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I think doing so can help click through rates`from search results and redirecting those old urls to new ones will not likely be detrimental to your existing rankings.  Do users a favor though and date your posts if the content has a chance of becoming outdated.

As I see it DemiGR, if you have an event such as the giveaway of a scholorship and you promote that event as any legitimate event might be promoted--via social media, via press release, via your website, via press--and others recognize the value in promoting it themselves and they link to it (or not) as they see fit, it seems it would build brand awareness and awareness for the event and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.  Promote the event, not the link and if the right event is promoted in the right way, links may happen.

agsin,

You might think of it like this:   I've been a member of Moz since 2006,  giving me one of the most aged profiles here in this forum, but for most of that time, I did not participate on the site, so my profile had like 10 or 20 points.  In other words, up until the time I began participating, I had an old profile but I had no authority.  The age doesn't really count for much--it's the engagement (points) that counts and which helps to adds authority.

Likewise, if your domain was registered back in 2006 but was not used until 2011, it would accrue age but not authority.  Once the domain begins actively playing a role on the web and Google can measure that other domains and users are interacting with it, it may begin accruing authority.

Hank,

I'd expect that to mean there are some external links pointed at that page, or perhaps, to a category page above it.  When you ran your OSE report did you look to see what links were pointing directly to that page vs. links pointing to the home page?

Be sure that the sites you're getting links on are not doing some low-end link building. If the pages you're getting links on are highly useful resources, you may expect people to link to them, if not, be careful and really investigate their back links.

Yes, that's generally considered the correct way of doing it if you have links to both www and non-www.

In GWT, if you tell Google that you have a preferred domain (www or non www) it will require that you verify both versions.  You're not able submit a disavow file for a domain that you have not been verified for, so if you have links pointing to non-www, you need to be verified for that domain before you can submit your disavow file for it--and vise versa.

Chris,

Even though Google crawls more of the web than any other service, it has a metric it uses to determine which and how many links to show you in the tool.  It does not show all of your links, even though it knows better than any service exactly how many you have.

Moz, does not crawl the web as deeply as Google but it does report on all of the links it finds.  Rather than attempting to index the entire web, Moz focuses on crawling the pages down to a depth that have an impact on search results.  If the pages it crawls have outbound links on them, those are the links that are likely to passing some amount of pagerank/authority to the page their pointing at.  Below that level, the quality/pagerank/authority is too low to be of any assistance to the page it may be linking to.

So, where GWT links represent a sample of your total links, open site explorer is a tool designed to show you the total number of links that are helping you with your rankings. Other tools exist as well, and they use different crawl strategies and that present links based on different metrics.  I think the more you understand OSE, the more useful you will find it.

I would argue that if this is the type of person who could be your customer you can keep it as is and let google index it.  As you said, it is helping you in the short term.  Upon any manual review, it would seem that it would pass easily, and that it is not any type of auto-generated spam or produced with the intention of manipulating pagerank or search results.

Could it get you filtered in the future? Maybe, but more likely maybe not. Is it helping bring in more of the same kind of people?  I think it is.  But I don't think you have a reason to shy away from such legitimate engagement.

If I may chime in, I'm guessing that the search was actually "site:mobify.com mobify" (without quotes). Whether that's right or wrong, however, I know does't answer the question.  However, when you do that search, you notice that there are numerous examples of similar occurrences. In each case, the titles are quite long.  This situation has been noticed before and there was even a post about it on the Moz blog by  Ruth Burr Reedy.  In that post, Ruth tracked down a likely possible cause as being that the title provided by the author is too long and because of that Google replaces it with it's best algorithmic alternative.

Peter, try shortening the titles and see if that solves your problem.

Harriet,

It looks like you're  doing a good job maintaining a posting schedule but I'd say that with your broad topics, you may be biting off more than you can chew, as far as defining and speaking to a target audience. If your blog doesn't have an audience that is engaged enough to comment on posts and share post content with others, authority for the domain will remain low.

