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Agreed - you already have the key term in the URL all you are doing is adding to the length of the URL and that can make it look spammy to users.
You will have other parameters added to the end of that URL and so very quickly you would be getting close to the 70 character max that SEOMoz suggests.
Ok, if you think there is a problem, see steps 1-4, but you have to ask yourself, is this really a problem? See end of this post.
Steps to consider
We had one case where we determined that the issue was a competing agency that was building negative links to properties that we managed for a client vs the web properties that they managed for the same clients! We tactfully made courtesy calls to the clients to help them by describing the negative link patterns and inquiring if they used anyone else for web marketing etc and suggesting that they contact the other agency as the other agency may not be aware that this is going on.
We were able to not only stop getting the links being built, but we looked good to our clients. This may or may not apply to you, but just throwing it out there that you need to look at this at a higher level to help with a) stopping additional links from being built or b) getting links removed.
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/the-latest-5-tools-ive-added-to-my-seo-toolbox/
There is a tool rmoov that is mentioned
http://www.rmoov.com/index.php
There is a free version and so this may work. Note, I have not used this tool, but it looks interesting enough that I would try it. May be worth asking the group here - have they used it and what do they think of the tool.
You can either 404 the page and let it die. Or, if you want to leave up a simple page with no other links to other pages on your site and then add a noindex tag so that it gets removed from Googles index
All of that said, let's just ignore everything I mentioned above. If the only issue here that you have 95% exact match anchor text. While that can be a symptom of a "bad link" profile, is it really impacting this page? Are you seeing a decrease in rankings for that page for those key terms? More importantly, are you seeing decreased traffic to that page (as rankings are relative). Are you assuming there is a problem, when there is not one? So you have a page with a "too perfect" of an anchor link profile. Then just stop doing it on future pages and move on. You may not have hit a threshold that triggers a penalty just yet. Have to consider where you are spending your time. May may more sense to work on building value, vs correcting things that may or may not be negatively impacting you.
My 2 cents plus a dime.
Here is the information you need on qualification
https://support.google.com/ads/answer/6230381
Google will be performing a background and license check in addition to performing a "reputation assessment" of the business online. I would assume that if this business has good reviews on Yelp or Google that this would help.
A good overview of the program is here
http://searchengineland.com/google-home-services-ads-plumbers-locksmiths-san-francisco-beta-226469
The service just launched the end of August so it is pretty new
keep that in mind when taking your client through the process.
www is seen as a separate subdomain than non-www. Same thing with http: vs https: - this is why you see the drop in the domain authority.
Here are your options
Get your www back on. Setup 301 redirects from the non www to the www
Setup 301 redirects from the www to the non www and keep the new structure
Option 1 is the better way to go with this if you can.
Generally speaking, Google will put whatever they think is the most appropriate in the SERPs for your title. It is annoying but the are doing it to "help" the user experience.
Mark is on the right track with what he is suggesting. We had a similar issue for a group of pages on our site. Google was showing the URL slug vs the title we had put in - that was annoying! We just tweaked the title a bit as it was already within the normal "parameters" of what people suggest as best practices. I think the update of tags make G take another look and our tags were updated an shown appropriately within a few weeks.
It is almost like your old TVs or radios, you need to "kick em" to get them to reset and work. That seemed to help in this case with us and title tags and SERPs on G.
Cheers!
Moz toolbar. See top left.
Screenshot before toolbar is set to highlight no follows
http://i.imgur.com/05p5h0T.png
Screenshot after after toolbar is set to highlight no follows
http://i.imgur.com/YSGw1gK.png
Example of toolbar highlighting no follows
http://i.imgur.com/Xy4iL9i.png
Other resources to learn more about Moz bar
https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/mozbar
https://moz.com/blog/announcing-mozbar-v3
http://www.poweredbysearch.com/mozbar-seo-extension-chrome-firefox/
or you can Google "Moz bar guide"
https://www.google.com/search?q=mozbar+guide
Search console is link agnostic.
https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--webmaster-tools
Q: I know I have [one / several / dozens of ] links that Search Console isn't showing. What gives?
A: Although the link reports in Search Console are more comprehensive than doing a [link:example.com] query in Google search, they may not include 100% of all links that you know about. This is normal and should not be cause for alarm. Search Console does not always show 100% of the links that Google knows about, so just because a particular link doesn't appear in Search Console doesn't mean that Google doesn't know about that link, or that your site isn't "getting credit" for that link.
Note that the link report in Search Console only shows whether a site is linking to yours; it doesn't show which links are most significant, and it can include links that are nofollowed, disavowed, or that don't pass PageRank.
Just to clarify above and add a little bit.
