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I completely agree with Clayton's response so I won't touch on that.

To answer your other question though of whether or not Google will see the second site as being duplicate, the short answer is that "it shouldn't".

Google will only reference the last-crawled copy of your website so the only time there could be potential for being seen as duplicate is if the new domain gets crawled before the old one is recrawled. Even then, I wouldn't expect it would have a measurable difference on the progress of a new domain.

Don't forget, you can't get penalized for duplicate content. The worst that can happen is your rankings slide somewhat but being a new domain, it'd take a few weeks/months to see any real rankings anyway so it's mostly a moot point

As genuinely interesting as this post is, the below paragraph basically sums up what I'm taking from it right now:

Earlier this year, Stone Temple Consulting released a study saying that links remain incredibly important in Google’s ranking algorithm. Searchmetrics agrees but says that importance has dropped.

Sure, if the data says there's less correlation there, maybe that's correct but to what extent? It's not like we can just start ignoring backlinks any time soon so as far as I'm concerned, it's business as usual.

We already know they're putting an emphasis on things like mobile usability, load speed, HTTPS, valuable content etc and should already be doing these things and that's not about to change.

Hi Nicola,

Sounds like a very strange one indeed. I can't say I've ever heard of Google giving a redirect when other 3rd party crawlers give you a 200.

My only suggestion to begin the troubleshooting would be to have a look at your htaccess and maybe Robots to see if there are any directives in there addressing Google specifically.

Anthony's suggestion is also a great idea. At least you'll see what Google is picking up on those pages right now rather what they saw last time it was cached.

Given this situation, that's exactly what I'd be doing.

John's advice does appear to be true; you won't be penalised for duplicate content but your rankings won't be great either.

Theoretically, Google should have no issue determining the fact that site A was the original source of that content and so it should suffer no ranking change at all. Canonicalisation is the path I'd be taking to hedge bets there and mitigate risk as much as possible.

It's still not guaranteed to be safe (Google may choose to ignore canonicalisation) but it's about as close as you're going to get. Hopefully the client doesn't drag their feet and take 2 years to get that content production started

Hi Jamie,

I think I'm a little confused by the situation/question. If he wants users who land on the .com domain to stay on the .com domain, this is the default behaviour of a website so he could simply remove the 301 redirect.

Doing this would double the maintenance and SEO work required so it's rarely a good idea unless he has a lot of resources to throw at it. Also, having 2 websites that are absolutely identical is dangerous; you won't get 'penalised' for it but the rankings would likely be pretty bad.

If he were to go down the route of running 2 sites, the best way to handle this is to write content that appeals to the users in each of those locations. The most obvious difference being UK English vs US but the way content is written for each country will typically contain regional differences too.

You can click on the domain and see the full list of links. If you've done this and confirmed the links really are dead, it's likely that they used to exist and Google is yet to re-crawl them and notice they've been removed.

Search Console does tend to be quite laggy (ie data you see in there is quite a bit behind) so don't put too much emphasis on what you see there. If the links are gone then that will be noted soon and ultimately there's nothing you can do to speed that up unfortunately.

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.

Unfortunately there's no black and white answer to this one since there are so many variables involved when changing both domain and website. If you had just migrated the old site to a new domain the process would be simply using a page-to-page 301 so every page on the old site simply pointed to the same page on the new domain. If the structure was kept identical with the new site and the 301s were handled in this way it should be fine but if not, you may have lost some of your link equity if any backlinks are pointing to the old domain and haven't been redirected.