Your posts cover topics from home decor/accessories to dating, to makeup, to gyms, to love, to wishlists and there's no doubt that these topics easily fall within the realm of health and beauty and are relevant to a broad audience. But authority and pagerank are about audience engagement and links, which are hard to get unless you're able to communicate on a intimate level with your audience.    Big time publishers with staffs of writers are better able to do that on the scale of diverse topics that you are attempting.

I recommend choosing a core topic that may overlap into the various areas that you like to write about but which, by itself, is far less competitive and far more focused. Focus on you, for example.  Focus on what makes you interesting and then on how dating, gyms, love, wishlists, decor each/all make you more interesting to those you wish will find you interesting. You're much more likely to gain authority like that.

Take a few 10-word samples of the duplicated content and do a search for them in quotation marks.  If your client's site shows up as the first result, you're in good shape.  If it doesn't , strongly consider re-writing.  Google does it's best to determine and rank the original source of content but, often, it gets it wrong and when that's the case, there isn't too much you can do about it other than building the authority/pagerank of the page from which the content was duplicated.

Stew, I certainly wouldn't recommend transitioning to your new site two weeks before your high season begins. I'd recommend do it right now or after the season has ended.  Besides the 301's (which could be the least of your issues), there are numerous other issues that may need to be worked out before traffic is back to normal and even if you're fully prepared, siht happens.  Give yourself as much time as you possibly can prior to your high season.

Actually, screamingfrog should take care of it for you via the custom spider configuration.  If you select "custom" under the "configuration" tab, you can drop in the html for the links you are looking for and it will give you a report with what pages it finds that code on.

For example, have screammingfrog search for the following snippet of code and it would find nofollow links pointing at mysite.com:

rel="nofollow" href="http://mysite.com

If I understand correctly, you're asking how you can create a business model that fills up the search results with a bunch of sites that all have the same content.  I think you're somewhat late to that party.  The Google of today doesn't really let you do that and it's pretty good at preventing it.   And if you were thinking of maybe linking back to your main site from all those dupes, I'd rethink that strategy, as well.

Stephen,

The flatter the architecture, the more apt pagerank is to reach all the pages of your site.  However, that has to be balanced with navigation that helps visitors most easily get to where they want to go on the site, which typically runs counter to presenting them with completely flat navigation. If you think of giving visitors fastest access to the content on your site that is most important to the majority of them and then require somewhat more numerous clicks to get to less important info, you'll probably do OK.

I second the beer money strategy : )

KelG,

I'd say the answer to that depends on your specific immediate goals.  There must be a reason you are discussing having SEO done before the replatforming--what is that reason.  You may very well have a relatively short term issue that SEO can solve for you within a budget that makes sense.  But then again, you may not.  In order to answer, I think that objective would need to be made clear.

Sandra,

There's no outright way to compare google's cache of today with its cache of a date in the past that I know of.  If you had google analytics installed at that time, you could go about getting useful info from that source.  Since the primary matter is really which pages were bringing in search traffic  then that are not bringing in search traffic now, you could compare landing page stats from today vs. two years ago to see which pages are not bringing in traffic any longer.

Any chance your website was redesigned in the mean time? Sometimes change of navigation, architecture, or URLs can be the culprit.

Scott,

Keep in mind that redirects happen at the server, before the user agent even gets to the page contents of a URL. That means that a rel=canonical tag on a page that has been redirected is not seen by the bot/user agent.  So, once redirected, the page of content that had been available at a URL is no longer accessible by anyone or anything on the web.  When Google sees the 301 redirect, it reassigns (most of) the value it had given to the original URL to the new URL.

If a URL has back links pointing to it and the URL is redirected,  the redirect should stay in place for as long as the back link has value.  If there are no back links pointing to a URL that has been redirected, 6 months is a safe bet for leaving the URL in place.  Here's Mat Cutts on that topic...

You might try Inserting your text into Javascript or maybe, inserting it into an Iframe.