The Disavow file to Google only goes to Google. Even when you submit it there, and Google confirms that it has the new copy, it takes a while (several months) for Google to then account for the domains you are Disavowing. i.e. Don't expect an immediate effect from Google in what you see in Search Console and/or in the SERPs. Also, side note, you should generally disavow at the domain level as once you have a bad link from a site, the whole site is probably not worth it and it makes your job easier if there are a bunch of links from the same domain. Also, spammers will use a subdomains to create copies of the main site and add even more crappy links to your site. Disavowing the domain takes care of the subdomain as well. The exception to this would be sites that are on wordpress, as all the subdomains would really be from different sites (you get the idea) so you would disavow at the subdomain level for those sites.
I have one site I run that gets a bunch of spam links to us built and so 1x to 2x a year I have to pull everything I can get from Moz, Majestic, Search Console, etc and find new domains to add to the Disavow file. It sucks, but it helps even though Google's official line that they can account for negative SEO.
There are tools such as CognitiveSEO that will aggregate links for you from various sources and then you can upload your Disavow file there and it will then know to filter out all the links it finds from those domains to help you weed out what you need to audit and I have found this useful.
Continuing from previous answers, Moz has no idea what the disavow file you sent to Google contains and will not take that into account when it is looking for links. You may see more links from the disavowed domains show up in Moz because of that. This is where tools like CognitiveSEO are helpful in being able to sort out things. I would hope that for MozPro members this would be a feature to add so that your OSE profile could account for Disavowed links. I have found Moz helpful in using the Spam score to decide if I should disavow domains for Google.
Regarding your point about finding links to your sites and then the sites no longer exist. That happens. The Moz link database and also Google's databases are not updated in real time. I have also seen that the links in Search Console are not up to date with what I see in Google search. If you go to the sites and they are 404/410 Gone, you are probably fine. I would say the disavow is a good conservative way to make sure that you are "safe" and would recommend that you move forward with that. If the sites are gone (as mentioned above) Moz should show them gone in the next update or two (depending on if they crawled those sites or not).
Bottom line on all this is, are you seeing less organic traffic to your site? All of the above may be a moo point if the bad sites that link to you are dead and potentially even Google is already ignoring them (and the disavow will make sure of that). Google does not look at the Moz metrics and so it does not matter if the links are included in the Moz index as long as you know they are taken care of. If your organic traffic is ok, then enjoy that coffee and relax as you submit the disavow file.
Cheers!
Agreed. You said have more 404s than you have pages indexed, that is not good even if your ranks did not drop. That would mean that while you are being found in the SERPs you are now showing 404s to users. It is the equivalent of a bar running out of beer during Octoberfest. Also those thirsty polka dancers with nothing to sell them to drink.
Cheers!
Happy Monday to you!
I agree with Mike - you need to use the 301 redirect to point from the old pages to the new pages.
If you are reworking the site, and have to use parameters, consider dropping the parameters in a hash - this hides them to the bots and you get full SEO benefit for links
Credit Rand for this excellent walk through - http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash
There are other ways to deal with parameters and re-sorts of a result page, but it depends on your situation. Bottom line, if you are going through the effort of a site restructure, don't set yourself up to end up with the same problem you have now. Figure out what your "Golden URLs" are for categories and products around key words and then find a way to "hide" all the other versions of those same pages (in this example you want to hide all the re-sorted and search result pages) from Google. This is why I would often use a "no follow, no index" meta tag on a page vs a canonical. Do not waste GoogleBot's time crawling a bunch of pages that you are not wanting to rank anyway. Setup the structure so the crawl is clear and focused on the pages that are the most important.
Cheers!
If it looks like a bad set of links, smells like a bad set of links and tastes like a bad set of links - it is probably a bad set of links. If you have control of the other sites, clean them up, otherwise this is a simple fix with a domain based disavow for the sites in question.
Agree with Kevin. That technique is old hat for using them just for the PageRank value on the domain. I recommended this video earlier, but I will mention again as it talks about how "tricks" are going by the wayside and #RCS is how you want to approach this. Watch the video of Wil Reynolds about 1/4 the way down.
http://moz.com/blog/an-interview-with-wil-reynolds
Good luck!
If you are creating a new website with a new URL structure, you should 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new URLs. Google with then know where the old site moved to. The duplicate points are moo as Google will delete your old website out of the index and replace it with the new one.
The duplicate issue only comes up if you have two sites running concurrently. Not sure why you would want to do that., but if you had two sites, Google will not be able to tell if the images are the same per se. It can do things like look at the alt tag, but it can look at the file name, the image size, the image dimensions etc etc.
You will probably be ok re-using the images as you mention, but I would focus more on getting the old site moved to the new one with 301s. If you are creating a new site as the old one got penalized, I would re-use as little as possible from the old site (for obvious reasons).