On top of that, moving to a new site brings with it a minefield of potential pitfalls too. Some examples:

• Is the new site at least as fast as before, if not faster?
• Is it sitting on the same server or at least in the same country (very minor factor these days but the 1%s can't be ignored!)
• Is the new site being crawled successfully? By this I mean if you do a Fetch and Render, is Google 'seeing' your site as users do or are there blank patches that can't be indexed for some reason like a poorly managed AJAX element.
• Has all the same content been moved across to the new site? A reduction in quality/volume can alter your rankings quite a bit
• Can the content be seen by search engines? If it used to just sit on the page before but is now hidden behind accordions or fancy design elements that set the default state to hidden, the importance this content is given by Google is reduced by a large enough amount to make a difference

This list could go on for a while but you get the idea. My best suggestion would be to sit down and go through every single change from old site to new including the ones above and even changes that may seem insignificant, then weigh that up against potential ranking factors - you'll typically find your culprit(s) quite quickly this way. Not sure if you're their SEO or the site owner but this step would require some SEO input to offer accurate feedback.

If this were 2015 I would have suggested that perhaps the lost equity in the 301s was seeing a drop in strength from your link profile but as Cyrus Shephard recently outlined in this Moz Blog, that's no longer the case so I'd question any advice to the contrary there.

Apologies for the indirect answer but I would have to ask "why"?

If these pages are almost identical and you only want one of them to be indexed, in most situations the users would probably benefit from there only being that one main page. Cutting down on redundant pages is great for UX, crawl budget and general site quality.

Maybe there is a genuine reason for it but without knowing the context it's hard to give accurate info on the best way to handle it

£1000 /month for hosting? o.O

I can't say I've ever seen this before! Perhaps that's for massive traffic volumes like you'd expect to see for Reddit.com? It would make sense in the scenario to cope with the sheer volume of simultaneous sessions and interaction as well as risks like DDOS but for the average website I can't imagine there'd be any benefit beyond finding a host with a server that's fast, reliable and preferably in the same region as your target market.

The server location isn't as important as people think but it does have some influence so if you're in the market for a server change you might as well, just don't go changing for this alone.

It's hard to say exactly without seeing your site since there are so many potential variables (e.g. are most of your blog posts low quality or just a minority? etc) that would define the best way to go about it.

What I can say though is that you're on the right track as far as using analytics data to determine which ones are providing value right now. There is a danger in losing some rankings if you go removing a huge volume of these posts. Unless they're utter rubbish posts, they'll likely be providing relevance signals to Google on what your site is about. That said, I do think it's a necessary evil and I'd expect you'll be rewarded for it in the long run provided you start replacing the trash with high quality posts in the future.

As for the benefits, if they really are low quality then user engagement is going to be terrible which is obviously not what you should be aiming for. It's also going to be chewing up your crawl budget for no good reason so the leaner your site is, the better base you have to start rebuilding with quality instead of quantity. For the same reason, I generally suggest removing tags and categories that aren't providing any actual benefit too - in most cases I see they're just there either "for good SEO" or because the site owners things that's how users are browsing their site but in almost all cases, that's not true. As always, check your own data on this to be sure.

As for removing vs noindex, this one is always contentious but I lean toward removing simply because it's going to clean things up for the user too and ultimately they should be your primary focus. Having 40,000+ pages of trash on your website is a fantastic indicator to them that your site may not be somewhere they want to be and noindexing them won't do anything to change the user's experience.

Hope that helps!

Hi Jeffrey,

These questions are always so interesting but to give an accurate answer we'd need more info like what the keyword is, if it's at all relevant to what you do etc.

In short, it's been many moons since Google just ranked you for words and phrases that could be found on your website. They do still help, but it's absolutely possible to rank for something without mentioning it, provided the topic is similar.

For example, if you run a car hire company and only ever use the word "hire" across your site, you will definitely still rank for "car rental" as well. For several years now Google has been improving the way they "understand" the content on your site.

As these improvements continue, just how far removed those related terms can be also increases. If a human can make the logical connection between two topics, chances are so can Google and so you can rank for these connected things. I actually wrote quite a lengthy response that covered this same topic a few weeks back which might be worth a read too. Basically, the shoe company Hype DC here in Australia almost never uses the word "shoe" or "shoes" yet their rankings for those terms are excellent.

Hope that helps!

