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Hi Bob,
This isn't really the best place to ask this question since the valuable contributors here aren't here to self-promote or actively pick up work from what is essentially a help forum.
To point you in the right direction, Moz does have a Recommended Providers list which is working checking out.
Unless these other domains are somehow ranking or pulling quality traffic from somewhere, I'd suggest just taking the secondary sites down. There's no point in the client paying hosting fees for each on (or even owning the domains to be honest) and it's really just complexity that nobody needs.
If they are earning traffic via a social campaign, adwords or something similar, I'd still suggest migrating those campaigns to the primary domain but you would then have to 301 those getting traffic since there is a chance that users will have saved them in an email or their favorites and you don't want them to hit an empty domain if they try to return.
The horrible thing about link removal is that it's often hard to give an accurate answer to this question. On one hand, directories, link farms etc are often ignored by search engines so having them may be doing you no harm. On the other hand, it's impossible to know if the specific domains you're looking at are actually being ignored or not.
In these scenarios I tend to lean towards having them removed anyway, just in case they are being counted. As you pointed out, there is a chance that removing them will remove some strength from your site and see you drop in rankings but since it's impossible to tell the outcome until it's too late, I'd rather risk being penalised for removing bad links than having them.
There are a few things you can do to make your life marginally easier here:
If you do decide to give them a call or even email them, the best angle I've found is "I'm cleaning up the links in accordance with Google guidelines and have to be very picky with the ones I keep; this is no reflection on the quality of your site but I'd really appreciate it if you can remove them". Far more likely to get results than the attitude some people take of "hey scumbag, your horrible site is ruining my rankings, get rid of these spam links".
Also, the reason I say to export, evaluate and disavow at a domain level is simply a matter of volume. Rather than 20,000 spam links, you may only end up having to sift through 200 referring domains instead; far easier to manage. In my experience it's pretty rare that you'd want to disavow just one link from a site like these so doing it at the domain level disavows them all and protects you if they decide to change their URL structure in the future. A new URL structure would give you a link from a "new page" in the eyes of the search engine.
Hi Fabrizo,
That's a tricky one given the sheer volume of pages/music on the site. Typically the cleanest way to handle all of this is to offer up a View All page and Canonical back to that but in your case, a View All pages would scroll on forever!
Canonical is not the answer here. It's made for handling duplicate pages like this:
www.website.com/product1.html
www.website.com/product1.html&sid=12432
In this instance, both pages are 100% identical so the canonical tag tells Google that any variation of product1.html is actually just that page and should be counted as such. What you've got here is pagination so while the pages are mostly the same, they're not identical.
Instead, this is exactly what rel=prev/next is for which you've already looked into. It's very hard to find recent information on this topic but the traditional advice from Google has been to implement prev/next and they will infer the most important page (typically page one) from the fact that it's the only page that has a rel=next but no rel=prev (because there is no previous page). Apologies if you already knew all of this; just making sure I didn't skim over anything here. Google also says these pages will essentially be seen as a single unit from that point and so all link equity will be consolidated toward that block of pages.
Canonical and rel=next/prev do act separately so by all means if you have search filters or anything else that may alter the URL, a canonical tag can be used as well but each page here would just point back to itself, not back to page 1.
This clip from Google's Maile Ohye is quite old but the advice in here clears a few things up and is still very relevant today.
With that said, the other point you raised is very valid - what to do about crawl budget. Google also suggests just leaving them as-is since you're only linking to the first 5 pages and any links beyond that are buried so deep in the hierarchy they're seen as a low priority and will barely be looked at.
From my understanding (though I'm a little hesitant on this one) is that noindexed pages do retain their link equity. Noindex doesn't say 'don't crawl me' (also meaning it won't help your crawl budget, this would have to be done through Robots.txt), it says 'don't include me in your index'. So on this logic it would make sense that links pointing to a noindexed page would still be counted.
Hi Pamela,
I'd lean toward redirecting the other sites to the one that currently carries the most power, assuming that site is also producing the best UX and engagement metrics (bounce rate, conversion rate etc). Rankings and user metrics typically go hand in hand but it's worth double-checking.
As for how to do the redirect, this is where it becomes more of a grey area because there are so many variables so it depends on your situation. Ultimately all pages that are receiving direct or referral traffic should be redirected to the equivalent page on the strongest site so those users will still arrive at the right product rather than just the home page.
The reason it's not that simple is because you might have 300,000 products with 60% of those getting direct/referral traffic so identifying these and getting the 301s set up would take a considerable amount of time and if done via htaccess, that's a lot of entries to be parsed on page load which isn't great for site speed. Alternatively, you might only have 5 or 6 of these pages in which case the site speed difference would be immeasurable and setting it up would take a matter of minutes.
Apologies for the somewhat vague response but hopefully it points you in the right direction.