Hi Gagan,
I think Irving only suggested using noindex on the additional pages if those pages do not have any index value. As you mention, you feel they do have index value and so you do not want to use noindex on them. I would agree with that
There is an article by Adam Audette, that quotes Maile Ohye from Google
http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
"However, using rel next/prev doesn’t prevent a component page from displaying in search results. So while these pages will “roll up” to the canonical (or default) page 1, they could still fire at search time if the query was relevant for that specific page.
At SMX West, Maile assured us that it would be a very rare thing for that situation to occur. But it could occur. Because of this, an additional recommendation (strictly as an optional step) is to add a robots noindex, follow to the rel prev/next component pages. This would ensure that component pages would never fire at search time."
More input from Maile Ohye
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/YbXqwoyooGM
Maile Ohye is responding to various questions on pagination.
"@TheDonald, @jerenel: If you've marked page 2 to n of your paginated series as "noindex, follow" to keep low quality content from affecting users and/or your site's rankings, that's fine, you can additionally include rel="next" and rel="prev." Noindex and rel="next"/"prev" are entirely independent annotations.
This means that if you add rel="next" and rel="prev" to noindex'd pages, it still signals to Google that the noindex'd pages are components of the series (though the noindex'd pages will not be returned in search results). This configuration is totally possible (and we'll honor it), but the benefit is mostly theoretical."
I think the key here is that if you have a section of your site that links to all of your blog postings and it is paginated, I would let Google crawl those, use rel next prev and do not use the noindex tag on pages 2-n. I always want to provide Google with a simple crawlable path of all of my content. But Google only needs that one path! Don't distract the Google! Any other versions of the path (i.e. re-sorts of the pagination based on date, or keyword search etc) I hide all of that from Google using noindex/nofollow or robots.txt where appropriate, as Google does not need to waste time browsing those duplicative pages.
Good luck!
I think I understand what you are trying to do, but I may be off with the semantics. The xml sitemap (at it's most basic level) is just a centralized list of links for pages that are on your site to help the search engines find pages without having to crawl all of the pages on your site. They do not contain any anchor text in them.
If you are wanting to crawl your site and find out what all your anchor text is internally, I would use a tool like Screaming Frog.
If you are trying to extract information from your sitemap.xml then you would need to use a combination of a text editor and excel. Say your URL structure includes product and brand information and you have all the URLs in a sitemap. You can pull that document into a text editor and then use the "Find and replace" function to get rid of all the extraneous code and then you can be left with just the URLs on one line. You can then use the excel function "Text to columns" to then split out the URL into sections based on slashes or dashes. If you have Screaming Frog, it will extract all the URLs for you and then you can split out the info in excel as well. Use Google to find examples of how to run the tools mentioned above in detail.
If I am totally off, please give a more detailed explanation of what you are trying to do and that will help as well.
FWAP! (sound of virtual slap)
Wow, this does sound like a nightmare. Are you seeing changes in traffic? I would wait a few days to see if it sticks. It seems that there is a disavow in your future with a reconsideration. I would document, document, document as this will make both the disavow and reconsideration more effective so that when your stuff is reviewed Google can dip into it.
Have you tried screaming frog on any of the domains. One key point is to set the user agent to Google Bot - the sites may show something different to bots than to people
I had a site hacked once. Screaming frog picked up the links, but you would not see them when you went on the site. I changed the user agent in my browser (using plug in) and boom they were there. So the site was not only hacked, but was effectively cloaking. It may be what happened to these other sites and why Google sees them and you don't. Luckily in my case we caught it pretty fast and got rid of it. One other point, we were load balancing servers on this site and only one of the servers was infected. So even as a bot, you only saw the links sometimes. It made it trickier to find, but point being, you may want to check these sites a couple different times as well.
You need to read this article and watch this video by Maile Ohye. She goes over pagination and rel next and prev
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
She also mentions how to use rel=canonical in this system as well and when it is appropriate.
You would only want to use the 301 redirect if you were deleting the page or changing the URL and wanted to get you users to the correct page as the old url was not working anymore.
Cheers!
Thank you - please mark my response as Good Answer if it helps.
Cheers!
Agreed with Takeshi. We do this all day long. Great way to have content on your site and build up your YouTube Channel. Keep it up!
Ask yourself if it helps your users or not. Get the answer to that question. If it makes sense to users, then drop it in. Beyond that, odds are you are using the keyword plenty across the site (in Titles, H1, content) and so adding it "one more time" in your header may or may not be beneficial.
I love this video that Matt asked himself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk4qgQdp2UA as it relates to keyword density. So, not sure if you are really getting anything there. As far as placement on the page, you can also use alt text in the image to put that important keyword at the top of the page then be AOK.