Since "you receive exactly the number of visitors you purchase", you know it has to be fake. My suggestion would be to put this money into improving your website instead.

They're not doing anything above board to generate actual traffic for you which means it's likely going to be bots or maybe some kind of traffic trading scheme (you visit websites in their list and those sites visit you) but I see no mention of that anywhere.

It seems traffic does boost rankings but only for as long as that traffic remains and to be getting significant ranking improvements, a significant amount of traffic is needed from the examples I've seen in the past.

As Cognitive SEO said, "impressions don't buy, real people do..." so I'd suggest thinking more about how you can rank higher and more about how you can deliver UX that leads to revenue. Here's Cognitive's article of their experience of picking up a large spike of real traffic from a Reddit thread - worth a read.

As Marie Haynes pointed out in this Q&A thread on a similar topic, the key difference between buying traffic and generating traffic is that generating real traffic brings real user engagement and the potential for organic backlinks. These backlinks mean lasting results rather than a brief stint of improved rankings.

Hi there!

To answer your question directly, I'd suggest having a read through this post from Cyrus a few months back. In short, 301s should now pass all strength through... but this is Google we're talking about here so please read the whole post before taking any action.

With that out of the way, I should also point out that there seems to be a bit of a misconception here. Having backlinks point directly to your subfolder(s)/subpage(s) is exactly what you should be doing with your link building efforts, it's just something that most don't think to do or don't know they should be doing!

If you drive 100% of your links to the home page, that's great for the home page's strength but if you want to be ranking subpages as well, plenty of effort should be going into building links for that pages too. While backlinks to any page on the site will help the entire domain's strength, each page is also weighed up by it's own metrics.

My suggestion here would be to forget about the complications of buying another domain, driving links to it and redirecting them all and just build links to each of your landing pages directly instead. There's nothing awkward about linking to website.com/subfolder because nobody will ever even see that link, all the user will ever see is just the anchor text, just like the link I provided above. You see "this post from Cyrus" in blue text but the actual link is https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo"

URLs (URIs) are rarely user friendly, that's exactly why we use anchor text!

Hi Darren,

I can't say that I know of a tool that will do this for you and there's a pretty good reason for that - there's no black and white way of knowing what keywords each page targets - not since search engines stopped paying attention to the Meta Keywords element many moons ago.

There may be some tools out there that I've never come across but the best they could offer would be an arbitrary estimation of what you're looking for; certainly nothing concrete.

The closest I could offer would be SEMrush. It will give you keywords that your site ranks for but from what I understand, it's extrapolated data meaning it isn't necessarily very accurate either. It's basically a ranking report at the domain level, ie what terms does your website rank for rather than showing which page ranks for what term.

Hope that makes sense!

Moz's Spam Score is about far more than just questionable backlinks. Since we don't have a URL to dig deeper and offer specific suggestions, the best I can really off you is a couple of links to better understand what it is you're looking for - it will probably spark a few ideas for you.

Link 1 - Whiteboard Friday

Link 2 - Moz Blog

As far as using tools like OSE and Majestic goes, Chris Hickman is correct in that they're imperfect. OSE seems to have the smallest index (ie the lowest volume of sites crawled) while Majestic has the most so it's only natural that Majestic would be giving you higher numbers.

Hopefully this will at least point you in the right direction!

The real question to be asking with something like this is "if I do this, will it help or hinder the user experience?" Without seeing the website or knowing the context here, I'd be guessing it's going to hinder that experience.

As time goes on and users become more familiar with the basic mechanics of how a search engine works, keyword optimisation (or over-optimisation in this case) appears more obvious to them and is the digital equivalent of the stereotypical slimy car salesman.

I can't think of many examples where having two near-identical headings on the same page would make a whole lot of sense but either way, go with whichever genuinely works best for the user and the vast majority of the time that will result in improved rankings too.

Assuming pricing in your country (US?) is about the same as here in Aus, I'd probably do the following if I didn't have SEO knowledge myself.

