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China eh? sounds like a "particular" link network
If these Chinese links were "built" by the previous SEO company I'd ask them to remove them they'll probably have the necessary information to do that. Beyond that I would try to remove as many as possible and then go down the disavow route.
Hi Chris
As with all things SEO it depends.
If you're working for a huge brand and have the budget it might make sense to have different cc-TLD's and target those to each market.
It's a common belief that subfolders are better than subdomains and Google treat a subdomain as a separate site so in terms of maintaining domain authority you might want to take this option.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
It all will come down to budget, time and long term goals - do people in Germany prefer to see .de extensions do UK people trust .co.uk over .com?
The only advantage I have found for using sub-domains is you can host them on separate servers quite easily - but you can get similar benefits with a CDN.
It's difficult to say whether these links are helping or hindering at the moment - by the sounds of it the report the SEO agency ran was a Link Detox report and the results are purely automated, while I have a lot of faith in the tools from LRT I wouldn't be 100% confident with the results as some of the links may be giving a false positive... however you will most likely be talking about a small change ratios.
Ultimately there is a potential problem if you haven't received a warning yet, so I would look to remove as many of these links as possible - as soon as possible.
Hi Michael
Have you received a notification in Google WMT of a partial or site-wide manual penalty?
Have you seen a loss in rankings? I do offer link removal and disavow as a service so would be happy to take a look but you might find that you need to remove as many of the links as possible rather than disavow and submit a reconsideration request.
Cheers
Never...
As James correctly pointed out the & (or ampersand) is not a good idea. However his explanation is a little incorrect.
You see URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, therefore the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format.
When using unsafe ASCII characters you have to replace them with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits.
Therefore an "&" is %26 and not & which is the standard HTML character set.
Personally I would look at a way to exclude the & and just have /5-star-hotel-near-beach/ for example
If you've had to noindex your products I would seriously be looking at ditching Cubecart.
Unfortunately the method method Oleg raised only works for Posts and not pages...
So you have a choice either write a PHP script and load it as a plugin or make some amendments to your .htaccess
Personally I noindex all my category and tags in WordPress as I don't think they offer the best way for people searching for information to enter my blog. That being said I always believe that i****f a page is of use to a searcher, then you should include it within the index.
I know you have said that you are getting 4% of your organic traffic via tag pages but what's the quality of these visitors, do they have a low bounce rate or better than average time on site?
It would be a good starting place for sites that are created in a similar way.
This basically says change anything ending index.html to end / using a 301 redirect
<code>RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.html?\ HTTP/</code>
<code>RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]</code>
This says redirect anything that starts http://www.domain...... to just http://domain......
<code>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk [NC]```
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
```</code>
Okay then you want
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Options +FollowSymLinksDirectoryIndex index.html
<code>RewriteEngine on</code>
<code>RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html?\ HTTP/</code>
<code>RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]</code>
<code>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk [NC]```
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
You haven't redirected www and non www so you need to add:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hiperformanceautocentres.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
What other errors are you getting? 3000 seems a lot!
Hi Christopher
Link Round ups and Resource pages are quite common on the web especially with bloggers.
I wrote a post about finding and approaching these types of sites...
Hey André
I'm a little unsure as to your question... but I think you are asking if it is bad to link to internal too many times with the same keywords?
If that's the case then yes make sure you diversify the anchor text you are using to link to your pages.
Hi Christopher (great name by the way)
When it comes to link building it really depends on the niche, the budget and strategy of the overall campaign as to what types of links I would advise anyone to go after.
1. Guest Blogging on Real Sites with Real Communities (not those glorified article directory blogs)
2. Resource Lists and Link Round ups if you have a high quality resource don't be afraid to ask other webmasters to link to you
3. Infographics - Data Visualisations really go down well in certain niches - in other areas they've been done to death
4. Broken Link Building and Helping Webmasters clean up technical site issues
If you are still struggling for inspiration then I recommend you check out this post
http://pointblankseo.com/creative-link-building
and I have a list of my favourite link building blogs here:
http://tripleseo.com/best-link-building-blogs-2013/
But as Mike King says "its about making friends or making the news"
How long does it take to get links indexed?
It depends upon on how often Google crawls the website and web pages concerned and whether or not they determine the content worthwhile adding to their index. You can perform a search in Google to see if the web pages containing your links have been indexed and check the last cache date.
**How long does it take Google Webmaster tools on average to detect links to my website? **
About 6 weeks on average, however Google does not include all your links in WMT
What about OSE?
The way Mozscape crawls and indexes the web means that deep pages are often not added to their OSE reports. If the links were only placed in the last 3-4 weeks it's unlikely Moz will havew found them all yet so I would hold on a couple more weeks.
So you're saying that you can get a link on a links page, which has very few outbound links, from a charity website?
I think you should take it, the website will most likely have a good authority and will be held in high regard over time as long as the site owners are responsible with their external linking strategies.
I would probably use a tool such as Link Prospector or Scrapebox and a handful of advanced search queries to return lots of results at once.
Ben gave a good one "things to do +city" but there are a lot more too:
City + "event sponsor"
City + "our sponsors"
City + sponsor list
City + sponsor contest
City + supporter "thank you"
Assuming each of these 15 links takes you about 5 minutes on average to get then you will spend about 75 minutes getting them.
Many of these links are from high traffic and high DA websites so they could actually rank in the SERP's for your business or brand name as well as send a small amount of referral traffic.
Ultimately I would go for relevance over these 15 links but for just over an hours work most of these links are easy to obtain and may even count towards your performance in the SERP's.