changed all the URLs to types of insurance but without the word so: theirinsurancecompany.com.au/business/insurance-details.html And rankings improved dramatically over the next month or two as the URLs were recrawled and reindexed. Now they rank for all sorts of insurance related keyphrases with FEWER instances of insurance in each URL.

Point 1 - it takes some time before Google takes redirects into account - if you changed the structure recently, it can take several weeks before these duplicates are removed from Webmastertools. I assume you have already checked that these url's are indeed 301 redirected by testing them with web-sniffer.net and/or Fetch like Google. Point 2 - you can only remove content in the following cases (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?rd=1 content is removed and generates a 404  - as you redirect the old style url to the new one it's generating a 301 & not 404 so removal is not possible this way the content that needs to be removed is blocked in the robots.txt - which I guess is not the case for you rgds, Dirk

I would tend to agree with Lynn Patchett. Could you tier out your changes and plan to methodically release it in small increments while monitoring the effects? This way you could begin with smaller changes, even a few url's with an update and gauge its effectiveness (or non)...

But to answer you specifically, yes, there is a chance the bots could read the URLs without hyphens.

Indeed.com uses the double hyphen in their URL scheme and it certainly doesn't seem to hurt them.  I Imagine this is due to being able to reconstitute this back from URL rewriting so they know the difference between a dash in the URL that replaces a "space" vs a -- which would reconstitute back to a dash. Example:q-Tennis-Channel-jobs.html Maps back to the company Tennis Channel Example: /cmp/Sag--aftra Maps back to the company Sag-Aftra

Sounds like they are wanting to make turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/ their homepage, which is quite strange. "Keyword stuffing" URLs like this will not help SEO in any way. I would advise against it and leave the homepage as turtlesforsale.com. eg. for other pages on the site: turtlesforsale.com/state/city/ is better than turlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale-in-state/turtles-for-sale-in-city/ Like most things in SEO, think of what is better for humans. The first example is much cleaner and easier to read, and for SEO purposes, there would be no difference between the two if all other factors were the same. A similar question was asked (and answered very well) here: http://moz.com/community/q/url-seo-better-directory-structure-vs-exact-keyword-phrase

Hi CFSSEO, I don't have any hard evidence, but I would think that it doesn't help your site get crawled more frequently. Most of the time Google decides how frequent they will crawl your site, especially if it is a large and high traffic website (they remove the crawl settings and assign you a 'special crawl rate'). Yes, this would cause slower page load times - if the no-cache rule is actually being followed which doesn't happen all the time. It will remove the 'cached' link in the SERPs In a scenario where the page has dynamic content that updates frequently, then it may be a good idea to use that tag. However, I don't think it will provide much of an SEO benefit.

Adding to this, and sorry if there is an obvious answer - I just want to make sure, I should create a new tag for beta site that is blocked, yes?

Google will look for the first character.  So unless there is some hidden character in the form of an entity (which I don't think is possible anyway) spaces are no problem whatsoever.

So it doesn't look like Google is penalizing them, and are actually rewarding them. I agree. I think that most of the time, Google will filter pages like these.  Some of the time the entire website will be reduced in rankings. But, sometimes stuff like this will get good rankings, and those good rankings might persist for a long time. If a person decides to place that type of content on his website, he should know that it will probably have a short life in Google's search results and might cause his site to be penalized.

Hi There Just to clarify, by definition there are not doorway pages - doorway pages function by redirecting the user to another page than the one that was indexed. These would just be additional pages indexed that more or less show the same content as other pages. That aside though, it's good to still question their validity. What Etsy is doing is a bit more complex and I wouldn't compare your site to Etsy (unless it's going to be millions of pages with hundreds or thousands of categories). But Etsy is doing something slightly different than what you're describing for your site. If you want to create the silo effect you can simply "nofollow" any links you don't want them to continue crawling off of the homepage. And in general I would try to control everything through good architecture. Now, for Etsy, if you have two similar pages showing in search - one a /search/ URL and the other a /Market/ URL - that, in my opinion is not ideal. I would noindex the search pages that are also duplicated by static pages.

Any SEO agency should be able to do this for you.  We do a one-off removal for clients for a set fee and they pay once - after that, we do all the work for removal. If it's denied, we do resubmission and get it taken care of.  That's something you should be looking for - make sure they don't do it once-off because if they don't get everything, you'll be paying again. (You don't want someone to be overly aggressive with the disavow, either. You will lose the good links as well.)

Some great information on here. What I have realized, the applicant must have agency experience. It makes on boarding and client relations going forward so much more efficient.

Google penalizes when it sees that you are gaming seo or trying to fool google. If you use "no follow" on your links, you are saying google that dont count the link juice therefore you are not claiming seo benefit from these links. NO harm done. Google doesn't penalizes you for any no. of "no follow" because you are not fooling it. You have added it for your users, not for google. Many sites like "Pay pal" have their links below any site which uses its payment system, but as it has "no follow", google doesn't penalize them if also they have millions of such link backs. relax and add "no follow" on these type of links. you will get benefit. for sure. Hope this helps

Sites that optimise the mobile experience will enjoy better rankings. That doesn't have to be a responsive site - it could be delivered on a separate mobile version or by dynamic serving. Clearly if you are providing your mobile visitors with an experience enhanced for mobile devices then you will be rewarded for that. A users who comes to a site from search which provides only a desktop version of the site and finds it virtually unusable will inevitably click back immediately - sending to Google the signal that their search query hasn't been met by that site. Optimise the user experience for the device the user is using - remember responsive isn't always the best option for user experience.

Personally I'd no-follow them, you don't want them to pass on any ranking factors so no-follow the links if they are driving traffic. If they don't drive traffic then get rid of them. Moosa is right though, you need to use other tools aside from WMT because that doesn't show a complete list of links to your website.

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.

CFSSEO, Can you share the site so we can have a look at it to provide a better, more specific, answer for you? If not, I hope this general answer will help: You should only have one canonical page per product. Even if there are product variants (size, color, etc...) those should typically be handled with a drop-down selector or checkbox on the product page instead of creating an entire new product page for each variant. If this is a large affiliate or drop-shipping website where you are pulling in feeds from different merchants/distributors/stores the bitter pill you may have to swallow is that such sites are dying out in the SERPs because Google doesn't think they offer anything above and beyond their own search results. Someone wants to buy a Blue Widget and they go to Google and type "Cheap blue widget" and a bunch of merchants'/distributors' stores show up... why do they need to put another site in-between the searcher and their destination? The only way to work within this paradigm is to prune the site down and focus mostly on category-level searches, price comparison searches, etc... and by offering more useful features, including robust customer reviews for products and merchants, tools to help the shopper compare options, in-depth buying guides to educate shoppers on their choices... but thousands of product pages with default manufacturer content will no longer do the trick, and may actually harm the rest of your site. This may or may not apply to your situation. It is tough to give advise like this without knowing the site in question. However, I hope it has helped point you in the right direction.

Thank you both. I appreciate the feedback!