• Use a few months worth of that budget upfront to get a quality company to do a thorough audit and devise a plan for me to work through
• Work through this plan as quickly as I humanly could without cutting corners
• Return to the original company periodically (quarterly?) for advice along the way so I know I'm always on track and not wasting my effort sprinting in the wrong direction
• Buy a few helpful tools to make analysis easier and monitor results. I'd say at least Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 items) and some kind of ranking tool - we use AWR Cloud.
• Engage a contractor of some form (Fiverr?) to start producing as much quality content as the remaining budget allows

Of course, if services are much like tangible products where Australia is 50-100% more expensive (the joys) then I'd probably just take the time to find and engage a quality agency and keep a close eye on their work to make sure you're getting value. Here in Aus the value you'll get from $1,000 /month is questionable unless you're in a vertical with minimal competition.

Before the hate starts - _some _agencies and certainly freelancers can do a fantastic job for you on that budget, it's simply that the smaller your budget, the higher the likelihood of landing a dud provider. Again, $1k /month in the US may be the standard minimum for quality agencies so this wouldn't apply.

It's something you shouldn't _really _doing so it comes with the usual warning of "use with caution"...

That said, the chances of anything negative happening here are so slim it's probably not worth worrying about. If you were cloaking shady anchor text relating to gambling or viagra it would be a different story.

There are two other points to be aware of here though. Firstly, it's very unlikely you'll see any ranking difference between those two link anchors in your link profile. The other is that it sounds like you're dropping footer links on your clients' sites to build your link profile. That one is cause for genuine concern if it's on a large volume. If it's only a couple of sites, disregard everything below!

How these are treated post Penguin 4.0 I don't know just yet but at best, they're given very little weight. We've just finished pulling one of our web design clients back up from ~ page 8 after he built a large volume of those same footer links over about 6 months. It may be because they were all irrelevant links (his clients have nothing to do with web design, obviously) or perhaps because his anchor profile was 98% "Web Design". Which of these caused the problem is quite irrelevant.

We removed those links from all but a handful of sites and he's back to the middle of page 1 so the real work just started. This was earlier in the year so again, I have no clue how that same thing would play you now after the latest update.

Hope that helps!

Hi Laura,

Welcome to the Moz community!

Without a domain to do some further investigation, these types of questions can be some of the toughest to answer because there are so many variables that could be causing the problem.

I can't comment on your current site but what I can say is that from experience, if this is happening it's typically going to be one of three things (maybe a combination?):

• More links pointing to the individual product pages than to the category pages
• Either no or low quality content on the subcategory pages; basically just showing a big chunk of products and nothing else
• Poor internal linking with more internal links pointing to those products, the category pages in a separate section of the nav, no category breadcrumbs etc. URL structure ties in here in much the same way.

If we think about typical user behaviour, it makes perfect sense that your product pages would be getting more backlinks than the categories. If we're talking about real users in a forum and they want to reference a product you sell, they're going to link straight to that product and the same can be said in most other contexts too.

This isn't a problem at all - real backlinks being earned in a natural way is always good. It just means you may need to put some effort into driving strength to the category pages too.

Content is a topic that gets so much attention in this industry that I don't think I really need to elaborate here - just make sure there is a decent amount of high-quality content on the pages, styled in a way that doesn't bury the products. UX first!

Finally, the internal linking. It's very hard to give advice on this part without seeing the site but basically, search engines tend to look at your nav to get an indication of which pages are likely the most important on the page from left to right, top to bottom. If you have an unusual structure where the category pages are buried down in the drop-downs (or - gasp - not even in the nav because there are buttons on the home page or something!) then you're missing an easy win there.

Don't forget that breadcrumbs and URL structure should ultimately match this same layout. Something like website.com/category/product.

This is all quite vague but hopefully it makes sense to the site you're working with now. Always happy to take a closer look if you'd like to share the URL here or in PM but I completely understand if you're not comfortable with that too.