Definitely not.
Hard to say for sure but I really doubt it. You can't actually get penalised for duplicate content so if anything I'd say it's a positive signal that 2 duplicate sets have been consolidated.
No. Theoretically there may be a window there where the new site is crawled before Google has noticed that the old one is no longer live (rankings are done based on their cached version, not the live site so if they still have the old site in cache, to Google it's still considered live) but that's both temporary and unlikely to have any measurable impact.
I'm working through a similar situation for a client at the moment where I'm waiting on their dev team to finish up the new site and I have a bunch of rubbish pages I want to do away with. The most efficient way to deal with both situations given they're just a couple of weeks away is to wait for the new site.
Hope that helps!
Hi Jason,
This is something I can't really give a confident answer on unfortunately. Our list of clients these days don't really lend themselves to legitimate causes for a press release so we haven't done one in a little while.
My best suggestion would be to look at them very closely before submitting and check for the usual quality factors (trust, authority, linking practices etc) and more importantly, try to find sites that actually have real traffic to amplify your efforts rather than just being launched into the ether to be seen by nobody 
Yep, you're on the right track Jason.
Since search engines view a subdomain as a separate entity, building valuable content and natural traffic/links to it means you're essentially driving all that referral traffic and strength to another website.
Hi Bryan,
No offence taken by any of us, I'm sure. It's an unfortunate fact that our industry has a number of... dodgy providers.
In any case, our process is quite similar to Danny in that we use a 2 stage interview process and a test.
Ours is broken into 2 parts. A very short phone interview to cover the boring old cliche questions like "why did you leave your last job?" and " what are you looking for from this role?" I'll also throw in a bit of a qualifying question that could raise some obvious red flags so I can filter out the ones that just aren't going to work out. This saves my time and, more importantly, saves their time and travel costs. If they're out of work, the last thing they need is to be travelling to an interview they just aren't right for.
For those that make it past this step, they're invited in for a face to face interview. This one is about getting to know who they are; no technical questions. This gives me a solid indication of whether or not they'll be a good cultural fit for our team (very important to us here!) and if this seems fine, they're asked to complete a 10-question test which should take about 5 - 10 minutes.
It asks basic questions that anyone with the experience required for the role will almost roll their eyes at because it's so easy - "what is the purpose of a page title and where is the average user likely to see it most?" - that type of thing.
All of this lets me know what sort of technical ability they have, how well they can communicate, what sort of person they are, what they're looking to achieve and whether or not they can articulate answers to basic questions under a bit of pressure.
Then, if we end up with 2 candidates who seem evenly matched in every way, we arrange a Mortal Kombat style fight to the death.
Seriously though, being ecommerce, if you do go this route make sure you include specific questions about SEO for ecommerce. They can fall under a few different rules as far as how they should be set out, how to deal with potential content duplication etc.
Hi Matt,
To answer your question directly, yes you will see an SEO benefit from that in the form of brand recognition and potential referral traffic.
As for ranking improvements though (what many wrongly define as "SEO Benefit"), no.
You've already raised the biggest concern which is posting a link directly to your site which can have a very spammy feel to it. Particularly if you push too hard and actually start to spam, you run the risk of getting picked up by /r/hailcorporate which pretty much marks the death of your brand on Reddit!
As with most things in SEO, if you're offering a truly valuable resource in the right way, there are only positives to be had from it, albeit indirect in this case.
Search engines do quite a good job of understanding what your site/pages/content is about these days so forcing the exact-match everywhere isn't really necessary. Rather than focussing on the H1s for the minute, I think a revision of your nav/site structure may be a better solution; apologies for going almost immediately off topic but it does still answer your question.
A great nav is going to be as "flat" as practical and designed to take the user from page-load to conversion in as fewer steps as possible.
Likewise, if these are core services that you offer, the closer those pages are to the top of your nav the better, no need to bury them several layers deep and miss out on some of that internal strength.
You'll know your target audience better than me but I'd be more inclined to structure it like this:
Shoe Cleaning
Dress Shoes
Work Shoes
Play Shoes
Shoe Repair
Dress Shoes
Work Shoes
Play Shoes
In most cases you'd even be better off dropping the "shoes" from these sub-items but a menu item of "dress" or "work" is a little confusing in this context.
The reason I'd suggest doing it this way is to satisfy user intent. I'd expect that most of your users have come to your site looking for one particular thing - either shoe repairs or shoe cleaning. It's entirely likely that if they're getting their shoes repaired, they may also be interested in getting them cleaned at the same time, but they arrive on your site with the intent of gathering information on your repairs so getting these should be as clear as possible.
Hi Jonathan,
Sitewide footer links on that many domains isn't really the best idea. Would these links serve any real purpose or is it just for the backlink strength?
If you were going to link from each one, I'd suggest keeping the volume very small and using them to add value. For example, rather than dumping them in the footer and masking most with a nofollow, point them to a great blog post on the global domain or at least say something like "interested to know more about [manufacturer brand]? Check out our global site to see where we're headed in 2016." You can include the link in that sentence so it makes sense in context.
Going somewhat off topic here, is there even a need to have 100+ websites for a single brand? More often than not, the better solution is to have a single powerhouse of a website rather large volumes of satellite sites scattered around the web. I imagine you're talking about sites like CarBrandLA.com, CarBrandNYC.com etc, rather than CarBrand.com CarBrand.com.au, CarBrand.co.uk? If it's the latter, these geo-specific TLDs make a bit more sense
There are definitely some benefits to well-structured URLs but they don't really offer a significant ranking improvement. In fact, John Mueller from Google gave the following response in a Hangout a few months back when asked whether this mattered:
_"I believe that is a very small ranking factor. So it is not something I'd really try to force. And it is not something I’d say it is even worth your effort to restructure your site just so you can get keywords in your URL." _Source
What this means is if you can get them in there, fantastic but I wouldn't completely stop doing what you're doing based on this alone.
Some of the benefits that can be gained from getting the keywords or title in the URL are to do with users and at the end of the day, they are the true aim of SEO so it is worth investigating. I'm not sure what platform you're using but the vast majority do offer some way to fix this, it may even be worth speaking to the platform's support team or a dev to see if it's something they can do, I'd expect it's quite a simple fix.
Hi Jared,
Unfortunately this discrepancy is unlikely to be an indication of anything to do with your site. I have seen similar happen in the past and checked across the 3 major link profile tools and got wildly different numbers in each.
I'm a very big fan of Moz and their suite of tools but OSE is often the one to report the least number of domains by quite a margin so I wouldn't be surprised by what you're seeing.
As the other replies mentioned, this is very normal. Anecdotally, it seems this happens most commonly if the brand name is more relevant for that search. Essentially they've decided for one reason or another that putting your brand first is likely to give you more SERP clicks.
I don't think we've ever had a concise explanation from Google as to exactly why this happens but either way, it's not something to be stressed about. If your page titles were being completely dropped in place of Google-generated ones this may be an indication that yours need some serious revision (depending on context) but in this instance it's fine.
No problem, happy to help.
If you actually sell the various types of shoes as well and the repairs/cleaning are almost a side-service then yes, your original example is ok since the "dress shoes" nav item would presumably take you to a landing page about dress shoes.
Unless you're getting a large volume of targetted searches for things like "dress shoe repairs", I'd probably just have "Repairs" and "Cleaning" as their own top-level nav items that lead to a single landing page each that covers all 3 types of shoes.
This would be sufficient for the more general terms like "shoe repairs".
The nav would look more like:
Shoes | Boots | Sandals | Shoe Cleaning | Repairs
With the relevant drop-downs under the first 3 items only.
Hi Falguni,
If you're looking for white hat SEO (which is what you'll find at Moz) then there's really no generic forum(s) that will send you traffic that matters. Link building via forums has to be done in a particular way anyhow to avoid being spammy and these forums should be specific to your niche.
Essentially what this means is if you're working for a finance company, the forums that could be used correctly for them would be different to an accommodation website or a plumber.
Locating the best forums takes a bit of research - what you're looking for is an active forum specific to your topic that you can genuinely contribute to, much like I'm contributing here right now, though I do this for community engagement and a mutual sharing of knowledge rather than traffic or leads.
I'm not sure if you've already resolve the issue or it's coincidence but I can see all of your pages indexed now, at least in a site: search.
Looking at your sitemap and robots I can't really identify any obvious issues there either. The fact that your home page has some degree of rankings suggests to me that you may just need to improve your site strength. Having just 2 referring domains probably isn't helping this
Hi Jared,
No problem at all. If you're happy to share your URL here I can throw it into another one that we use and let you know what I see.
To do the right thing by the provider of that tool, I wouldn't be comfortable exporting all the data but I can at least let you know what sort of volume I see as far as referring domains.
Since you're seeing a decent number in Search Console, I doubt this is an issue. To my knowledge, there is nothing you can do on your site to block inbound inlinks from being counted, it has to be done on the other end.
Interesting Giorgio, I hadn't seen that WBF before.
Absolutely no disrespect to Ruth but that's the first WBF I've disagreed with. The scraper risk is something I'm willing to take a gamble on for the benefits of relative links and the other points are moot if your website is setup correctly (htaccess deals with the potential for different versions of your domain and IMO canonicalization should always be used).
Going by that WBF, if your site is set up correctly with redirects and canonicalization, the only benefit here is if a scraper copies your site and there's a very slim chance of this actually happening.